Closing in on clean metadata: artist and track spelling auto-correction is here

Thursday, 29 January 2009
by erik
filed under Announcements
Comments: 262

Ever since I joined Last.fm back in 2005, my long-suffering coworkers have had to put up with endless grumbles about the state of the metadata on our music catalogue pages and how we desperately needed tools for putting things right. Well, as of today they can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: Last.fm now automatically corrects common misspellings of artist and track names for you.

As you might be aware, the pages for artists and tracks on Last.fm are automatically created from peoples’ scrobbles. Until recently, the system had no way of identifying variations in spellings of artists and tracks, which led to many duplicate pages for the same artist or track. With millions of scrobbles coming in every day, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you will soon have a big metadata mess on your hands.

If you’ve been following the Last.fm Blog, you’ll have seen our articles on audio fingerprinting:

Our esteemed music scientists have crunched the fingerprint data you’ve sent us, and have generated a huge list of auto-corrections for both artists and tracks. As of today, these mappings enable us to automatically redirect you from a badly spelt version of an artist or track to the correct one. Try it out for yourself at Trentmoller’s page Note: this links to an incorrect spelling, and will redirect you:




Once you’ve been redirected to the corrected spelling, you will still have a choice to go back to view the original page, in case we made a mistake. If you think we wrongly corrected a spelling, you can let us know by clicking “Flag this”:




Merging data in your profile

If you have scrobbled tracks by both Trentemoller and Trentemøller in the past, these will now be combined and the playcounts accumulated in the charts on your profile. (If you don’t like this behaviour and would prefer to keep your original spellings as-is, there’s a new setting for you.)

Merging data for artist pages

We are still not merging data for spelling corrections on artist and other catalogue pages. Spelling variations there will still have their individual playcounts and charts for now. We’ll be working on this in the next phase of our metadata-cleanup operation, after we’ve listened to your feedback about the current changes.

How to report mistakes

As clever as these auto-corrections are, it’s inevitable that some mistakes will slip through, especially in these early stages. On each artist and track page, you will see a link down at the bottom of the right hand sidebar, which allows you to suggest new corrections or flag existing ones. The more votes we get through this system, the more accurate the catalogue will grow over time. So please be patient and it shouldn’t be long until you’ll never see that “fix your tags” image in your charts again!

Please note we won’t auto-correct spelling in your comments, but we will delete off-topic ones :)

Comments

  1. Adam
    29 January, 13:24

    Finally, big THANK YOU!

    Adam – 29 January, 13:24
  2. Robson
    29 January, 13:30

    The number of times I told people “merging will happen eventually, just be patient”… My patience has paid off. only 4 years, hehe. I know it’s not much as I used to be a regular subscriber, but I’ve just bought 2 months. Thanks for this – so many people will be grateful that it’s finally gone live.

    Robson – 29 January, 13:30
  3. Daniel Bell
    29 January, 13:31

    So how long until you can help us tag our own MP3s? ;)

    Daniel Bell – 29 January, 13:31
  4. Jon
    29 January, 13:33

    Yay, great news.

    Jon – 29 January, 13:33
  5. gadgetchannel
    29 January, 13:35

    I’m not seeing the “Redirected from” header when I’m redirected to the correct artist page. Is this not fully implemented yet?

    gadgetchannel – 29 January, 13:35
  6. StudleyUK
    29 January, 13:46

    Great stuff! I’ve already spotted this in a few places in my charts – there’s an ace Johnny Foreigner song called “Salt, Peppa and Spinderella” which I’d scrobbled with about five different name variations, it’s now merged into one and is finally appearing highly in my chart!

    One question: is this only for badly-spelled artists, or will it also include artists with name variations? The reason I ask is because I have lots of tracks scrobbled for “Goo Goo Dolls”, and also lots for “The Goo Goo Dolls”, but these still aren’t merged. (MusicBrainz lists Goo Goo Dolls as the correct name, with the alternative listed as an alias.)

    StudleyUK – 29 January, 13:46
  7. SE16-3LN
    29 January, 13:47

    there are many many mistakes and bug…
    i’ve never listened to 七瀬光 but 黒百合姉妹 automatically change to different name…

    SE16-3LN – 29 January, 13:47
  8. hungoverdrawn
    29 January, 13:50

    So… my Dexys Midnight Runners tracks were always tagged correctly. But they were scrobbled as Dexy’s Midnight Runners. And that’s what appears in my top artists, much to my chagrin. Is this going to fix that?

    hungoverdrawn – 29 January, 13:50
  9. Papuass
    29 January, 13:52

    What about bands with equal names. There are multiple bands named Brainstorm or Kino.

    Papuass – 29 January, 13:52
  10. Marek Koczorowski
    29 January, 13:54

    So now, if we vote enough, Goran Bregovic will redirect to Goran Bregović, Hrsta to Hṛṣṭa and all the stupid polish-artist-downloads like ! WWW.POLSKIE-MP3.TK ! republika or ! www.polskie-mp3.tk ! lao che to the correct band names? That’s great ;D

    Marek Koczorowski – 29 January, 13:54
  11. Gone_Wishing
    29 January, 13:57

    Congratulations! I noticed the change it made to my charts immediately – everything is much ‘cleaner’ now. :)

    Now, the only thing missing is the option to merge scrobbled tracks under one artist’s name to a different artist! :p (i.e. On some CD’s I’ve played, it scrobbles the guest vocalist on the song as opposed to the actual artist automatically – I fix the tags but am left with a few scrobbles that are incorrect – is such an option possible in the distant future?)

    Gone_Wishing – 29 January, 13:57
  12. Nik
    29 January, 13:58

    great great progress! will this technology also someday enable you to seperate artists with the same name?

    Nik – 29 January, 13:58
  13. neraulia
    29 January, 14:00

    This is exciting!

    One thing that needs attention is the Modeselektor remixes for Bjork’s “Dull Flame of Desire”. They are tagged all kinds of ways and I can’t tell which is correct.

    Thanks for continued improvement to one of my favorite sites!

    neraulia – 29 January, 14:00
  14. Julian Stahnke
    29 January, 14:04

    :)

    Julian Stahnke – 29 January, 14:04
  15. v11v11v
    29 January, 14:25

    I’ve turned the feature off. It renamed all the Kraftwerk live tracks which make up the majority of my all-time top 20 tracks by removing the location e.g. Neon Lights (London) to just Neon Lights. This removed the demarcation between versions and merges different versions into single entities. That makes it useless for me.

    v11v11v – 29 January, 14:25
  16. James Wheare
    29 January, 14:26

    @SE16-3LN: That’s what the flagging is for! Report it as incorrect.

    @Papuass: This doesn’t affect artist disambiguation yet. That’s another project.

    James Wheare – 29 January, 14:26
  17. Erik Jälevik
    29 January, 14:26

    Thanks for the feedback, all.

    Please bear in mind that what you’re seeing now is the very first set of mappings, and if you find mistakes, do use the voting function to let us know.

    Erik Jälevik – 29 January, 14:26
  18. James Wheare
    29 January, 14:29

    @gadgetchannel: Which page are you not seeing the redirection for? Does it happen consistently? The header shows up if you have a cookie set, but the cookie expires very quickly, so if the page took a little longer to load you won’t see the header.

    James Wheare – 29 January, 14:29
  19. Hoshi
    29 January, 14:30

    This is a pretty cool feature. Thanks last.fm team!

    Hoshi – 29 January, 14:30
  20. random_specimen
    29 January, 14:31

    Nice .. but is there a way to see the corrected artist names, resp. tracks?

    random_specimen – 29 January, 14:31
  21. James Wheare
    29 January, 14:31

    @hungoverdrawn: Dexys Midnight Runners seems to have slipped through the net, but yes, once that correction is added you should see your charts and library corrected accordingly.

    James Wheare – 29 January, 14:31
  22. gpberlin
    29 January, 14:32

    cool! finally! you guys rocks! 8)

    gpberlin – 29 January, 14:32
  23. James Wheare
    29 January, 14:35

    @StudleyUK: Goo Goo Dolls should be merged soon. It’s not strictly a spelling mistake, but they are the same band. That said, not all artist name variations will be merged if those artists record under very different names. For example Aphex Twin and Polygon Window.

    We will publish some guidelines on this soon.

    James Wheare – 29 January, 14:35
  24. johnny7
    29 January, 14:39

    This is great, thank you guys!

    johnny7 – 29 January, 14:39
  25. mmhenriksen
    29 January, 14:44

    Have fun with Sigur Rós: ()

    ;)

    mmhenriksen – 29 January, 14:44
  26. johnny7
    29 January, 14:44

    But it would be great if I could disable these little buttons in the recent plays list.

    johnny7 – 29 January, 14:44
  27. mkb
    29 January, 14:45

    I swear Audioscrobbler did this once before. Am I wrong, misremembering, maybe?

    mkb – 29 January, 14:45
  28. GrantRS
    29 January, 14:47

    Very good! I’ve been waiting for this for so long! Can’t see a downside yet and it’s made an immediate marked improvement to my library data. How exactly do we suggest additional mergers though? eg. “Gates of Delirium” by Yes merged into “The Gates of Delirium”

    GrantRS – 29 January, 14:47
  29. kiko
    29 January, 14:50

    great!
    But when do you think your fingerprint application could run with acc ?

    kiko – 29 January, 14:50
  30. houndworld
    29 January, 14:50

    I think it’s problematic. While I’m happy to have the track numbers removed from some of my previously scrobbled tracks (mostly from the import of an extensive itunes import that I didn’t notice/correct at the time), I don’t like the idea that my listening history is changed by popular vote. Maybe this undermines my faith in democratic principles, but what if the majority is simply wrong?!

    Further, there’s difference of 17 in my artist count with this feature switched on, but I can’t see where.

    I’d like to be able to allow the ‘corrections’ on an artist-by-artist or track-by-track basis.

    houndworld – 29 January, 14:50
  31. James Wheare
    29 January, 15:03

    @GrantRS: You can suggest a new correction on any page at the bottom of the right hand side. Click the link that says: “Is this artist name wrong or misspelt? Suggest a correction.”

    @houndworld: Votes are not immediately fed back into the system. And if you adequately can back up why you think something is wrong, we can always make changes.

    James Wheare – 29 January, 15:03
  32. gadgetchannel
    29 January, 15:10

    @James Wheare

    I’ve only visited a few pages which redirect, two artists and a track and I didn’t see the “Redirected from” banner on any of them. The pages were

    http://www.last.fm/music/Trentmoller (the example in the blog)
    http://www.last.fm/music/Maximo Park
    http://www.last.fm/music/Son of Dave/_/Hellhoud

    gadgetchannel – 29 January, 15:10
  33. Nói
    29 January, 15:11

    Great great! How I’ve been waiting for this!

    Nói – 29 January, 15:11
  34. Erik Frey
    29 January, 15:23

    @houndworld, we’re carefully balancing user votes with authority sources like discogs and musicbrainz, the raw fingerprint data we receive, and a host of other weights/treatments.

    Think of it less as popular vote and more as representative democracy :)

    Erik Frey – 29 January, 15:23
  35. werkan
    29 January, 15:43

    Exactly what we needed, a big thanks to the developers!

    Great work!

    werkan – 29 January, 15:43
  36. paradiddolo
    29 January, 15:46

    That wil be LEGEN wait for it, here it comes DARY!!!

    paradiddolo – 29 January, 15:46
  37. Edgar J
    29 January, 15:49

    Sometimes a song is revived by a new singer that is not yet in your database.

    I suggest that you also add a field where we can tell you whether a particular song that was auto-corrected is a revival of the song that it was auto-corrected to.

    Edgar J – 29 January, 15:49
  38. GrantRS
    29 January, 15:56

    Thanks. Going through looking for corrections to suggest now. :)

    GrantRS – 29 January, 15:56
  39. Noodle-CAT
    29 January, 16:22

    When I start to scrobble the correct tag for an artist, will all my old plays be added to the correct name? O.o
    Because, I’m afraid to loose mit 2000 plays of Miyavi and start to have 2 different Miyavi-tags in my chart… thanks

    In fact that this works, this will be awesome news!

    Noodle-CAT – 29 January, 16:22
  40. Tecfan
    29 January, 16:26

    another step in the right direction ;)

    Tecfan – 29 January, 16:26
  41. StuDog
    29 January, 16:32

    The one thing I learned today is that Dexy’s is Dexys and last.fm wikis say that both are incorrect and not even the labels know for sure!

