Posts Tagged api
My new superpower – creating Spotify playlists from a web app
The new Spotify Web API allows the developer to create and add tracks to a playlist on behalf of a listener. This is a pretty powerful feature, opening the door for a whole range of apps. For instance, this weekend, I added the ability to save a Roadtrip Mixtape playlist, so you can now actually take your mixtapes on the road. The code is on github if you are interested in seeing how it is done.
The Echo Nest + Spotify Sandbox
I am wearing my International Executive Music Hacker hat today. I’m writing this blog post at 5AM somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, on my way to the Barcelona Music Hack Day, where I’ll be representing both The Echo Nest and Spotify. I’m pretty excited about the hack event – first, because it’s in freaking Barcelona, and second, because I get to talk about what’s been going on with the Spotify and Echo Nest APIs.
It has been just about 100 days since The Echo Nest and Spotify have joined forces. In that time we’ve been working hard to build the best music platform for listeners and for developers. This week we are releasing some of the very first fruits of our labors.
First up, we are releasing a new Spotify Web API.
This is a complete revamp of the Spotify Metadata API (the old version has now been deprecated). The Spotify Web API gives you access to all sorts of information about the Spotify catalog including details about artists, albums and tracks. Want to know the top tracks for an artist? There’s an API for that. Looking for high quality album art, artist images and 30 second audio previews? There are APIs for that too. Best of all, the new API includes perhaps the most requested Spotify API feature of all time With the Spotify Web API you can now create and modify playlists on behalf of authenticated users. Yes – you can now create a Spotify web app that creates playlists. (I personally requested this feature way back in 2008, here’s my begging plea for the feature in 2009).
I’ve been using the beta version of this new API for a couple months now and I must say I am quite impressed. The API is fast, super easy to use, and provides all sorts of great data for building apps. In the past weeks I’ve had fun converting a number of my favorite apps to use the Spotify API. First there’s the Road Trip Mix Tape that lets you create a Spotify playlist of music by artists that are from the very towns you are driving through. Then there’s Music Popcorn, a visual interface for exploring genres. For the less visual, there’s the Genre Browser that gives you lots of details about the different music genres including playlists that help give you a gentle introduction to any of the thousands of Echo Nest genres. Next there’s Boil the Frog, an app that creates seamless playlists between any two artists. Finally there’s the 3D Music Maze, an app that lets you explore for music by wandering through a 3 dimensional music world.
Next up, a freshly minted Echo Nest + Spotify Sandbox — a new Spotify ID space.
These apps are possible because of the second thing we are releasing this week – a spiffy, shiny new Spotify Rosetta Stone catalog that ensures that the Echo Nest API has the freshest, and most up-to-date view of the Spotify universe of music. For those who might be new to The Echo Nest, Project Rosetta Stone is something we’ve been working on here at the Nest for many years. The goal of Project Rosetta Stone is to solve one of the most common problems that nearly every music app developer faces. The problem is that every music service has its own set of IDs – a music subscription service like Spotify has its own artist, album and track IDs. A lyric service has its own (and very different) IDs for those same artists, albums and tracks and a concert ticketing API has yet a third set of IDs. This is quite problematic for app developers that want to build an app that combines information from multiple services. Without a common ID system, the app developer has to resort to metadata searching and matching – which is slow and quite error prone – this results in a poor app.
Project Rosetta Stone solves this problem by providing ID mappings between as many music services as we can. With this mapping you can easily translate IDs from one ID space to another. With Rosetta Stone, if you have the Spotify track ID you can get Lyricfind and/or Musixmatch IDs making it easy to use those respective APIs to retrieve lyrics for that song. You can easily map the Spotify artist ID to a Songkick or Eventful ID to get ticket and touring information from those APIs. And of course you can use the Spotify track ID to get detailed Echo Nest information about the song such as its tempo, energy, danceability, along with detailed Echo Nest artist data such as latest artist news, blog posts and similar artists.
