Last.fm – the Blog · Audio Fingerprinting for Clean Metadata
by sbrothierThe veteran Scrobblers amongst you will probably remember our “moderation system” – this was a user-voting system that let you propose and merge artists, ultimately fixing misspelled artists by creating aliases to the correct version. We are planning to bring this back in a big way, addressing not only artists, but albums and tracks too. We don’t want to have to vote on the really obvious stuff (“01 – Radiohead”), so we are going to do as much as possible automatically, with various algorithms and data mining tricks. The entries we can’t be 100% sure about, and the remaining stuff, will again be thrown open to a public vote. Phase 1 is now underway with the first public “beta” release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint. For now, all that it does is send the fingerprint data to bootstrap the moderation system. This doesn’t change any MP3 files on your computer. It does send useful fingerprint data to our moderation system so we can get the ball rolling. If you have a big MP3 collection, it will take a while… Thankfully it remembers where it got to, so you don’t have to do it all in one session. Grab the fingerprinting app and let it scan your MP3 collection: Download for: Windows Mac OS X Linux .deb Source code What we’ll do next is figure out all the popular (mis)spellings for tracks with the same fingerprints. We will publish lots of stats, example data and graphs showing our progress as the fingerprint database grows in the coming weeks. We need people with MP3 collections (of any size/quality) to download and run the fingerprinter to make this work, so spread the word.