    StuDog – 29 January, 16:32
  42. houndworld
    29 January, 16:39

    @ErikFrey: thanks for clarifying, but even then, I feel I’m not in control. I’ve just listened to ‘Appleblim & Peverelist – Circling’, which has been ‘corrected’ to ‘Appleblim & Peverelist – a circling’. It’s track A on a 12” and the track is called ‘Circling’. It’s quite clearly wrong – it’d be nice if I could avoid the alteration. If I can’t, I wonder, how long before this gets corrected properly? And what guarantee is there that it ever does?

    I do appreciate the value of fingerprinting and the work that’s gone into this; I’d just like to be in control of which of my scrobbles are auto-corrected. (Better yet I’d like to be able to correct things myself, but apparently this will never be possible!)

    houndworld – 29 January, 16:39
  43. molly159
    29 January, 16:53

    Thank you,

    but I’ve got one suggestion: as I can removed track from my library, could it be possible to move track or artist into another artist? Manually?

    molly159 – 29 January, 16:53
  44. Aengus
    29 January, 16:59

    Hello,

    Does this mean that it’ll never be the case in the future that audio fingerprints are sent to the server as scrobbles instead of artistname-trackname?

    It looks to me like this is the path you’re taking, whereas I was previously under the impression that eventually audio fingerprints would be used for the purpose of track identification in scrobbles.

    Aengus

    Aengus – 29 January, 16:59
  45. Raito
    29 January, 17:05

    Hahah, it’s funny, the one artist page on my charts I wanted to have merged was Merry with メリー, and it was the one that wasn’t.

    Instead things like ダリ got merged with Dali, even though both are separate bands. OH well, it was a good idea, but it didn’t work with my charts. =/

    Raito – 29 January, 17:05
  46. Rico
    29 January, 17:08

    THANK YOU! Finally, we have an answer to the old (the) arcade fire problem. great work

    Rico – 29 January, 17:08
  47. PurpleCow17
    29 January, 17:10

    Mmm… I love the idea, but have music that might complain. Most of my showtunes have been corrected to the composer, when I had very specifically re-named some to the actual singer. Otherwise all the different versions I have of, say, “Epiphany” from Sweeney Todd are all mushed into one, whether they were sung by Len Cariou, George Hearn, or Johnny Depp. I listen to a lot of these specifically for the singer (not the composer), and I’d like my scrobbles to reflect that.

    I would like to echo being able to choose specific scrobbles not to be auto-corrected. As a whole I would like to leave it in, but this added control would be nice.

    PurpleCow17 – 29 January, 17:10
  48. johnny7
    29 January, 17:11

    @Noodle-CAT: Yes! Don’t worry about it, you won’t have two different artists in your charts.

    I still think it would be great if I could disable these little buttons in the recent plays list. I’m not really to blame for my actually wrong scrobbled artist tag (the Negura Bunget-thing, if you know).

    johnny7 – 29 January, 17:11
  49. Noodle-CAT
    29 January, 17:26

    @johnny7 thx for the answer

    I hope it really works, I’ve also seen some progress at a friends page. He used to scrobble some tracks with the tracknumber in front of it :) NOw they’re all gone, nice work, you guys! :D

    Noodle-CAT – 29 January, 17:26
  50. Pablo
    29 January, 17:32

    Please, be careful with merging artists doing video game music. There are a lot of people who tag this music as the company who makes the game instead of the composer.

    For example, I have the Super Smash Bros. Brawl soundtrack with artists like Koji Kondo and now it redirects to Nintendo. Please look at that before the merger!

    Pablo – 29 January, 17:32
  51. pushmi-pullyu
    29 January, 17:50

    i have a question… i listen to some rather obscure (well, in last.fm and global terms, certainly) Croatian artists, and from what i’ve seen, lots of their song titles have been “corrected” from titles with diacritic marks (the right ones) to those without (which is wrong). the trouble is, wherever you look up the information on the web, you’re more likely to run into song and artist names without diacritics (because not every keyboard has them, etc.). that, however, does not make them correct. and i think not enough people will be bothered to actually vote for the correct version to influence the final merging process. what about that? i hope i’ve made myself clear… would hate for hundreds of my carefully tagged songs to be autotransformed into some mutilated versions (yeah, i’m kinda geeky like that :D)…

    pushmi-pullyu – 29 January, 17:50
  52. David Jennings
    29 January, 17:53

    Presumably this change is what has led to plays of Simon Jeffes’ Piano Music album being “merged” into plays of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra in my library. What’s that about, then? Are all Morrissey’s plays being merged into The Smiths too?

    Is there any way we can correct these odd glitches?

    David Jennings – 29 January, 17:53
  53. Lion Magnus
    29 January, 17:55

    Sorry, but this new feature is horrible for people who listen to and understand Japanese since it automatically changes a lot, if not most of the, japanese titles into the incorrect romanizations.

    Lion Magnus – 29 January, 17:55
  54. Paul Lamere
    29 January, 17:56

    super duper! This is really great! So when will we see something like this made available as a web service?

    Paul Lamere – 29 January, 17:56
  55. Bernhard
    29 January, 18:12

    hello, just wanted to say that this new spelling tool does not work how it should do – for example, i’ve got an artist which is spelled how the band wants themselves to be named – and last.fm just changes the artist’s name? that’s not very good in my opinion…

    greetings

    Bernhard – 29 January, 18:12
  56. Kix
    29 January, 18:17

    I do not appreciate many of my unicode artists becoming some other artist with the same name. Changing it back.

    Kix – 29 January, 18:17
  57. Kelley
    29 January, 18:28

    I really hope there will be an option to get rid of the little buttons on the recently played list.

    Kelley – 29 January, 18:28
  58. bloody foreigner
    29 January, 18:32

    Thanks for all your time and effort, but I have to mention that
    “Flag this” is not the most easily understandable expression for choosing the right spelling for the names. I myself have avoided to press the flagging because I haven’t known what does it mean in this case.

    bloody foreigner – 29 January, 18:32
  59. johnny7
    29 January, 18:37

    It’s exactly the other way round for me: I’m too lazy to tag titles like “Øþegarðr” from Arckanum. I tagged it as “Opegardr” and LastFM corrects it for me.

    Another point: I think the statistics aren’t correct. Would be nice if the playcounts redirected to the correct artist, too.

    johnny7 – 29 January, 18:37
  60. Amanda
    29 January, 18:40

    Thank you a hundred times over for doing this! My library is much cleaner now because of it. Great new feature! =D

    Amanda – 29 January, 18:40
  61. zim
    29 January, 18:57

    Thanks, but no thanks. In ten minutes of looking through my library post-“auto-correction” I’ve already seen more than half a dozen blatantly incorrect track and artist merges and redirects. Not interested in spending a week locating and reporting the no doubt hundreds of errors this is causing in my library, so I’m turning this off. Nice idea, flawed execution.

    zim – 29 January, 18:57
  62. Chris
    29 January, 19:00

    Great idea…

    However, straight away in my list Deerhunter’s ‘Cover Me (Slowly)’ from ‘Microcastles’ has been auto-corrected to ‘Intro’ from ‘Cryptograms’. How can it be so wrong with a correct song that has 52000 listens?

    Chris – 29 January, 19:00
  63. jarecek
    29 January, 19:09

    i knew this day will come :) lets do the same thing with albums .. there are tons of mistagged albums .. for instance my fucking groove armada’s love box .. instead of lovebox .. flag it/merge it .. i know it will come also .. i’ll be waitin .. last.fm is still best thing i’ve ever found on internet (after google) :D

    jarecek – 29 January, 19:09
  64. l
    29 January, 19:25

    Thank you. I’ve been waiting for this.
    I have a suggestion. If a user votes for a name change for a track, that track’s name should be changed in that user’s library even if it’s not the popular vote.

    l – 29 January, 19:25
  65. Wendy
    29 January, 19:57

    Oh my God. Best thing to happen in Last.fm in friggin’ ages.

    A HUGE THANK YOU for finally putting this stuff up. When artist pages get merged… Wow. I might just throw a party.

    Wendy – 29 January, 19:57
  66. mja0
    29 January, 20:02

    Yay! Me like.

    mja0 – 29 January, 20:02
  67. Lars
    29 January, 20:28

    Cool! Maybe Rodolpho Biagi will finally be corrected to Rodolfo Biagi!

    Lars – 29 January, 20:28
  68. Kloloty
    29 January, 20:31

    “Sorry, but this new feature is horrible for people who listen to and understand Japanese since it automatically changes a lot, if not most of the, japanese titles into the incorrect romanizations.”

    I can’t disagree…

    Kloloty – 29 January, 20:31
  69. GodShowMeMagic
    29 January, 20:46

    I think you have mentioned this in your post but I just wanted to check… This doesn’t change the info on the artists page top tracks does it?

    Super Furry Animals still has the mis-spelling and link to chubacabras (it doesn’t automatically redirect although it recognises it is wrong) when it should be Chupacabras

    I’ve seen it auto-corrected on user profiles but the wrong spelling and link is still sitting there on the artists top tracks, mocking me… Will be good when this gets sorted.

    GodShowMeMagic – 29 January, 20:46
  70. The N
    29 January, 20:48

    Talking about artist names – great.
    But if it’s up to song titles I don’t like what autocorrection does. “songtitle_x (Demo)” which sounds completely different from the normal studio version “songtitle_x” is redirected to “songtitle_x” as well. As I choose to disable the function, band names are not redirected as well.
    Maybe a good next step would be two opt-in possibilities, one for “Auto-correct spelling of artists” and the other one “Auto-correct spelling of tracks”.

    The N – 29 January, 20:48
  71. humdrum
    29 January, 20:49

    I’m torn – I like the spelling auto correction, but I haaaate that in the overview of my listened tracks, songs only appear once, stamped with the most recent play.

    I go through bouts where I listen to songs on repeat, but now the song will only appear once and I don’t like it. I can’t find any way of changing this back in the settings. Help, please?

    humdrum – 29 January, 20:49
  72. an hero
    29 January, 20:55

    hmm, could use a little more tweaking.

    especially on non-english releases, please focus your efforts on that. there’s still the endlessly puerile dickering between following canonical sources (e.g. original japanese) over transliterating conveniences. for all other cases of plain indolence and just outright stupidity in tagging that’s a valiant effort you have there. as for myself i’ll be turning off correction since most songs in my collection were impeccably tagged in the first place (yep, focus on your non-english entries to reiterate… PRETTY PLEASE :( )

    an hero – 29 January, 20:55
  73. Dan
    29 January, 21:15

    Just curious: How do you determine what parts of a song or artist name to write upper and lower case?
    I like my MP3s all title case, but on last.fm it’s different…

    Dan – 29 January, 21:15
  74. Hypersky75
    29 January, 21:17

    So, how can you tell what’s been corrected or not in your library, if it’s no longer in your recently played chart?

    Hypersky75 – 29 January, 21:17
  75. lammx
    29 January, 21:40

    Great news!

    But there’s a bug: I just wanted to flag Rhythms del Mundo – Modern Way as not being „Kaiser Chiefs – Modern Way“ but „Buena Vista Social Club & Kaiser Chiefs – Modern Way“, but it then told me „You voted for Kaiser Chiefs – Modern Way“

    lammx – 29 January, 21:40
  76. hungoverdrawn
    29 January, 21:44

    Just want to say – Dexys weren’t fixed at the time of my posting, but are now. Dexys Midnight Runners – no apostrophe – have actually moved up in my top ranking, so the incorrect scrobbles have clearly been fixed and added to some correct scrobbles. Thank you last.fm, this one has bugged me for a long time now.

    hungoverdrawn – 29 January, 21:44
  77. Papuass
    29 January, 22:02

    James, thanks for the prompt answer. I have been using this new feature for about a day and quite like it.