We have had Spotify IDs in Rosetta Stone for many years, but this particular mapping has in the past been problematic for us. Spotify has a huge catalog and keeping the mapping fresh and up to date between Spotify and The Echo Nest has always been a big challenge. There’s a huge back catalog with millions of tracks to deal with plus thousands of new tracks are being added every week. The result was that there was always a bit of a lag between when updates to the Spotify catalog were reflected in the Rosetta Stone mapping. This meant that if you built a Rosetta Stone-based app you could find that The Echo Nest wouldn’t always know about a Spotify track, especially if a track was very new. The result would be a less-than-perfect app.
This week we are releasing a new Spotify ID space. Our engineers have been working hard over the last 100 days to set up all sorts of infrastructure and plumbing to ensure that we have the most up-to-date view of the Spotify catalog. No more lag between when a new track appears in Spotify and when you can get Echo Nest data. Plus, all of our APIs that take IDs as inputs will now also take Spotify IDs as input as well. If you have a Spotify artist ID you can use it with any Echo Nest artist API method. Likewise, if you have a Spotify track ID you can use it with any Echo Nest song or track API method that takes a track ID as input. This makes it **really** easy for developers to use The Echo Nest and Spotify Apps together. For example, here’s an API call that returns detailed audio properties for a Spotify track given its ID.
I’ve been having much fun using The Echo Nest API with the brand new Spotify API. I’ve already written some code that you can use. First, I wrote a Python library for Spotify called Spotipy. It’s makes it easy to write Python programs that use the new Spotify Web API, and it works well with my Echo Nest Python library called Pyen. Here’s an example of using the two libraries together:
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| import pyen | |
| import spotipy | |
| import sys | |
| ''' | |
| get a set of images for artists that are similar to | |
| the given seed artist | |
| ''' | |
| en = pyen.Pyen() | |
| sp = spotipy.Spotify() | |
| spids = [] | |
| response = en.get('artist/similar', name='weezer', bucket='id:spotify', limit=True) | |
| for artist in response['artists']: | |
| spids.append(artist['foreign_ids'][0]['foreign_id']) | |
| for artist in sp.artists(spids)['artists']: | |
| print artist['images'][0]['url'], artist['name'] |
I’ve also put together a number of Javascript example apps that use both APIs. These are simple apps intended to help new developers (or at least new to music apps) use the APIs together to do common things like create chillout playlists, browse through the web of similar artists, and more.
So yes, I’m pretty jazzed about this trip to Barcelona. I get to create a music hack, I get to spend a few days with some of the best music hackers in the world (The Barcelona Music Hack Day, as part of the Sonar Festival tends to attract the top music hackers). I get to spend a few days on the Mediterranean in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Best of all, I get to talk about the new Spotify and Echo Nest developer platform and help music hackers build cool stuff on top of the newly combined platform.
I’ve put together a page that talks in detail about the new Spotify / Echo Nest platform. It has links to all of the API docs, libraries, examples, github repos, demos and details on how you can use The Echo Nest / Spotify Platform. Check it out here:
http://static.echonest.com/enspex
Keep an eye on this space for I’ll be updating it as we continue to integrate our developer APIs. There’s lots more coming, so stay tuned!
The Echo Nest Is Joining Spotify: What It Means To Me, and To Developers
Posted by Paul in Music, The Echo Nest on March 6, 2014
I love writing music apps and playing with music data. How much? Every weekend I wake up at 6am and spend a long morning writing a new music app or playing with music data. That’s after a work week at The Echo Nest, where I spend much of my time writing music apps and playing with music data. The holiday break is even more fun, because I get to spend a whole week working on a longer project like Six Degrees of Black Sabbath or the 3D Music Maze.
That’s why I love working for The Echo Nest. We have built an amazing open API, which anyone can use, for free, to create music apps. With this API, you can create phenomenal music discovery apps like Boil the Frog that take you on a journey between any two artists, or Music Popcorn, which guides you through hundreds of music genres, from the arcane to the mainstream. It also powers apps that create new music, like Girl Talk in a Box, which lets you play with your favorite song in the browser, or The Swinger, which creates a Swing version of any song:
One of my roles at The Echo Nest is to be the developer evangelist for our API — to teach developers what our API can do, and get them excited about building things with it. This is the best job ever. I get to go to all parts of the world to attend events like Music Hack Day and show a new crop of developers what they can do with The Echo Nest API. In that regard, it’s also the easiest job ever, because when I show apps that developers have built with The Echo Nest API, like The Bonhamizer and The Infinite Jukebox, or show how to create a Pandora-like radio experience with just a few lines of Python, developers can’t help but get excited about our API.
Photo by Thomas Bonte
At The Echo Nest we’ve built what I think is the best, most complete music API — and now our API is about to get so much better.
Today, we’ve announced that The Echo Nest has been acquired by Spotify, the award-winning digital music service. As part of Spotify, The Echo Nest will use our deep understanding of music to give Spotify listeners the best possible personalized music listening experience.
Spotify has long been committed to fostering a music app developer ecosystem. They have a number of APIs for creating apps on the web, on mobile devices, and within the Spotify application. They’ve been a sponsor and active participant in Music Hack Days for years now. Developers love Spotify, because it makes it easy to add music to an app without any licensing fuss. It has an incredibly huge music catalog that is available in countries around the world.
Spotify and The Echo Nest APIs already work well together. The Echo Nest already knows Spotify’s music catalog. All of our artist, song, and playlisting APIs can return Spotify IDs, making it easy to build a smart app that plays music from Spotify. Developers have been building Spotify / Echo Nest apps for years. If you go to a Music Hack Day, one of the most common phrases you’ll hear is, “This Spotify app uses The Echo Nest API”.
I am incredibly excited about becoming part of Spotify, especially because of what it means for The Echo Nest API. First, to be clear, The Echo Nest API isn’t going to go away. We are committed to continuing to support our open API. Second, although we haven’t sorted through all the details, you can imagine that there’s a whole lot of data that Spotify has that we can potentially use to enhance our API. Perhaps the first visible change you’ll see in The Echo Nest API as a result of our becoming part of Spotify is that we will be able to keep our view of the Spotify ID space in our Project Rosetta Stone ID mapping layer incredibly fresh. No more lag between when an item appears in Spotify and when its ID appears in The Echo Nest.
The Echo Nest and the Spotify APIs are complementary. Spotify’s API provides everything a developer needs to play music and facilitate interaction with the listener, while The Echo Nest provides deep data on the music itself — what it sounds like, what people are saying about it, similar music its fans should listen to, and too much more to mention here. These two APIs together provide everything you need to create just about any music app you can think of.
I am a longtime fan of Spotify. I’ve been following them now for over seven years. I first blogged about Spotify way back in January of 2007 while they were still in stealth mode. I blogged about the Spotify haircuts, and their serious demeanor:
Those Crazy Spotify Guys in 2007
I blogged about the Spotify application when it was released to private beta (“Woah – Spotify is pretty cool”), and continued to blog about them every time they added another cool feature.
Last month, on a very cold and snowy day in Boston, I sat across a conference table from of bunch of really smart folks with Swedish accents. As they described their vision of a music platform, it became clear to me that they share the same obsession that we do with trying to find the best way to bring fans and music together.
Together, we can create the best music listening experience in history.
I’m totally excited to be working for Spotify now. Still, as with any new beginning, there’s an ending as well. We’ve worked hard, for many years, to build The Echo Nest — and as anyone who’s spent time here knows, we have a very special culture of people totally obsessed with building the best music platform. Of course this will continue, but as we become part of Spotify things will necessarily change, and the time when The Echo Nest was a scrappy music startup when no one in their right mind wanted to be a music startup will be just a sweet memory. To me, this is a bit like graduation day in high school — it is exciting to be moving on to bigger things, but also sad to say goodbye to that crazy time in life.
There is a big difference: When I graduated from high school and went off to college, I had to say goodbye to all my friends, but now as I go off to the college of Spotify, all my friends and classmates from high school are coming with me. How exciting is that!
New Genre APIs
Posted by Paul in code, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on January 16, 2014
Today at the Echo Nest we are pushing out an update to our Genre APIs. The new APIs lets you get all sorts of information about any of over 800 genres including a description of the genre, representative artists in the genre, similar genres, and links to web resources for the genre (such as a wikipedia page, if one exists for a genre). You can also use the genres to create various types of playlists. With these APIs you build all sorts of music exploration apps like Every Noise At Once, Music Popcorn and Genre-A-Day.