    Papuass – 29 January, 22:02
  78. Max Howell
    29 January, 22:21

    @Dan I use the MusicBrainz guidelines:

    http://musicbrainz.org/doc/CapitalizationStandard

    Max Howell – 29 January, 22:21
  79. chisette
    29 January, 23:04

    i’ve been dreaming about it for a really long time, i was ashamed & i wished i could fix tag mistakes made in the past – and today it has finally happened… i’m kind of speechless, don’t know what to say, just… thank you guys :)))
    i really do appreciate what you did & keep on doing
    when i saw it on my profile today the first thought was “shit, is system collapsing?” but once i understood what exactly happened i couldn’t keep myself from smiling :))
    you made my day somehow, so thx again :))

    chisette – 29 January, 23:04
  80. GTStar
    29 January, 23:59

    Yeah, I waited so long and finally it happened! Thank you!

    I love the possibility to report mistakes and I was happy, when I read, that there will be a merge of the profiles soon(?)! This is, what I think, will be the best what can happen. :)

    REALLY GREAT NEWS!

    GTStar – 29 January, 23:59
  81. En-Cu-Kou
    30 January, 00:05

    If there was an RSS feed of autocorrected tracks, I’d subscribe to it, keep up with what last.fm thinks about my tags, and correct either the tag or last.fm when they disagree.

    Would it be possible to add that?

    En-Cu-Kou – 30 January, 00:05
  82. zexpe
    30 January, 00:16

    I agree with a lot of the comments above:

    1. The voting system may well be biased against native languages where English/Anglicised variations are commonly used. Some level of consistency is required here. Is there a page with the official rules? How can we contact you to point to an appropriate authority?

    2. A lot of the “Live” versions of my tracks are being corrected to the studio versions. It’d be great to have a unified naming convention for live tracks, but they still need to distinguished from the studio versions.

    3. It’d be great to see what scrobbles have been auto-corrected beyond just the last 10 scrobbles on your page. When I click see more / edit scrobbles, I’d like to see which ones were corrected with a link to the name of the track I originally submitted (just like the green icon on your page links to the originally scrobbled track name).

    4. If the problems above aren’t resolved, it would be nice to un-auto-correct some tracks but not all.

    5. I’m looking forward to seeing the mess of albums and track listings finally tackled as well! This actually ties in very closely with ensuring live vs. studio tracks are correctly distinguished between, e.g. my “Live” recording scrobbles now link to the studio album despite being scrobbled from the live album. Also presently the English version of artist name’s pages tend to have more fuller album coverage. e.g. George Dalaras vs. Γιώργος Νταλάρας.

    zexpe – 30 January, 00:16
  83. GTStar
    30 January, 00:24

    There is one point I miss:

    If the spelling is right, but case insensitivity you cannot fix it.

    GTStar – 30 January, 00:24
  84. tyrique12
    30 January, 00:26

    Finally..

    tyrique12 – 30 January, 00:26
  85. unaesthetic
    30 January, 01:10

    there are groups such as Der Blutharsch and The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, where the official given track names are just roman numerals or “Untitled” so it has long been the habit of listeners to tag track names as “album title + number”, ie The Pleasures Received In Pain I, The Pleasures Received In Pain II, The Pleasures Received In Pain III and so on. The auto-correction has changed all the titles back to the numerals, so there’s no way of differentiating III from one album or another.

    unaesthetic – 30 January, 01:10
  86. angeoria
    30 January, 02:52

    I’m a bit torn about this: on the one hand, I’d put off fixing my tags for quite a while because I didn’t want to have to have two versions of the same song in my charts, and that’s now cleared up. Much appreciated! On the other hand, though, as others have observed, I have a lot of tracks which are properly tagged in Japanese, Korean, or Mandarin, and it’s really annoying to have the romaji in my charts after spending so much time tagging everything correctly. I appreciate that my incorrectly tagged tracks are now fixed and merged, and I’d like to keep that as-is, but I’d also really like to revert all the romaji without opting out entirely or waiting for popular vote to agree with me. Would it be possible to 1) see all the tracks that have been auto-merged in my charts and 2) opt out of the auto-merging for specific tracks rather than my entire library?

    angeoria – 30 January, 02:52
  87. behindthestars
    30 January, 05:16

    You guys are AMAZING. Thank you! :)

    behindthestars – 30 January, 05:16
  88. bigbeatnut
    30 January, 08:11

    Yeehaa !

    But yeah … NEXT thing to tackle has to be the multiple bands with the same name. I do NOT regularly listen to a Heavy Metal band called Wisdom, but anyone browsing my profile will think that I do.

    bigbeatnut – 30 January, 08:11
  89. neothe0ne
    30 January, 08:16

    There’s a growing problem of tracks/artists being redirected to the INCORRECT spelling of the artist. Through this autocorrection, a bunch of my correctly tagged tracks are triggering “Last.fm fix your tags” red images when they were perfectly fine.

    I hope some users votes are weighed more than others, since some people refuse to fix tags and often they outnumber the number of people with correct tags =\

    neothe0ne – 30 January, 08:16
  90. randomaction
    30 January, 08:32

    Well done!

    Do you consider making artist names and song titles in non-Latin scripts (e.g. Cyrillic) case-insensitive? Currently, this is a source of title duplication.

    randomaction – 30 January, 08:32
  91. facevoid
    30 January, 08:44

    this feature doesn’t work for me. live versions of the song combines with studio versions.

    kanji/katakana changes into romanized version.

    facevoid – 30 January, 08:44
  92. Kim Bach
    30 January, 08:53

    Very cool, long overdue. It was ok to be told to “fix your tags”, but it was just a little difficult to do retroactively.

    Kim Bach – 30 January, 08:53
  93. mikowhy
    30 January, 08:56

    that’s very good idea. I hope there will be everything working propely and data mess, which you are writing about, will go away.

    Take care.

    PS. Your captcha looks very unclear

    mikowhy – 30 January, 08:56
  94. DownloadBird
    30 January, 09:19

    Good work :)

    DownloadBird – 30 January, 09:19
  95. teak3N
    30 January, 09:20

    Good feature, but it would be better if we had an overview of “wrong spelled tracks / artist” somewhere on our profile. That way I don’t have to dig deep into my library to see which tags I have to fix.

    teak3N – 30 January, 09:20
  96. kasn
    30 January, 09:42

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

    This was a problem I had from my first day on last.fm. So happy it works now as I expect.

    Great work guys.

    kasn – 30 January, 09:42
  97. run4free
    30 January, 10:06

    Nice but difficult
    Example: I listened to track called – Everything is Gone from Gang Bang

    Last.fm corrected by Everything’s is Gone

    Who is right?

    Not the more then 4000 listeners with Everything is Gone
    Not the Wikipedia page

    But yes for this case last.fm is right.
    On Gang Bang’s website it is referenced with “Everything’s”

    Well done

    run4free – 30 January, 10:06
  98. GTStar
    30 January, 10:29

    Is it planned to use the fingerprints of the tracks to separate the songs from each other? So that you can listen to two tracks named the same but it will be counted for both tracks separately?

    GTStar – 30 January, 10:29
  99. James Wheare
    30 January, 10:43

    @lammx: Sorry about that, the “Modern Way” in the drop down was actually tied to a specific track ID. I’ve fixed this in development and it should go out soon, but if you want to correct your vote in the mean time, you can select the “another track name…” option and type in “Modern Way” again. That should work.

    James Wheare – 30 January, 10:43
  100. b. f. again
    30 January, 10:55

    I hope that all those far too many V/A-albums on Last.fm get fixed, that make people scrobble tracks like “Various Artists – angel of the morning” (from album Pure Love Moods Vol. 1).

    If not with the alphabetical problems, the biggest mess may be on a classical music section, where people (as well as Last.fm on scrobbable albums) have named their scrobbles like “Bach – Allegro”. It would be great if there would be given simple rules how to name a single track when it’s from a classical album.

    But you have done huge job with all that works more than well!

    b. f. again – 30 January, 10:55
  101. Milk0Vellocet
    30 January, 10:55

    Excellent feature, can we get an overview of auto-corrected tracks or at least so it shows auto-corrections in our play history, not just recently played?

    Milk0Vellocet – 30 January, 10:55
  102. Damien Ryan
    30 January, 11:25

    Great step forward guys.

    One thing I’ve noticed is that the played tracks editor has changed so that multiple plays of a single track only show up once. I was using the old behaviour to clean up some audiobooks that I had scrobbled way to many times, but now this is going to be more time consuming.

    Any chance of being able to reset the playcount of a track (or set of tracks) to one? It’s possible to delete a whole load, but I really just want to reset it to one.

    Keep up the good work,
    Damien

    Damien Ryan – 30 January, 11:25
  103. kat_chasing
    30 January, 13:02

    This is fantastic! Great work, thank you.

    kat_chasing – 30 January, 13:02
  104. gunny
    30 January, 13:57

    Could you please explain a little bit how many votes are needed to redirect the wrong name? Or what other rules do you currently use?

    gunny – 30 January, 13:57
  105. Archaenon
    30 January, 14:19

    NO. seriously though my charts are now splashed with the wrong names for multiple groups who were in thier original language. I’m so glad you gave the option to turn it off , it’s a nightmare. 90% of the names are bad and are not right. Good example , the romanized version of PARAN is not right.

    Archaenon – 30 January, 14:19
  106. Rednyrg721
    30 January, 14:59

    As some people pointed out already, i need lists of autocorrected artists/tracks sorted by scrobble count preferably as it’s hard to check out whether autocorrection is right or not right now. Had to check it off.

    Rednyrg721 – 30 January, 14:59
  107. Edu
    30 January, 15:40

    Finally.. Thanks!!

    Edu – 30 January, 15:40
  108. Sami
    30 January, 15:51

    Now most of my recent playlist is “auto-corrected” wrongly. It’s fun to go around flagging dozens of tracks back to how they are supposed to be!

    Sami – 30 January, 15:51
  109. lammx
    30 January, 16:27

    @James Wheare: That worked, yes. Thanks for the fix.

    lammx – 30 January, 16:27
  110. Jochem
    30 January, 17:07

    Awesome feature. Would it be possible to ‘tap’ into the database with desktop apps? That way developers can make apps to change the tags on your music to the correct last.fm ones. Finally a clean music collection…

    Jochem – 30 January, 17:07
  111. nan
    30 January, 17:08

    So far it’s been working great!. I’m really looking forward to the day where merging mispelled artists will be possible.

    nan – 30 January, 17:08
  112. h
    30 January, 17:52

    The feature has worked great, but has also caused a bit of trouble (I’m not quite sure that it has to do with the spelling app, but it did occur about the same time as the launch of it): A few artists I’ve never listened to (and of which 3 seems to be non-existing, even) has been added to my library, and can’t be deleted. I don’t know whether you knew about this bug, otherwise you do now.

    h – 30 January, 17:52
  113. Ann
    30 January, 19:06

    It’s really sweet, I was waiting for this but I have a little problem now.. What if there are different artists with the same name? For example I was tagging “Eddie” in korean language because I listen to korean artist.. Now I have “Eddie” in tags and this is someone else :( I even switch off autocorrection because too many artist changed on my library in this way.. I dont understand why korean tag must be changed on english tag if artist is realy korean.. I know there is maany tag and maaany artist but I just wonder why this is changed because this tag wasnt wrong :(

    Ann – 30 January, 19:06
  114. bege
    30 January, 19:55

    Trying to use “suggest a correction” for
    track “T.I. – Live Your Life (Explicit Album Version) [Featuring Rihanna]”

    I choose “Should Link To”,
    then select Artist=T.I.
    then type in “Live Your Life (feat. Rihanna)”
    which is the MusicBrainz spelling,
    but I get back: “We’re sorry, but we couldn’t find that track.”
    However the track does exist, here:
    http://www.last.fm/music/T.I./_/Live+Your+Life+(feat.+Rihanna)

    Do I need to type the “+”?

    bege – 30 January, 19:55
  115. Loki
    30 January, 20:01

    Seriously impressed with this! It’s fixed up my charts really well. =3

    Corrections won’t please everyone though, and herein lies the problem: in a similar way that Unicode tags now show up as their Romanised counterparts (as mentioned in previous comments), some of the songs I’d scrobbled with (MusicBrainz-correct) Romanised artists / song titles now show up in Unicode.

    There’s a double-standard in some cases – some songs autocorrect to Romanised and some songs autocorrect to Unicode. This will annoy a lot of users!

    Ideally, a future version of the system would include a preference whereby a user would be able to choose their preferred way of displaying these songs – either in Romanised or Unicode form.

    Either way it’s great to see this finally working! Keep up the good work~

    — Loki

    Loki – 30 January, 20:01
  116. yelow
    30 January, 20:16

    OMG! i was waiting for this but i have never thought that it will messup every thing in my library!!!
    who come that a track name is corrected by adding a website adress to it! just take a look here http://www.last.fm/user/yelow/library/music/Elissa i prefer that you give us the possibility to correct mistakes in our profiles by ourselfs rather than doing this “automaticly” and mess up everything
    btw what’s said here isn’t real at all! “Once you’ve been redirected to the corrected spelling, you will still have a choice to go back to view the original page, in case we made a mistake. If you think we wrongly corrected a spelling, you can let us know by clicking “Flag this”” i can’t go back to any original page and there’s not any flag this thing
    thanks

    yelow – 30 January, 20:16
  117. srboisvert
    30 January, 21:27

    Now perhaps you could fix the geography mess that has venues in Wolverhampton listed as being in Birmingham?

    srboisvert – 30 January, 21:27
  118. Raito
    30 January, 21:53

    Unfortunately anyone who listens to foreign artists will probably not like this. The correct names should not be romaji, for instance, in Japanese artists’ cases. And also, now redirects don’t work. So everyone with their tags as ‘koda kumi’ get a new koda kumi page instead of the automatic redirect to the correct name in kanji.

    Same for say, unicoded ‘kyo’ vs regular ‘kyo’. The latter is a French band, and the former, a Japanese solo artist.

    Great idea, not so great execution.

    Raito – 30 January, 21:53
  119. Ayumi
    30 January, 22:24

    I liked this new feature, it solved some of my problems with winamp (who cannot show kana/kanji, and as I cannot type it too, I can’t correct some of my mistagged artists).
    But I still have some mistakes on my charts D: The track “Mamoritai” (まもりたい) is NOT from Kanjani8 (関ジャニ∞). It’s a solo from a guy (who is member of Kanjani8, btw) called Okura Tadayoshi (大倉忠義), but it’s not from band itself >_< I don’t really want it to be merged, since I don’t listen to Kanjani8, I listen to Okura Tadayoshi.
    And the other problem is with An Cafe. An Cafe is the romanized “oficial” version to アンティック-珈琲店-. But I think it should redirect to アンティック-珈琲店-, since it’s the official japanese name of the band, AND the romanized version of the name was made to simplify the work of fans overseas who can’t type kana/kanji in their keyboards. Lastfm corrected all my An Cafe tags, but didn’t merge it at all, and having in my charts “An Cafe” as my second artist when I have a lot of plays with アンティック-珈琲店- as name is annoying me so much.
    Please, please correct this two things and I’ll be so happy!! (And thanks for correcting the romaji names into kanji for mostly of An Cafe tracks ^^ I think there’s just one wrong, but as I’m not sure of it, I won’t comment at all).
    Sorry for my bad english.

    Ayumi – 30 January, 22:24
  120. larsvolta
    30 January, 22:42

    i’ve been waiting for this day to come, but i noticed that there are simply a lot of individual tracks and artists that still need work. i’m not sure if reporting them case by case will help, but here are two examples:

    Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France Étape 1” and “Tour de France Etape 1” are the same track, the former being correct, but both appearing as separate tracks on lastfm. Same with Étape 2 and Étape 3.

    Radiohead’s “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors are the same track, the former being correct, but both appearing as separate tracks on lastfm.

    larsvolta – 30 January, 22:42
  121. jonathandyer
    30 January, 22:57

    When it comes to corrections of spelling and punctuation, I think this is a great move. I’m quite happy to put up with spellings I don’t like to get rid of the endless lists of tracks that obviously refer to the same song.

    However, before any more permanent merging happens I think there are a couple of issues that really need addressing. The first relates to music where the composer is more important than the performer (classical music, some musicals and soundtracks). This is a value judgement, so some tracks go one way, some the other, sometimes even on the same album – my collection of Schnittke’s string quartets now has half the tracks credited to Schnittke, and the rest to the Kronos Quartet. The reason I and a lot of other classical listeners tag the artist as the composer is because the stats then make a lot more sense – Sibelius’ similar artists are more interesting than Fritz Reiner’s.

    The other problem is people who record under a variety of very similar names. This does happen in the rock world (my Nick Cave scrobbles are now split between “Nick Cave”, “Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds”, “Nick Cave & PJ Harvey” and “Nick Cave & Shane MacGowan”), but is endemic in the jazz world – Miles Davis recorded as “Miles Davis”, “Miles Davis Quintet”, “Miles Daves Sextet”, “Miles Davis Nonet”, “Miles Davis & Gil Evans”, “Miles Davis & Michel Legrand”, and so on and so on. For me, these are all the same artist, so I like to take the AMG approach which is to group them all under the most obvious single artist: in this case Miles Davis. It makes things easier to find and the stats make more sense – these aren’t really different artists.

    The upshot is that these two issues mean that people like me who have made an effort to clean up all their tags now risk having their personal stats distorted irrespective of what MusicBrainz say are the correct tags, which kind of outweighs the advantage of the spelling corrections cleaning up the artist stats.

    jonathandyer – 30 January, 22:57
  122. jacobbrett
    30 January, 23:30

    http://www.last.fm/music/Future+Primitive+Sound/XIII+Soundtrack

    Needs to be fixed with: http://musicbrainz.org/release/0a1b08da-7e92-4417-b8a6-ff0f85978b52.html

    http://www.last.fm/music/Various+Artists/Axis+of+Justice%3A+Concert+Series%2C+Volume+1Axis of Justice: Concert Series, Volume 1

    Needs to be fixed with: http://musicbrainz.org/release/a1c94c9d-0b60-44fc-8470-7229f7aee392.html

    Thanks!

    jacobbrett – 30 January, 23:30
  123. Maria
    30 January, 23:36

    About time, great feature :) But I am indeed furious over some of the corrections so far, as they are WRONG!

    Maria – 30 January, 23:36
  124. zbdz
    30 January, 23:41

    The “proper” spelling, especially for Polish artists, their tracks etc., is in my opinion based on the count of plays. It means that some letters (which may be found in Polish alphabet only) are omitted in proper tags, just because simplified titles are more common in use. I hope it will change. Thanks.

    zbdz – 30 January, 23:41
  125. LeeFH
    30 January, 23:43

    Fantastic update guys! I already got corrected on one song correctly, but on another one incorrectly.

    This kept me wondering if this correction system could go specific maybe? I do not want to switch that feature off as it looks pretty promising, but i know that the song in question is well-tagged so there’s no need to correction on that one.

    Keep up!

    LeeFH – 30 January, 23:43
  126. Park shinae
    30 January, 23:53

    I didn’t like the change, i always listened to “Arashi” (in my computer) and the last.fm turn to “嵐” (automatically) but now the last.fm don’t change this for me anymore , i keep getting to “Arashi” page :-|
    i tried to turn off the feature but it doesn’t change anything…..

    Park shinae – 30 January, 23:53
  127. PresidentX
    31 January, 00:27

    I don’t entirely get this – is there any possibility to redirect specific songs?

    e.g. the song “Tumša Nakte, Zaļa Zāle” that previously was under ‘Ainars Mielavs’ has now been redirected to ‘Skaistākās Dziesmas’(which actually isn’t an artist but a name for an album)… is there a way I can reverse this?
    (I flagged the song but it is still auto-corrected when I play it).

    and I agree with Jonathandyer that some artists who record under a variety of very similar names should be somehow merged into one…

    Apart from that congrats! I was already planning to remove some incorrectly tagged artists and so this was a very pleasant surprise!

    PresidentX – 31 January, 00:27
  128. Alex
    31 January, 00:29

    As much as I think this is a good idea, this re-tagging wrecked havoc with my library. A Joe Strummer and the Mesceleros album came up as simply “Joe Strummer” and in the next track had the correct name. My GZA/Genius album “Liquid Swords” was a mess and some of the replacements had the wrong artists featured. When I looked back I had several entries for the same artist in my library. It screwed everything up so much that I said “screw it, I’m starting over” and erased all my data. I’m starting over, but thus far I’m not impressed with this system.

    Alex – 31 January, 00:29
  129. adi_gallia
    31 January, 01:17

    I think this is great, it still doesn’t solve the P!nk/Pink issue. While Pink is a Japanese band, the majority of the scrobbles for Pink are intended for P!nk and even the photo used for Pink is of P!nk.

    adi_gallia – 31 January, 01:17
  130. Ash
    31 January, 02:38

    I’ve noticed a problem with the Aquabats’ album Charge. The album itself clearly shows all track names have an exclamation mark on the end, and so does Musicbrainz, but the system’s corrected it to no exclamation by popular vote.

    How can we flag something like this?

    A track with an auto-correct!
    The MusicBrainz Page

    Ash – 31 January, 02:38
  131. Ash
    31 January, 02:40

    It seems the last.fm blog autocorrected my url. Pretend the exclamation mark after the first one is part of the url plz. :)

    Ash – 31 January, 02:40
  132. brainchild138
    31 January, 03:21

    Would it be possible to make the auto-correct logo show up in our library/tracks list, of all the music we have listened to, rather than just the last 11 songs? I would like to see what ones have been changed, and to put my vote in if I feel it is an incorrect change.

    brainchild138 – 31 January, 03:21
  133. concretedonkey
    31 January, 06:17

    Bug:
    Seems this update brought back all the artists I’ve erased from my library. Disabled the feature for now.

    concretedonkey – 31 January, 06:17
  134. Archaenon
    31 January, 06:35

    This really butchered NON ENGLISH GROUPS. Please revise this and make sure people stop voting for romanized versions as they are not the actual artist name.

    Archaenon – 31 January, 06:35
  135. contraflow
    31 January, 07:00

    much appreciated.

    however, speaking on behalf of the impatient users who went ahead with the universal scrobbler for example, adding correctly and deleting badly tagged tracks like there’s no better tomorrow, we would appreciate if one could undo all last.fm activity from a certain day or time period, or alternatively just undo the deleting.

    my personal “mission accomplished” tragedy occured as recently as last weekend. may we have a proper transition during which our weekly, monthly and yearly charts can be restored to their original accuracy?

    thank you.

    contraflow – 31 January, 07:00
  136. nerdpanda
    31 January, 07:35

    Thank you for this, I hate it when I don’t know the correct spelling for something and it screws up charts. Not to mention a big thanks for combining the “Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13” with “The Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13” that tag screwed up my charts for a long time

    nerdpanda – 31 January, 07:35
  137. James
    31 January, 07:44

    Wow that was a lot of comments to read! :)

    Anyway, as a few people have suggested: The popular opinion of ‘correct’ tags won’t always mesh what individual users believe is right. Even once you get past the issue of foreign artists tagged in their native script being swapped with (often incorrect) transliterations… you have issues like classical and soundtrack recordings tagged with the comopser, not the performer, as the artist. This is the standard on MusicBrainz, but not what I prefer.

    For musicbrainz, I can just avoid tagging those particular tracks, but here.. all my tracks will be ‘corrected’ with tags I’ve specifically avoided. And since I seem to be of the minority opinion on this, I doubt my flagging-votes will change anything.

    So add me to the list of people asking for piecemeal corrections, choosing which to keep and reject. To be honest, all I care about is the data on my own chart. If my scrobbles get added to the global stats with composer-artists, I won’t mind.. so long as my stats list the artist tags I want.

    (PS: Ditto on the “Page O’ Corrected Tracks”, too!)

    James – 31 January, 07:44
  138. jesus2099
    31 January, 09:43

    I got many many correct scrobbles automatically converted into nonsense.
    So I follow the star links and vote for the correct names.
    The wrong names remain in my charts.
    I switch off the thing.

    I guess it must be OK for mainstream music though.

    jesus2099 – 31 January, 09:43
  139. jesus2099
    31 January, 09:51

    Ah an error I remember was to rename LuLu into the somwhat silly LuLu (yes, that is fullwidth latin noncense).

    It could be usefull to keep some links and permit us (those who switch off this option) to vote as well for correct names.