The new APIs are quite simple to use. Here are a few python examples created using pyen.
List all of the available genres with a description
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| import pyen | |
| en = pyen.Pyen() | |
| response = en.get('genre/list', bucket=['description']) | |
| for g in response['genres']: | |
| print g['name'], '-', g['description'] |
This outputs text like so:
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| a cappella – A cappella is singing without instrumental accompaniment. From the Italian for "in the manner of the chapel," a cappella may be performed solo or by a group. | |
| abstract hip hop – | |
| acid house – From house music came acid house, developed in the mid-'80s by Chicago DJs experimenting with the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. That instrument produced the subgenre's signature squelching bass, used to create a hypnotic sound. | |
| acid jazz – Acid jazz, also called club jazz, is a style of jazz that takes cues from a number of genres, including funk, hip-hop, house, and soul. | |
| … |
We can get the top artists for any genre like so:
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| import pyen | |
| import sys | |
| en = pyen.Pyen() | |
| if len(sys.argv) > 1: | |
| genre = ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) | |
| response = en.get('genre/artists', name=genre) | |
| for artist in response['artists']: | |
| print artist['name'] | |
| else: | |
| print "usage: python top_artists_for_genre.py genre name" |
Here are the top artists for ‘cool jazz’
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| % python top_artists_for_genre.py cool jazz | |
| Thelonious Monk | |
| Stan Getz | |
| Lee Konitz | |
| The Dave Brubeck Quartet | |
| Bill Evans | |
| Cannonball Adderley | |
| Art Pepper | |
| Charlie Parker | |
| John Coltrane | |
| Gil Evans | |
| Ahmad Jamal | |
| Miles Davis | |
| Horace Silver | |
| Dave Brubeck | |
| Oliver Nelson |
We can find similar genres to any genre with this bit of code:
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| import pyen | |
| import sys | |
| en = pyen.Pyen() | |
| if len(sys.argv) > 1: | |
| genre = ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) | |
| response = en.get('genre/similar', name=genre) | |
| for genre in response['genres']: | |
| print genre['name'] | |
| else: | |
| print "usage: python sim_genres.py genre name" |
Sample output:
% python sim_genres.py cool jazz bebop jazz hard bop contemporary post-bop soul jazz big band jazz christmas stride jazz funk jazz fusion avant-garde jazz free jazz
We can use the genres to create excellent genre playlists. To do so, create a playlist of type ‘genre-radio’ and give the genre name as a seed. We’ve also added a new parameter called ‘genre_preset’ that, if specified will control the type of songs that will be added to the playlist. You can chose from core, in_rotation, and emerging. Core genre playlists are great for introducing a new listener to the genre. Here’s a bit of code that generates a core playlist for any genre:
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| import pyen | |
| import sys | |
| en = pyen.Pyen() | |
| if len(sys.argv) < 2: | |
| print 'Usage: python genre_playlist.py seed genre name' | |
| else: | |
| genre = ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) | |
| response = en.get('playlist/static', type='genre-radio', genre_preset='core-best', genre=genre) | |
| for i, song in enumerate(response['songs']): | |
| print "%d %s by %s" % ((i +1), song['title'], song['artist_name']) |
The core classic rock playlist looks like this:
- Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd
- Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf
- All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
- Kashmir by Led Zeppelin
- Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream
- Let’s Work Together by Canned Heat
- Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
- It’s My Life by The Animals
- 30 Days In The Hole by Humble Pie
- Midnight Rider by The Allman Brothers Band
- The Joker by Steve Miller Band
- Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Black Betty by Ram Jam
- Heart Full Of Soul by The Yardbirds
- Light My Fire by The Doors
The ‘in rotation’ classic rock playlist looks like this:
- Heaven on Earth by Boston
- Doom And Gloom by The Rolling Stones
- Little Black Submarines by The Black Keys
- I Gotsta Get Paid by ZZ Top
- Fly Like An Eagle by Steve Miller Band
- Blue On Black by Kenny Wayne Shepherd
- Driving Towards The Daylight by Joe Bonamassa
- When A Blind Man Cries by Deep Purple
- Over and Over (Live) by Joe Walsh
- The Best Is Yet To Come by Scorpions
- World Boss by Gov’t Mule
- One Way Out by The Allman Brothers Band
- Corned Beef City by Mark Knopfler
- Bleeding Heart by Jimi Hendrix
- My Sharona by The Knack
While the emerging ‘classic rock’ playlist looks like this:
- If You Were in Love by Boston
- Beggin’ by Shocking Blue
- Speak Now by The Answer
- Mystic Highway by John Fogerty
- Hell Of A Season by The Black Keys
- No Reward by Gov’t Mule
- Pretty Wasted by Tito & Tarantula
- The Battle Of Evermore by Page & Plant
- I Got All You Need by Joe Bonamassa
- What You Gonna Do About Me by Buddy Guy
- I Used To Could by Mark Knopfler
- Wrecking Ball by Joe Walsh
- The Circle by Black Country Communion
- You Could Have Been a Lady by April Wine
- 15 Lonely by Walter Trout
The new Genre APIs are really quite fun to use. I’m looking forward to seeing a whole new world of music exploration and discovery apps built around these APIs.