    Because as I see it, only those liking the wrong names will get the option to vote.

    jesus2099 – 31 January, 09:51
  140. Axel65
    31 January, 15:15

    I understand the importance of auto-correcting wrong or misspelled metadata of artists and tracks. But now i’m already encountering the negative apsect of the new auto-correction. Take Captain Beefheart for example. For some reason a lot of people or last.fm thinks that the correct name is Captain Beefheart & [b]his[/b] magic band. This is wrong! Just have a look on every album so you can see (if you have eyes to look) that it says Captain Beefheart & [b]the[/b] magic band. I always invest a lot of time to get my tracks all the correct spelling, checking at discogs and other resources and now it’s all fruitless because the new system simply overrides it :o(

    Axel65 – 31 January, 15:15
  141. magenta27
    31 January, 15:33

    I turned off the feature because it f**** up my charts (sorry for the expression!), but now it’s even worse! I have to change a lot of artist names and i’m comfused. Moreover, although i turned the feature off still my charts are not as they used to be, at the “last 7 days” artist chart, i have the same artist twice (Anna Vissi that is, and Celine Dion, the one with a tone on “e” and the other with no tone), one with 52 plays and the other with 4 plays. If it’s going to be that way from now on, i no longer want to be a user of last.fm, because i have these charts 2.5 years now and it’s not fair to turn out to be like that now, waste of time.
    Hope someone can reply to that and tell me what should I do
    Cheers from Greece!

    magenta27 – 31 January, 15:33
  142. Zephirnl
    31 January, 15:45

    This system would be great, IF (yes, it’s a big if) you could also choose to be notified, but not corrected. Right now the only 2 options are autocorrect (and get notified) or nothing. I would like to have the option to not be corrected, but get notified of tracks that last.fm thinks are incorrectly tagged. Another user also mentioned having an RSS feed of rently played ‘wrong’ track tags. that would be nice too.

    Zephirnl – 31 January, 15:45
  143. Noodle-CAT
    31 January, 17:13

    Overall it’s a great system and I’m looking forward, that there will be only one page for artists like miyavi, who had like 2 or 3 pages… but today some of the redirections, that worked before don’t work anymore…
    Like with Gazette, which autocorrected it right to The Gazette now just links to the wrong page… this worked better before the changes.

    Also I think, that some of the tracks are wrongly merged, like L’arc~en~Ciel – Pieces and L’Arc~en~Ciel – Pieces (ark mix), these are on different albums… xd

    I’d like to recorrect some of the tracks by clicking on the green star or something… xd

    Noodle-CAT – 31 January, 17:13
  144. stopthenoise
    31 January, 18:13

    Just disabled the spelling correction feature.. Several (approx. one out of two) of my tracks now gets scrobbled incorrectly..

    Please wait adding new services to the site until you have tested your software.. Skatebård is Skatebård, not Skatebård.. No, I don’t want you to remove remix info from my tracks, just because you don’t know the remixes I’ve bought yet..

    I started out being impressed, but am now very unsatisfied with all todays scrobblings, which I have been changed incorrectly.. :-(

    Love your site, but this feature needs more work :-)

    stopthenoise – 31 January, 18:13
  145. theboxingnun
    31 January, 18:58

    I’m all about this happening, and have been looking forward to it for a while, but there are many bugs I think we’re all going to have to help fix.

    Unfortunately, some of them can’t wait too long because they are seriously messing up charts (completely different songs being merged with one another, same goes for different artists being merged.)

    I think Last.fm needs some sort of flagging system that can be verified and changed right away for those problems. Maybe even get volunteers together…I’d do it, and have been somewhat already. When I see the green star on my profile, I’ve been searching online to verify the correct artist and title, then voting accordingly.

    Of course, no one knows if and when that will help, so that’s why it seems something more drastic has to be done for the serious errors. I know this must have been a huge undertaking, but please, do something soon…the bugs in this are really bad and doing the opposite of what Last.fm was designed to do.

    theboxingnun – 31 January, 18:58
  146. nikki
    31 January, 20:21

    I really think this is more problematic than useful. I listen to a lot of Asian artists, and all of their songs keep getting changed to the romanised titles. I really abhor this. I make the effort to keep the titles as they are officially, and yet the website decides their incorrect based on… what? It doesn’t make sense.

    On top of that, I have songs in other languages with English counterparts. The two songs get combined, which doesn’t make sense. Sure, I can (and did) turn off the setting for my library to get corrected… But this doesn’t make the feature any more useful when it does this.

    Granted, it’s useful for people who don’t tag their songs properly or have five variations of the same song scrobbled (which, to me, doesn’t make sense on either account). It’s not useful for those of us who get incorrect corrections when we actually maintain our music library properly.

    nikki – 31 January, 20:21
  147. elvyse
    31 January, 20:27

    Excellent feature! How I longed for it! :-)

    Still a few kinks though. Suggesting corrections doesn’t always work. For example I’m trying to suggest Vaka for this track http://www.last.fm/music/Sigur+R%C3%B3s/_/Untitled+1+(%5C%22Vaka%5C%22) but on the success screen it says that I voted for “Sigur Rós – “

    :-(

    elvyse – 31 January, 20:27
  148. Mo
    31 January, 20:44

    Live tracks are changed into studio version which is totally senseless. I’ve got sometimes twenty different versions of the song, and I don’t want it to scrobble as the same thing, which they obviously are not. I know I repeat something, that’s already been said, but I want it to become the more democratic voice, because you seem to take care of the majority first ;P So please fix it, it’s terrifying. Same horrible thing happens with remixes.

    If it’s possible, I would make it dependable on the single user: asking him every first time if he want the track to be scrobbled like that or not.

    Mo – 31 January, 20:44
  149. Tueksta
    31 January, 21:27

    I agree with Milk0Vellocet, the corrections should be marked not only in recently played list, but also in edit scrobble history.

    Tueksta – 31 January, 21:27
  150. Erwin
    31 January, 22:42

    Thanks very much!
    I think it’s a great feature; it was nice to see how all my The Arcade Fire scrobbles became Arcade Fire scrobbles, as it should be.

    I have, however, turned it off for now, because even though there’s a big amount of songs for which I really like the auto-correction, there’s also quite a few which I don’t want to be corrected.

    I listen to a lot of remixes Four Tet has done for other artist. I listen to these because it’s a Four Tet remix, and in many cases I don’t even know the original song. Thus, I feel it’s better to tag them as Four Tet songs and have the original artist in the title (so Four Tet – Battles – Tonto (Four Tet Remix), because it’s the Four Tet part that makes me want to play the song.
    Now, all these scrobbles are corrected to Battles – Tonto (Four Tet Remix), which obviously I don’t like.

    I’m sure this has been said many times before, but I stopped reading all the replies at some point and just thought I’d mention it.

    I do like Mo’s idea of asking the user “do you mean [insert name]?” each time a new song is scrobbled that with a title that Last.FM thinks is not right. That would be great; if you say yes it gets corrected from that point on, if no it never gets corrected.
    Well I’d like that.

    Either way, big thank you for the change thing though, always good to see so much progression. Thanks!

    Erwin – 31 January, 22:42
  151. Christopher Lin (ninjakitsunex)
    31 January, 22:45

    My big complaint with this system is that some of my tracks are getting re-interpreted as other tracks (the only one I’ve noticed so is that Emmy the Great’s “24” is converted to a live version of that track “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)”).

    The ‘report a problem’ feature does not do much for me because it only asks me what I think the live version of the track should be auto-corrected to. But I don’t think all instances of “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)” should be auto-corrected to “24” — obviously, some people are listening to the live track instead of the studio track. So I don’t want to report the live track for being ‘wrong’ in any way.

    What I would like to do is just manually correct that one scrobble instance from “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)” back to “24.” I expected this to be available on the little grey menu that appears to the right of each track name (you know, the menu that also lets me love the track, add tags, or remove from library). To me, this is the ideal way to approach problems with spelling auto-correction. Users don’t have to go to the trouble of going to the song page in order to fix the scrobbles that appear on their profile page, and they don’t have to suggest that one title should be auto-corrected to another title for all instances — they merely change things to keep their own profile accurate.

    Last.fm should record all instances of manual correction, and this data will guide the metadata team to figuring out where distinctions need to be made between certain titles, and can use individual instances to figure out how the fingerprints for the various titles differ. I see manual correction of individual scrobbles as distinct from suggestions to wholesale correct entire song pages in the context of this auto-correction system — the former indicates that the system has confused two tracks and needs to be improved, while the latter indicates that the song title is just plain wrong in some way and needs to be collapsed into another song entirely.

    Please implement the ability to manually fix your own individual track scrobbles. Preferably, clicking ‘Fix track spelling’ on the little menu for each track would allow me to type the title I want into an open text field, but I understand if you want to limit the user to the nearby instances of the song, e.g. if I wanted to correct “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)” I would have to choose between “24” and “24 (live on WTOTS)” (this is similar to the current correction menu that is available on track pages).

    It would also be nice if after correcting one scrobble of “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)” to “24”, the site asked me if I wanted to apply the same correction to all other times I had scrobbled “24 (live on WTOTS Jan 08)” so I could correct a case in which the auto-corrector botched a track that I’d listened to on repeat a lot. (This idea is similar to how Google Calendar, after editing one instance of a repeated event, asks if you want to apply the same change to all instances of the event.)

    I hope this suggestion is heeded, because otherwise my statistics for Emmy the Great will be wrong. =(

    How trivial yet tragic.

    Christopher Lin (ninjakitsunex) – 31 January, 22:45
  152. arved
    31 January, 23:43

    It would be great if Last.fm would now use this information to fix at least the “streamable” tracks that are so obviously wrong named…

    for example:

    http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/Hepsi/_/Kalpsizsin%2B-%2BWww.UcuzMp3.Com%2B%2526%2BWww.Oldumu.Com

    http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/Serdar+Ortac(www.nergizfm.com)/_/Gitme

    When using the radio i frequently get songs like this, which mess all my stats…

    arved – 31 January, 23:43
  153. Antonia Gray
    1 February, 01:52

    I’m not happy about this at all…

    Mainly for reasons that have been stated previously regarding Japanese artists. I liked it that Last.fm corrected Koda Kumi as 倖田來未 because not only did I get the correct album art, it was also the name she uses to release her material, this also applies to various other Asian artists and I am getting seriously annoyed.

    Plus, if you’re going to force the romanised spellings onto me why are you not counting the plays for these songs in my weekly charts. I know full well that my top track for this week is wrong on Last.fm but because all the Japanese names have been so severely messed around it appears that they aren’t being counted.

    It very confusing and does it mean that I have to wait until you can merged the romanised versions with the correct versions. If so, could this been done sooner rather than later

    My Last.fm page looked quite neat before, now it looks messy, unorganised and a completely incorrect representation of what I’ve been listening

    Could this be fixed soon?

    Antonia Gray – 1 February, 01:52
  154. Sherrice
    1 February, 01:53

    Now the next phase is finding a way to let old Last FM users import their previous library plays.

    Sherrice – 1 February, 01:53
  155. Alex
    1 February, 02:51

    I apologize for my last comment, it was a bit heavy-handed. I decided to run with things and start over. One complaint/bug though. It seems that no matter what I do “Café del Mar” appears in my library. Nothing in my iTunes before or after the change goes by that name, and I can’t tell why its appearing. I suppose if it keeps happening I’ll email support or something.

    Figured I’d spit it out here in case someone else found Café del Mar in their library.

    Alex – 1 February, 02:51
  156. Tan The Man
    1 February, 04:54

    Nice…

    Tan The Man – 1 February, 04:54
  157. zima
    1 February, 08:28

    It’s great that there are now some means thanks to which the mess with the metadata can be dealt with.

    However…selecting the correct spelling based purely on votes isn’t the optimal solution imho, not only when gathering data from Last.fm client, but ALSO through voting on artist/song page.

    In the post you give an example of Trentmoller -> Trentemøller, which works in the right direction…however, from what I see, it generally works the other way around in the case of performers/tracks from my country: instead of establishing correct pronounciation, which uses latin letters with added diacritics specific to my alphabet (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż), it “latinizes” the names. Unfortunatelly, that’s the way the majority of people have their songs tagged, because of two things:

    1) For some reason people who release files onto p2p shun their own language…

    2) “it’s just the better way/it works better without Unicode/etc.”…which migh have been true…10 YEARS AGO!

    I don’t believe you should be concerned with either of those factors.

    As an example, song “Trzy życzenia” (three wishes) by Firebirds on my recently played list has been corrected to “Trzy zyczenia” (three…SUCH WORD DOESN’T EVEN EXIST IN MY LANGUAGE), and I don’t have much hope it will be swung by votes the other way around – majority of people don’t care; “it has always been like this, so it’s the way it’s meant to be done”, many of them think… (so…no votes on the page)

    Therefore, I propose a solution to this issue: when in doubt, when having two spelling versions, both represented by relatively LARGE number of users (so it will eliminate singular examples of simple typos), ignore the one that is spelled purely with latin alphabet, pick the one which uses letters modified by diacritical signs.

    zima – 1 February, 08:28
  158. johnny7
    1 February, 10:36

    A small bug: I can’t link a song to another whose name begins with “…”. LastFM tells me the song couldn’t be found.

    johnny7 – 1 February, 10:36
  159. johnny7
    1 February, 10:40

    Ah damn, this is not always like this, but sometimes, even if the song actually exists.

    btw: What do you think is correct?
    … And the Great Cold Death of the Earth
    or
    …And the Great Cold Death of the Earth

    johnny7 – 1 February, 10:40
  160. TPIMaster
    1 February, 11:06

    Good job on this one, but only my “Recently listened tracks” list is auto-corrected. My artist charts are not corrected, as artist names that get corrected in my RL tracks are still in their incorrect form in my artist charts.

    TPIMaster – 1 February, 11:06
  161. Arhielanto
    1 February, 11:28

    The idea is great, but the execution, indeed… In the library I lost tracks by certain artists. And at the end of my library are nonexistent artists (MÄ°RKELAM, Lizarrako Gaiteoak) & artists I never listened to (林原めぐみ, Finger Eleven.)

    The second, bigger, more long-term gripe: Semiotics (how’s that for a 20€ word?)
    There’s no distinction between artist, musician, composer, performer, remixer, producer, compiler, album artist, … on Last.FM, which seriously hinders your ability to truly clean up your database.

    - Take remixes: how to tag them? For original performer? What about those remixes where the original is mauled beyond recognition? That’s surely more the work of the remixer, no? Solution: double artistry! (works for mashups as well.)

    - Classical music: always the sore point of Fast.FM. Let’s face it, J.S. is nót “on tour.” Why not give performer credits (and pages) to Glenn Gould and composer credits to J.S.? Double artistry!

    - However, then you’ve got urban music, where the producer is usually the composer, and the artist is just some hot chick cooing over the track. Then again, if it’s just the guys behind the screens making all the music, don’t they deserve our attention (and scrobbles)? By applying this rule systematically, you could very well revolutionize our approach to popular music. (I’m not kidding.)

    As long as you don’t increase the “intelligence” of your system, you’re gonna remain stuck, no matter how much auto-correct you apply. Give a man auto-tune, and he’ll sing for a day. Give a man singing lessons…

    Arhielanto – 1 February, 11:28
  162. Orange-Minz
    1 February, 12:08

    many, many THX!!!

    Orange-Minz – 1 February, 12:08
  163. Chroniz
    1 February, 13:24

    Any change of making seperate option for using either auto-correction for artists or tracks? I wouldn’t want to use it for tracks as it messes some of my soundtrack tracks to use japanese and other to use english letters instead. And if I disable the whole correction thing, it will create two artists (Yasunori Mitsuda in this case) page to my charts instead.

    Not to even mention that many correct track names from not-so-well-known artists will be changed to wrong ones due to “majority rules”.

    Chroniz – 1 February, 13:24
  164. izlesene
    1 February, 14:19

    ty man nice

    izlesene – 1 February, 14:19
  165. Llia
    1 February, 16:30

    Groovy idea, seems to be working ok for me.

    Tiny blip though, DJ Danger Mouse – The Grey Album tracks are being renamed as Jay-Z.

    This is going to take time to get ticking over properly, but the most ambitious projects do. Nice one last.fm darlings, appreciate the hard work.

    Llia – 1 February, 16:30
  166. leoguh
    1 February, 17:12

    I don’t think it’s “majority” rule. Some correct track names were corrected to wrong ones although these were used much more. I vote for every song which I listened to but which wasn’t tagged by Last.fm correctly.
    For example: Трамвайная (Toxic waste mix) (307 plays by 104 listeners)was changed to 09_Трамвайная (Toxic waste mix) (285 plays with 130 listeners) (which is incorrect)

    In whole, a super idea. Must be supported by users to be completely integrated though.

    leoguh – 1 February, 17:12
  167. Oli
    1 February, 19:36

    This has totally made my day.

    Would very much like to see album merging.

    Oli – 1 February, 19:36
  168. Kyzumi
    1 February, 19:38

    Thank you very much for this! It is certainly a huge step in making last.fm a perfect music database website. Now all you need to do is manage to merge all misstaged artists and tracks into one correct tag (I know this is exactly what this post is about but japanese groups still have a lot of trouble with this)

    last.fm really need a moderator that have a lot of experience with japanese music. I know a few that could make it work

    Kyzumi – 1 February, 19:38
  169. Noodle-CAT
    1 February, 19:39

    Complainment: I just noticed that my scrobbles for The Gazette, Miyavi, D’espairsRay and alice nine. were each split in 2 artist with one having a huge amount of plays and the other having like 50-300 scrobbles… xD

    But I still belive in your tech ;)
    This will work soon, I hope ;)

    Noodle-CAT – 1 February, 19:39
  170. martin-klida
    1 February, 22:17

    hi, thx for all that fantastic job which you do

    please fix The Connels’ ’74-‘75 or 74 – 75 or 74/75 and so on into one track

    as a result of fixing I have differences in data on my profile, library and charts pages

    m-k

    martin-klida – 1 February, 22:17
  171. Ange_Kaorin
    1 February, 23:23

    I said this in the board, but I’ll repeat it in here, too….:

    Somehow, I’m liking it. I had the romanized name of a Taiwanese artist from the times Winamp couldn’t show Chinese characters and now that it can (or when I use iTunes), I was wishing to have the name of the artist corrected (or redirected). I never wanted to rename the artist name coz it’s would be “doubled”.
    And it’s also correcting the songs of the artist, which is good. So thanx.

    However… There are some songs that aren’t correcting themselves, so I went to the song page and then went to the “suggest correction” part. When I enter the name of the song in Chinese characters and press submit, it shows the OK dialog like this:

    http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/982/dibujoca8.jpg

    See? Looks like no title has been submitted, as if I’ve done a blank submission.

    Now I’ve gone to those tracks and yes, it says I already submitted a name for it, but the name is blank!

    Any idea? Fix?

    Thanx ;)

    Ange_Kaorin – 1 February, 23:23
  172. DopefishJustin
    2 February, 01:34

    FUCKING FINALLY

    that is all

    DopefishJustin – 2 February, 01:34
  173. metalmagi
    2 February, 01:52

    This really screws up my charts.

    metalmagi – 2 February, 01:52
  174. LavenderYuki
    2 February, 02:29

    it messed up my library for sure. have you guys forgotten about the Asian music listeners? most of us had no problem tagging the artists in roman because it will redirect to the original Asian writings. now that trick won’t work anymore and we either have to re-tag all our music, or to ignore it.

    i still believe in you guys for solving this kind of problem.

    LavenderYuki – 2 February, 02:29
  175. sheepwithblogs
    2 February, 03:35

    For all of the spelling corrections I’ve tried to make today, I get the error “We’re sorry, but we couldn’t find that track,” even when I’ve copied the information directly from a Last.fm track page. Not terribly useful.

    sheepwithblogs – 2 February, 03:35
  176. sheepwithblogs
    2 February, 03:38

    … that came out snarkier than I intended. I’m really excited about auto-correction cleaning up charts, which is why it’s so annoying that making suggestions for incorrect tracks isn’t working properly.

    sheepwithblogs – 2 February, 03:38
  177. kat
    2 February, 05:01

    love the new correcting feature – but the irony of the fact that the word MISSPELLED is misspelled isn’t lost on me. can this please be fixed??

    “Is this artist name wrong or misspelt? Suggest a correction.”

    it’s not “spelt” – spelt is a type of grain. thanks :D

    kat – 2 February, 05:01
  178. ladyrevania
    2 February, 05:48

    I turned that off, because it changed some of my 동방신기 songs to 東方神起 . This is the same artist, why isn’t it merged?

    ladyrevania – 2 February, 05:48
  179. Naddie
    2 February, 05:53

    I think this is great for certain artists, but it doesn’t always work right for foreign artists – there are so many ways to romanize the artists’ names, plus some of the artists have different names in different countries (e.g. Tohoshinki in Japan, DBSK in Korea, etc) and thus have different spellings/languages…

    And some of the changes don’t make much sense, like how Lamp is changed to Lamb. They’re completely different artists, and Lamp shouldn’t be redirected to Lamb.

    Anyway, as you all have said this is still the early stage, but as you guys go along I’ll hope you’ll manage to correct most things :) The correction also depends on the users, so please to people who loves to “flag” the artists’ names wrongly, check the correct spelling or whatever at the official artists’ websites.

    Just my 2 cents.

    Naddie – 2 February, 05:53
  180. PianoInBush
    2 February, 06:14

    well, this is a great update.. but please help me with this: a bunch of misspelled artists that used to automatically redirect to the correct names, now don’t. for example, it now scrobbles “Adam & The Ants” instead of “Adam and the Ants” and it doesn’t transform my Weird Al Yankovic to “Weird Al” Yankovic anymore :(

    PianoInBush – 2 February, 06:14
  181. Alex K.
    2 February, 07:16

    I should really read what everyone has said before writing. But its really late now.

    I LOVE this new setting! But I do spend a lot of time adding: (artist name here “Cover”) to all songs that need it. And the auto-spelling takes it OFF completely, so I turned it OFF instead, thank you! =)

    If that’s fixed in the future I’ll turn it on.

    And thumbs up for Data merging in the future!

    Alex K. – 2 February, 07:16
  182. Claudio
    2 February, 08:36

    This is a great feature, thanks a lot. The only problem I see so far is that some of the auto-corrected song names are not related to any album so, when I play this song, I don’t see the right album cover. I suspect this can cause the album statistics to be wrong then.

    For instance, playing Rush’s “Freeze (Part IV Of ‘Fear’)” autocorrects to “Freeze (Part IV Of “Fear”)”, but the latter is not part of the “Vapor Trails” album, whereas the former is.

    Can we apply this autocorrection to the tracks in the albums as well?

    Claudio – 2 February, 08:36
  183. Theo
    2 February, 12:29

    it seems that i lost a lot of plays for all artists from ethiopia kidané, mekurya bahta gebre heywet etc because of redirecting for instants I had over 40 plays for Mulatu Astatqé now only about 8 how is this possible?

    Theo – 2 February, 12:29
  184. greg233
    2 February, 14:49

    Amazing ! Any news concerning your fingerprint with aac ? (it could be pretty good with my itunes…

    greg233 – 2 February, 14:49
  185. Swordfish
    2 February, 18:42

    I get a red exclamation point (top right) when I click “Submit”. Also, the box doesn’t close. What’s wrong?

    Screenshot:

    Swordfish – 2 February, 18:42
  186. film izle
    2 February, 19:05

    … that came out snarkier than I intended. I’m really excited about auto-correction cleaning up charts, which is why it’s so annoying that making suggestions for incorrect tracks isn’t working properly.

    film izle – 2 February, 19:05
  187. skaldii
    2 February, 20:16

    Why all my “Morning Musume” autocorrects to “morning musume” (http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/morning+musume)? o_O It isn’t redirecting it. Before it has redirected them as モーニング娘。

    But still, this is a great change. I find it too troublesome to write artists’ names in Japanese in my Windows Media Player and this is auto-correcting them for me.

    skaldii – 2 February, 20:16
  188. skaldii
    2 February, 20:26

    I noticed that it’s adding them as モーニング娘。 music but it doesn’t show “morning musume” as “モーニング娘。” in the Recently Listened Tracks. o_O

    skaldii – 2 February, 20:26
  189. Fiona
    3 February, 02:51

    I’m quite happy with the change, but then mine are mostly those like Trentemoller where I can’t be bothered with the diacritics. :)

    Fiona – 3 February, 02:51
  190. TheoW
    3 February, 05:54

    Will this eventually fix things that have been already scrobbled? If you look at the Smith’s page, you would see that “How Soon is Now(?)” should be #1. Will it work to correct that?

    TheoW – 3 February, 05:54
  191. humanzz
    3 February, 08:28

    You guys really rock. But you still have a lot of issues when it comes to non-english artists and songs.