Finding artist names in text
Let’s say you have a block of text – perhaps a tweet or a web page from a music review site. If you want to find out if the text mentions a particular artist such as Weezer, it is a pretty straightforward task: Just search through the text for the artist name and all the variants and aliases for that artist. It is pretty easy.
What is harder is trying to figure out if any artists are mentioned in a block of text, and if so, which ones. Since there are millions of artists, each with their own set of aliases and variants, the simple search that we use to find ‘Weezer’ in a tweet doesn’t work so well. The fact that many artist names are also common words adds to the difficulty.
Luckily I work with a bunch of really smart folks at The Echo Nest who’ve already had to solve this problem in order to make The Echo Nest work. Over on the Echo Nest blog, there’s a nifty description of the problem of artist name identification and extraction and an announcement of the release of a new (and very much beta) API called artist/extract that will expose some of this functionality to application developers that use our APIs.
This morning I spent a few minutes and created a little web app that lets you play with the artist/extract API. Here’s a screenshot:
In this example I’ve typed in the text:
I like Deerhoof, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I don’t like Coldplay, or Justin Bieber. GNR is OK. Go try it yourself!
You can see that it found Deerhoof and Coldplay, (easy enough), and a spelling variant of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It also recognized GNR as two bands – GNR (a Portuguese rock band), and as a nickname for Guns N’ Roses. Also notice that it didn’t get confused by the mention of ‘ OK. Go’ that is embedded in there. The extractor is not always perfect – it tries hard to avoid confusing artists with regular English words (since just about every English word is a band name), so it will rely on letter case and other hints to try to separate real artist mentions from accidental ones.
The artist extractor is very much a beta api so it may be a bit unsteady on its feet and may sometimes not work as you’d expect it to. Nevertheless, it is a nifty bit of music data infrastructure that will help us understand better who is talking about what artists.
Read the API docs for Artist/Extract – or try out the little web demo.
What’s the TTKP?
Posted by Paul in data, fun, Music, web services on November 9, 2010
Whenever Jennie and I are in the car together, we will listen to the local Top-40 radio station (KISS 108). One top-40 artist that i can recognize reliably is Katy Perry. It seems like we can’t drive very far before we are listening to Teenage Dreams, Firework or California Gurls. That got me wondering what the average Time To Katy Perry (TTKP) was on the station and how it compared to other radio stations. So I fired up my Python interpreter, wrote some code to pull the data from the fabulous YES api and answer this very important question. With the YES API I can get the timestamped song plays for a station for the last 7 days. I gathered this data from WXKS (Kiss 108), did some calculations to come up with this data:
- Total songs played per week: 1,336
- Total unique songs: 184
- Total unique artists: 107
- Average songs per hour: 7
- Number of Katy Perry plays: 76
- Median Time between Katy Perry songs: 1hour 18 minutes
That means the average Time to Katy Perry is about 39 minutes.
Katy Perry is only the fourth most played artist on KISS 108. Here are the stats for the top 10:
| Artist | Plays | Median time between plays |
Average time to next play |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taio Cruz | 84 | 1:07 | 0:34 |
| Rihanna | 80 | 1:27 | 0:44 |
| Usher | 79 | 1:20 | 0:40 |
| Katy Perry | 76 | 1:18 | 0:39 |
| Bruno Mars | 73 | 1:30 | 0:45 |
| Nelly | 56 | 1:44 | 0:52 |
| Mike Posner | 56 | 1:57 | 0:59 |
| Pink | 47 | 2:20 | 1:10 |
| Lady Gaga | 47 | 1:59 | 1:00 |
| Taylor Swift | 41 | 2:17 | 1:09 |
I took a look at some of the other top-40 stations around the country to see which has the lowest TTKP:
| Station | Songs Per Hour | TTKP |
|---|---|---|
| KIIS – LA’s #1 hit music station | 8 | 39 mins |
| WHTZ- New York’s #1 hit music station | 9 | 48 mins |
| WXKS- Boston’s #1 hit music station | 7 | 39 mins |
| WSTR- Atlanta – Always #1 for Today’s Hit Music | 8 | 38 mins |
| KAMP- 97.1 Amp Radio – Los Angeles | 11 | 38 mins |
| KCHZ- 95.7 – The Beat of Kansas City | 11 | 32 mins |
| WFLZ- 93.3 – Tampa Bay’s Hit Music channe | 9 | 39 mins |
| KREV- 92.7 – The Revolution – San Francisco | 11 | 36 mins |
So, no matter where you are, if you have a radio, you can tune into the local top-40 radio station, and you’ll need to wait, on average, only about 40 minutes until a Katy Perry song comes on. Good to know.
Jennie’s ultimate road trip
Posted by Paul in code, fun, Music, The Echo Nest on October 20, 2010
Last weekend at Music Hack Day Boston, I teamed up with Jennie, my 15-year-old daughter, to build her idea for a music hack which we’ve called Jennie’s Ultimate Road Trip. The hack helps you plan a road trip so that you’ll maximize the number of great concerts you can attend along the way. You give the app your starting and ending city, your starting and ending dates, and the names of some of your favorite artists and Jennie’s Ultimate Road Trip will search through the many events to find the ones that fit your route schedule that you’d like to see and gives you an itinerary and map.
We used the wonderful SongKick API to grab events for all the nearby cities. I was quite surprised at the how many events SongKick would find. For just a single week, in the geographic area between Boston and New York City, SongKick found 1,161 events with 2,168 different artists. More events and more artists makes it easier to find a route that will give a satisfying set of concerts – but it can also make finding a route a bit more computationally challenging too (more on that later). Once we had the set of possible artists that we could visit, we needed to narrow down the list of artists to the ones would be of most interest to the user. To do this we used the new Personal Catalogs feature of the Echo Nest API. We created a personal catalog containing all of the potential artists (so for our trip to NYC from Boston, we’d create a catalog of 2,168 artists). We then used the Echo Nest artist similarity APIs to get recommendations for artists within this catalog. This yielded us a set of 200 artists that best match the user’s taste that would be playing in the area.
The next bit was the tricky bit – first, we subsetted the events to just include events for the recommended set of artists. Then we had to build the optimal route through the events, considering the date and time of the event, the preference the user has for the artist, whether or not we’ve already been to an event for this artist on the trip, how far out of our way the venue is from our ultimate destination and how far the event is from our previous destination. For anyone who saw me looking grouchy on Sunday morning during the hack day it was because it was hard trying to figure out a good cost function that would weigh all of these factors: artist preference, travel time and distance between shows, event history. The computer science folks who read this blog will recognize that this route finding is similar to the ‘travelling salesman problem‘ – but with a twist, instead of finding a route between cities, which don’t tend to move around too much, we have to find a path through a set of artist concerts where every night, the artists are in different places. I call this the ‘travelling rock star’ problem. Ultimately I was pretty happy with how the routing algorithm, it can find a decent route through a thousand events in less than 30 seconds.