    What I would really love is for non-english artists and tracks to have 2 names, one in english, and one in its native language.

    This can resolve a lot of issues and really help make things better for those of us who listen to non-english music

    humanzz – 3 February, 08:28
  192. Mo
    3 February, 11:39

    O_o

    http://www.last.fm/music/Sonic+Youth/_/Silver+Rocket+(live) redirects to http://www.last.fm/music/Sonic+Youth/_/%27Cross+the+Breeze

    that’s pure surrealism.

    Mo – 3 February, 11:39
  193. GTStar
    3 February, 12:41

    I checked my library completely by now and linked all “wrong” artists to the right one.

    What I still miss is the possibility to assign a song to two or more artists. That would be a solution for all those “vs.”, “&”, “and”, “with” and so on ;)

    GTStar – 3 February, 12:41
  194. pdh1978
    3 February, 14:00

    This was working great for me, until last night I played Cat Power’s Ramblin’ (Wo)man, which automatically corrects to the (far less scrobbled!) Ramblin’ Man.

    As Zephirnl suggests above, can we have some method of choosing which corrections to accept? For example, perhaps when the green flower (great!) appears on the ‘Recently Listened Tracks’, we could click on it and receive some 4-5 suggestions as to which track we actually want to be scrobbling?

    pdh1978 – 3 February, 14:00
  195. TruckOSaurus
    3 February, 15:05

    I’ve been waiting for a while for a system like this.

    The main draw for me was that I could finally re-tag all my Pink songs to P!nk since they would be merged in my library. But to my great surprise, P!nk tracks are not auto-corrected! I don’t see why since I don’t think any of the songs of the Japanese band share their name with P!nk tracks.

    TruckOSaurus – 3 February, 15:05
  196. Arkady
    3 February, 17:13

    Now we have many problems with wrong redirects =/

    Arkady – 3 February, 17:13
  197. ZenDude
    3 February, 23:47

    After using this for a week I give you 2 thumbs up! There are some hiccups here and there but my experience with finding new and obscure songs has been very good! I look forward to even better data in the future.

    ZenDude – 3 February, 23:47
  198. Eric
    4 February, 00:41

    I’m not getting the “did you mean XX” thing on a lot of the things it’s renaming on me. For example, “Stephen and the Colberts” has no “Did you mean Stephen Colbert?” even though it (incorrectly) renames it. Same for “Jonathan Coulton & GlaDOS”.

    Eric – 4 February, 00:41
  199. Toppot
    4 February, 00:54

    I love this feature, you have done a great job of cleaning up my data and I love you for it. This feature is hugely useful to existing members (the longer/more scrobbled the more useful) but this will also help keep new members and future data clean.

    Toppot – 4 February, 00:54
  200. Logan
    4 February, 05:48

    It’s unfortunate that the way I had to find out about this fantastic development was by having a track corrected that shouldn’t have been, but I’m sure it will improve over time. Overall I’m very excited, this was a very necessary feature.

    Logan – 4 February, 05:48
  201. fos
    4 February, 08:28

    I think auto-corrected is fine, but I don’t like to see traditional Chinese being redirected to simplified Chinese.
    Using what kind of Chinese characters is about personal custom not misspelling.

    fos – 4 February, 08:28
  202. greygoo
    4 February, 09:28

    For me personally this new feature, the way it works right now, does more harm than good. So i’ve turned it off, for now.

    Yesterday i was listening to the ‘Harold Budd & Brian Eno – Ambient 2’ album. That artist has previously always been redirected to ‘Harold Budd/Brian Eno’, which is fine and correct. Now i started listening and the first tracks were just like before redirected to ‘Harold Budd/Brian Eno’, but then some tracks on the album were redirected to simply ‘Brian Eno – track title’, which is wrong.

    I should just change my tags to ‘Harold Budd/Brian Eno’, but that doesn’t change the fact that the auto-correction completely messes up in this particular example.

    On the plus side: a few alternate/incorrect scrobbles of tracks were merged with the correct ones in my charts, but that’s it.

    I’m leaving this OFF until it becomes more interactive.

    greygoo – 4 February, 09:28
  203. De_Lemming
    4 February, 13:39

    A pity the new system doesn’t handle incorrect case…
    I clicked the “Suggest a correction” link for Ken Ishii: EXTRA, and entered “Extra”. The system responded with “you voted for EXTRA”…

    De_Lemming – 4 February, 13:39
  204. GodShowMeMagic
    4 February, 22:26

    @ Kat

    Misspelt is correct in Britain, American English uses misspelled but British English uses misspelt. Last.fm is UK-based so that’s why they are using the British spelling! (They also spell colour not color…) :)

    GodShowMeMagic – 4 February, 22:26
  205. andrea25
    4 February, 22:52

    thanks last.fm!
    this is the best site improvement ever!!
    :D

    andrea25 – 4 February, 22:52
  206. polyrhythm
    5 February, 14:51

    This has really spoilt my last.fm experience.

    I am a fan of foreign music, and all of my artists in my music library are written in the the English forms, and it would redirect to it’s actual name in it’s own language. Since the auto-correction has been implemented, the English and the Non-English name have been split (rather than redirected, which most were originally), which just gives me the choice to either, rename all my artists to their original names (to my confusion), or have it spelt the English way and scrobbled towards the new page, which I think takes away from the whole ‘community’ aspect of each artist page if they’re split. Not to mention it will completely mess up my library.

    I’ll more than likely turn off my scrobbling feature on my foreign artists until this is fixed. I really hope this is fixed ASAP.

    polyrhythm – 5 February, 14:51
  207. Juniorain
    5 February, 15:30

    Ok, how can we send incorrect titles to be merged into correct titles? There should be already a form in song pages for doing so.

    So far I’ve had a good time with many corrected tracks that ghosted my experience since the early days.

    Juniorain – 5 February, 15:30
  208. halahup
    5 February, 17:17

    I made my comment here -http://www.last.fm/user/halahup/journal/2009/02/05/2gligz_spelling_correction. I hope someone reads it.

    halahup – 5 February, 17:17
  209. Law
    6 February, 05:06

    Stop doing cool stuff! :D

    Law – 6 February, 05:06
  210. Allison
    6 February, 07:03

    this is cool. just irks me a in few places.
    Like the track Stubborn Man by The Old Ceremony (which doesn’t come out until next week) gets auto-turned into Get to Love by the same band, which is on the 2007 release, and I’m worried that a band so unknown my charts will not ever be right because of it.

    Allison – 6 February, 07:03
  211. GTStar
    6 February, 14:42

    @halahup:
    Yes, you are right. And I hope that this problem can be fixed by using the fingerprints of the songs. With those it should be easy to differentiate between two connatural songs and two identical songs.

    GTStar – 6 February, 14:42
  212. jarvo86
    6 February, 21:22

    @Juniorain: There’s a “Is this track name wrong or misspelt? Suggest a correction” link on the right of every artist and track page.

    jarvo86 – 6 February, 21:22
  213. Diogo Sousa
    7 February, 10:17

    There seems to be a certain amount of uncertainty regarding bands that don’t start with a “The” like Constantines or Goo Goo Dolls. They keep getting corrected to “The Constantines” for instance.
    The other way around is also true. Gossip isn’t the same as The Gossip.

    Diogo Sousa – 7 February, 10:17
  214. nocius
    8 February, 03:18

    It’s helpful for some artists, for other artists, it simply kills everything.

    Best example is probably the artist ‘Nintendo’. Now that’s not an artist, it’s an artist as much as Universal Music Group or Sony BMG would be an artist. It’s not an artist. And many of my scrobbles get merged there. That’s not really satisfying.

    nocius – 8 February, 03:18
  215. BrooklynWHAT
    8 February, 07:44

    You guys are killing me w/ the Ghostface/Ghostface Killah thing.

    the CORRECT tag is Ghostface Killah. i mean really, its on all his albums except one. its on his Wikipedia page. its on everything.

    Death to Ghostface. Long Live Ghostface Killah.

    And thats just one issue. I honestly think the site would be better w/o Autocorrecting. At least I’d have control over my stats and artist which Last.fm has royally messed up.

    BrooklynWHAT – 8 February, 07:44
  216. Metalunderground138
    8 February, 11:04

    Metadata Smetamata…. let’s work on the basics first like normalizing the tracks in my recommended radio.

    Metalunderground138 – 8 February, 11:04
  217. Dennis
    8 February, 15:59

    Last.fm suddenly became ~110% better. Wow, congratulations, thank you and happi tiem!

    Dennis – 8 February, 15:59
  218. johnny7
    8 February, 16:50

    Strange problem just appeared for me (it was fine till now):

    http://www.lastfm.de/music/+noredirect/Negura+Bunget
    http://www.lastfm.de/music/Negurã+Bunget
    http://www.lastfm.de/music/Negură+Bunget

    1) The simplified version I have in my tags.
    2) totally wrong
    3) correct

    The site from 1 links to 2, but I still listen to tracks from 1 (see my recent plays list). And why doesn’t everything link to 3 like from the beginning of the new feature?

    johnny7 – 8 February, 16:50
  219. alvareo
    8 February, 17:12

    This. feature. sucks. Was promising, but it sucks. I’ve OBVIOUSLY disabled it, as any sane peron would do. Discuss: http://www.last.fm/forum/21713/_/498554/

    alvareo – 8 February, 17:12
  220. androidodo
    8 February, 18:56

    make this feature to auto-correct album names too!

    androidodo – 8 February, 18:56
  221. EricMc
    8 February, 20:18

    I’m glad this feature has been added, however, If I play a song such as “Brightest (Acoustic)” it auto-corrects it to the regular version, “Brightest”. I would like it if it wouldn’t change my Acoustic or Alternate Versions of songs to the regular version. I’d like it to track my plays of each different version of the song rather than making it look like I have been listening to the same version of the song when I have not.

    EricMc – 8 February, 20:18
  222. naotko
    9 February, 00:29

    Excellent! last.fm just spotted a Misspellted:) word from CDDB. Keep up tweaking!

    naotko – 9 February, 00:29
  223. Herman
    9 February, 07:02

    This feature looked promising, but pruning your library to get rid of “new” added tracks by artists not auto-corrected is a pain in the arse. Its pretty close to ruining an otherwise pleasant lastfm experience.

    Herman – 9 February, 07:02
  224. IQ-TyQe
    9 February, 08:10

    About “flag this”

    so it looks something like this:

    “What’s wrong?
    ………………………………….
    [option 1] ABCDE is a valid track.

    [option 2] ABCDE should link to [choose]
    ………………………………….”

    Isn’t this a little ambigous?

    I get the impression that it is the wrong option that I should pick.
    It’s the title “What’s wrong”. It could be unclear for some whether this refers to:
    1)the option choice
    2)to the general idea that there are a number of names for the artist (and one needs to be chosen for the site)

    Give this, I reckon that in the first case people would be supposed to pick out the wrong option, while in the second case, which I believe is the case, we select the correct statement.

    IQ-TyQe – 9 February, 08:10
  225. BennyBunny
    9 February, 09:24

    thanks for merging!

    BennyBunny – 9 February, 09:24
  226. John
    9 February, 10:12

    That was long expected, and so far doesn’t disappoint! Congrats, last.fm coderz!

    John – 9 February, 10:12
  227. Domify
    10 February, 03:42

    I like the auto-correction, but every now and then, the artists seem to unmerge, leaving me with two spellings of a band. I’d really love a feature to just rename an artist in our library to one of its suggested spellings.

    Domify – 10 February, 03:42
  228. johnny7
    10 February, 17:34

    Well, the good directions were undone now, I listen to Negurã Bunget (actually Negură Bunget).

    And there are still many different versions for one song:
    Ulver – Capitel I: I Troldskog faren vild
    Ulver – Capitel 1: I Troldskog faren vild
    Ulver – Chapter I: I Troldskog faren vild
    Ulver – I Troldskog faren vild
    Ulver – Lost in the enchanted forest

    and so on… everything’s the same song.

    The idea is great, continue improving and doing it! And please do the same with albums afterwards.

    johnny7 – 10 February, 17:34
  229. Mxbnr
    10 February, 20:26

    hey it stoped working, an artist that i have changed their name by taking out an exclamation mark, and for a while it did change and put them under on name, but today it separated them, again. Is there a way to make them merge again.

    Mxbnr – 10 February, 20:26
  230. Sashka78
    11 February, 00:09

    Is there an option to remember spelling settings for a particular artist/song?

    Sashka78 – 11 February, 00:09
  231. DopefishJustin
    11 February, 00:28

    One issue I’m noticing: I have several tracks in my library with only one listener (me) because I’ve tagged them idiosyncratically for one reason or another; I’ve been a good little user and gone through and voted for the proper track names, but they haven’t been autocorrected.

    Example:
    http://www.last.fm/music/Paprika/_/Hashiru+Mono
    to
    http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/%E5%B9%B3%E6%B2%A2%E9%80%B2/_/%E8%B5%B0%E3%82%8B%E8%80%85

    I guess one vote is not considered enough to trigger an autocorrection, so it’s waiting for more confirmation. But since I’m the only one who’s ever scrobbled this track, it’s probably going to be waiting forever. I think in the case where there is only one listener for the track and that listener has voted to redirect it, that vote should be assigned a greater weight.

    DopefishJustin – 11 February, 00:28
  232. ups
    11 February, 15:24

    This is great! I was really hoping for this to come to last.fm!

    Just one request: Make a list of songs and artists that were automatically corrected in on my scrobled tracks.

    I would like to come back to the site and check what artists have the wrong name and then correct them on my library. So far, it only warns the user on the main page.

    ups – 11 February, 15:24
  233. Juniorain
    12 February, 04:43

    The auto corrector is acting freaky now, I corrected the names I was scrobbling wrongly and now some songs names have been doubled! (Firstly it wasn’t doubled, but I changed the name to not receive the green thing after the song anymore)

    Some songs turned back to normal too, and I don’t know if some low-user scrobbled songs will ever be merged.

    Juniorain – 12 February, 04:43
  234. Robson
    12 February, 18:48

    I suspect this is going to cause lots of staff related headaches and that there’s a huge backlog of stuff that you need to look at now, like you WANTED to triple your workload overnight. But it’s still a worthwhile feature. Maybe reinstate a group of auto-mods who can share the load for you?

    Robson – 12 February, 18:48
  235. Marty McFly
    12 February, 20:54

    With this correction, last.fm will be only with one or two mistakes left. And these mistakes vary between “mistake” and “good thing” from different points of view. I mean old last.fm, but only in graphical style. To make page take less than 1MB of data, I think it’s just too much, isn’t it ? But it’s minor thing, I somehow did used to this. So with these corrections, last.fm will be flawless. And it’s great, isn’t it ?

    So people, sing along, “Long live last.fm”

    Marty McFly – 12 February, 20:54
  236. Jon Dye
    13 February, 07:48

    My artist name has a “.” at the end of it. So does my url. This poses problems when trying to post a link within a site (such as last.fm) where the html address is automatically converted to a link. The site assumes the “.” isn’t part of the link, therefore leading you to a nonexistent page. Is there any way to correct this? Perhaps a redirect would be in order? How do I set that up or is it only automatic at this point?

    Jon Dye – 13 February, 07:48
  237. Tom
    13 February, 11:49

    hi there, I found wrong correction. I listened song and it was auto-corrected to another song from this artist. Is it posible to tell it to someone?

    I mean this song:
    http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/Abbott%2B%2526%2BChambers/_/Where+Are+You+(Karl+G+Dub)

    Tom – 13 February, 11:49
  238. SAOPP
    13 February, 16:02

    A very interesting feature. But! Too many errors in her work, some artists do not display correctly, but sorry :(

    SAOPP – 13 February, 16:02
  239. oters
    13 February, 16:05

    it’s really great that you’ve made this system of redirection, good idea, but seems that it doesn’t work at all in case of this artist.
    check this, please

    http://www.last.fm/search?q=1.5&m=artists

    these are all pages of one band, there are like about 40 of incorrect spellings and none of them redirects to the correct one. what’s wrong with it?

    thanks.

    oters – 13 February, 16:05
  240. kadınca
    13 February, 18:11

    I’m quite happy with the change, but then mine are mostly those like Trentemoller where I can’t be bothered with the diacritics. :)

    kadınca – 13 February, 18:11
  241. chenmy
    14 February, 15:24

    I’m not quite sure how you guys are going to implement this, but there is a serious flaw when it comes to auto-correcting Chinese songs. Many, or most Chinese songs are named either in “traditional” or “simplified” Chinese script and the individual listener is either going to prefer all “simplified” or all “traditional”. Your current set up will make things extremely inconsistent for users who listen to a lot of Chinese songs.

    I imagine the same will be true for users of Japanese and other Asian scripts.

    chenmy – 14 February, 15:24
  242. wmwymer
    15 February, 19:59

    Thank you thank you thank you! I love last.fm! There are only a few things that have bothered me and this was the main thing. I sing your praises/spread the word constantly. I should be on your PR team. Keep up the good work!

    wmwymer – 15 February, 19:59
  243. KillyMXI
    16 February, 22:17

    Wery annoying mistake with this artist:
    姫神 – Himekami – HIMEKAMI

    It sets HIMEKAMI as english spelling for 姫神, but also HIMEKAMI redirected to Himekami and Himekami redirected to 姫神 aka HIMEKAMI.

    Kind of vicious circle. All these need to be merged. But current suggesting system is kinda limited to make this.

    KillyMXI – 16 February, 22:17
  244. kamaron
    17 February, 06:36

    i didn’t find where to get help.. or to send an email, so if someone can help me i will be thankful

    once i entered into a friend’s profile that was on french.. and since then… when i open my profile… its on french… even if i change to spanish… if i close the browser and open it again… guess what??

    french

    kamaron – 17 February, 06:36
  245. Davi
    17 February, 16:30

    In my Recently Listened Tracks in my profile I got some “green star” labeled tracks, which are automatically corrected by last.fm. Can I get the complete list, so I can try to correct my mp3 tags?

    Davi – 17 February, 16:30
  246. Helmet Hairdo
    18 February, 04:28

    Both CCR and Creedence now redirect to Creedence Clearwater Revival! Good job! :-)

    Helmet Hairdo – 18 February, 04:28
  247. kuukabarra
    19 February, 21:49

    Last.fm fixed some of my misspelt artist names, e.g. Julien Doré instead of Julien or merged mia with M.I.A.
    I was quite happy because my library was much cleaner and the statistics were more true… But now all of these changes are gone and everything is the way it was before. Why? I haven´t changed the settings or anything…

    kuukabarra – 19 February, 21:49
  248. sindlarv
    20 February, 12:22

    It’s great, thanks! There’s still one glitch for me, though. Your new system does not handle incorrect case. An example follows: In my native language it is incorrect to spell “Už Jsme Doma” with all words uppercased. It should be “Už jsme doma” instead. By entering correct name, however, the system responded with “you voted for Už Jsme Doma” :-/

    sindlarv – 20 February, 12:22
  249. DJ Dain
    21 February, 00:41

    Eagerly awaiting a new blog post denying/discrediting the article about you guys supposedly handing over user scrobller info to the RIAA: http://is.gd/ki7M

    DJ Dain – 21 February, 00:41
  250. zerofixity
    21 February, 03:19

    This is a nice feature. However, auto-correct should be available to turn on and off on a per-song basis, instead of altogether.

    zerofixity – 21 February, 03:19
  251. Domify
    21 February, 19:38

    I’d like if the auto-correction merged all the individual cast plays for musicals and made it the musical’s name. The top albums charts get completely messed up, and it causes for too much confusion.

    Domify – 21 February, 19:38
  252. DJ Gapless
    21 February, 21:25

    @DJ Dain:

    Here you go, dude: http://www.p2pnet.net/story/18571

    DJ Gapless – 21 February, 21:25
  253. hedfones
    22 February, 06:21

    The auto-correction feature is totally broken. Approximately 10% of all of my songs are being submitted incorrectly and there doesn’t seem to be a damned thing I can do about it. I mean, since when did the studio version of the Who’s “My Generation” suddenly become live? I own a large portion of my music collection legally and if you can’t trust what’s written on the CD case then what’re we going to do?

    I can’t describe how maddening this is. It honestly makes me what to quit using the service (even though it’s free) because my songs aren’t even being cataloged correctly. If this new “feature” isn’t the Last.fm team’s top priority of fixing then the entire service needs to be disabled.

    hedfones – 22 February, 06:21
  254. johnny7
    22 February, 17:25

    I think most people share one opinion:

    - The general idea of a system correcting spelling mistakes is great. It has to be done for artists, titles and albums too (!).

    - Most issues seem to be quite clear:
    Gluck should link to Glück, Trentmoller to Trentemøller.

    - Aside from this, there are many links which are just sh*t:
    Intro should not link to the opener track or whatever, if there is a separated intro on the cd. A live version shouldn’t link to the studio version.
    I also already saw some correct versions linking to a wrong one even though the wrong one was obviously wrong and even though the wrong one had not more than five listeners.

    I wonder what’s so difficult about finding the correct name for a track. It’s just on the backcover of a cd isn’t it? And most of the time, you can find it on Musicbrainz too. So what does LastFM wrong when it is linked to so many wrong versions? Is it because of the votes?

    I don’t know how exactly you calculate the links with votes and Musicbrainz and so on but there have to be changed something. I actually trust in the users’ votes, but if they are responsible for the sh*t which is appearing, then better focus on Musicbrainz.

    And if the links seem to work overall, please merge the sites. Thank you.

    johnny7 – 22 February, 17:25
  255. miwa201
    23 February, 21:29

    The option for auto correcting spelling is turned on for me but it won’t work. I tried misspelling a track on purpose and it didn’t change. Like I had The Killers’ track Bling (Confessions of a King) labeled like that before there was the spelling option, when it shouldn’t have the s in Confessions. After a while it did change to just Confession but a few days ago I noticed that it was back to Confessions even though the option was still on. I hope this was clear enough. Anyone know why?

    miwa201 – 23 February, 21:29
  256. Sean
    27 February, 17:08

    I like the auto correction feature, even though it’s not perfect, I can only assume it’ll get better over time. It’s a HUGE improvement over doing nothing at all. It totally frustrates me, that I have the same music as friends, but some of them have incorrect tags, so we don’t always match up, even though we do.

    Today though, I noticed it seems to be off and anything previously auto corrected is now spelled wrong.

    Sean – 27 February, 17:08
  257. Kain Haart
    2 March, 09:05

    What version of «Guns N’ Roses – Knockin’ On Heavens Door» is considered to be correct now? :))

    Kain Haart – 2 March, 09:05
  258. ICQ
    3 March, 08:27

    This feature looked promising, but pruning your library to get rid of “new” added tracks by artists not auto-corrected is a pain in the arse. Its pretty close to ruining an otherwise pleasant lastfm experience

    ICQ – 3 March, 08:27
  259. Ljubomir
    3 March, 17:44

    I know it is possible to turn off the auto-corrections completely, but do you consider introducing an option to turn them off partially? That is to say, letting the users decide for themselves which artists they want to be merged in their libraries? I.e. make the corrections manual, instead of automatic?
    Or at least can you tell me where can I suggest new corrections? I have already voted on the respective artist and song pages, but with no effect.

    Ljubomir – 3 March, 17:44
  260. Cihan
    8 March, 05:51

    Hey. I just registered a few days ago, love the site though the unique pages created for some tracks I listen to is a bit of a pain, though I understand you guys are working on this problem.

    I dont know if this is important or not but I’ve noticed that tracks I have with whoever’s featured on the song in square brackets, tend to get their own unique pages more. Does the database just not like square brackets?

    Because otherwise the track I listen to is spelt exactly the same way as the more established track page with lots of plays and listeners, except that page has whoever’s featured in rounded brackets.

    Cihan – 8 March, 05:51
  261. Margo
    8 March, 17:49

    Will this eventually include venues and events as well? There are so many duplicates.

    Example:
    this event

    and this event

    Margo – 8 March, 17:49
  262. Lars
    10 March, 10:44

    I play the last.fm radio a lot and not infrequently some track comes up incorrectly labelled. (Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire plays a live version of Money (That’s what I want)). In the radio player there is no way to indicate to you that there is something wrong. One has to leave the radio and then go to the track page, which I never get around to doing. So my my question, or suggestion, would be if it would be possible to have the flagging function in the radio player as well.

    Lars – 10 March, 10:44

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