Jennie joined me for a few hours at the Music Hack Day – she coded up the HTML for the webform and made the top banner – (it was pretty weird to look over on her computer and see her typing in raw HTML tags with attached CSS attributes – kids these days). We got the demo done in time – and with the power of caching it will generate routes and plot them on a map using the Google API. Unfortunately, if your route doesn’t happen to be in the cache, it can take quite a bit of time to get a route out of the app – gathering events from SongKick, getting the recommendations from the Echo Nest, and finding the optimal route all add up to an app that can take 5 minutes before you get your answer. When I get a bit of time, I’ll take another pass to speed things up. When it is fast enough, I’ll put it online.
It was a fun demo to write. I especially enjoyed working on it with my daughter. And we won the SongKick prize, which was pretty fantastic.
Jennie with the SongKick prize
The Echo Nest Song API
Posted by Paul in Music, The Echo Nest, web services on April 24, 2010
- Performance – api method calls run faster – on average API methods are running 3X faster than the older version.
- JSON Output – all of our methods now support JSON output in addition to XML. This greatly simplifies writing client libraries for the Echo Nest
- Nimble coding – with the new architecture it will be much easier for us to roll out new features – so expect to see new features added to the Echo Nest platform every month
- No cruft – we are revisiting our APIs to try to eliminate inconsistencies, redundancies and unnecessary features to make them as clean as we can.
The beta version of our next generation APIs are here: http://beta.developer.echonest.com/
The first significant new API we are adding is the Song API – this gives you all sorts of ways to search for and retrieve song level data. With the song API you can do the following:
- search for songs via artist name, song title, and description. You can affect the results with constraints and sorts:
- constrain the results by a number of factors including musical attributes like tempo, loudness, time signature and key, artist hotttnesss, location
- sort – the results by any of the attributes
- Find similar songs – find similar songs to a seed song
- Find profile – get all sorts of info about a song including audio, audio summary info, track data for different catalogs, song hottttnesss, artist_hotttnesss, artist_location, and detailed track analysis
- Identify songs – works in conjunction with the ENMFP
There are lots of things you can do with this API. Here’s just a quick sample of the types of queries you can make:
Find the loudest thrash songs
song/search?sort=loudness-desc&description=thrash
Find indie songs for jogging
song/search?min_tempo=120&description=indie&max_tempo=125
Fetch the tempo of Hey Jude
search?title=hey+jude&bucket=audio_summary&artist=the+beatles
Fetch the track audio and analysis of Bad Romance
search?title=bad+romance&bucket=tracks&bucket=id:paulify&artist=lady+gaga
Find songs similar to Bad Romance
song/similar?id=SOAOBBG127D9789749
- jen-api – a java client
- beta_pyechonest – a new branch of the venerable pyechonest library. Grab it from SVN with
svn checkout http://pyechonest.googlecode.com/svn/branches/ beta-pyechonest-read-only
I’ll be writing more about all of the new APIs real soon. Access the beta Echo Nest APIs here:
Flash API for the Echo Nest
Posted by Paul in code, The Echo Nest, web services on July 8, 2009
It’s a busy week for client APIs at the Echo Nest. Developer Ryan Berdeen has released a Flash API for the Echo Nest. Ryan’s API supports the track methods of the Echo Nest API, giving the flash programmer the ability to analyze a track and get detailed info about the track including track metadata, loudness, mode and key along with detailed information relating to the tracks rhythmic, timbrel, and harmonic content.
One of the sticky bits in using the Echo Nest from Flash has been the track uploader. People have had a hard time getting it to work – and since we don’t do very much Flash programming here at the nest it never made it to the top of the list of things to look into. However, Ryan dug in an wrote a MultipartFormDataEncoder that works with the track upload API method – solving the problem not just for him, but for everyone.
Ryan’s timing for this release is most excellent. This release comes just in time for Music Hackday – where hundreds of developers (presumably including a number of flash programmers) will be hacking away at the various music APIs including the Echo Nest. Special thanks goes to Ryan for developing this API and making it available to the world
(== (+ “Clojure” “Echo Nest”) “woah!”)
Posted by Paul in code, Music, The Echo Nest on June 25, 2009
Here’s the first Echo Nest application (as far as I know) that is written in Clojure: Another reason I like Clojure
Music Machinery 