[UPDATE]
Phew, so we’ve received >1 million fingerprints so far.. not bad for the first 24hrs. The most fingerprints submitted by a single user is 12,203. I’m sure that record won’t stand for long tho :)
The ‘server overloaded’ message should be silenced now. We are currently receiving ~42 fingerprints per second.
More news to follow tomorrow.
[/UPDATE]
The veteran Scrobblers amongst you will probably remember our “moderation system” – this was a user-voting system that let you propose and merge artists, ultimately fixing misspelled artists by creating aliases to the correct version.
We are planning to bring this back in a big way, addressing not only artists, but albums and tracks too.
We don’t want to have to vote on the really obvious stuff (“01 – Radiohead”), so we are going to do as much as possible automatically, with various algorithms and data mining tricks. The entries we can’t be 100% sure about, and the remaining stuff, will again be thrown open to a public vote.
Phase 1 is now underway with the first public “beta” release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint. For now, all that it does is send the fingerprint data to bootstrap the moderation system. This doesn’t change any MP3 files on your computer. It does send useful fingerprint data to our moderation system so we can get the ball rolling. If you have a big MP3 collection, it will take a while… Thankfully it remembers where it got to, so you don’t have to do it all in one session.
Grab the fingerprinting app and let it scan your MP3 collection:
Download for:
Windows
Mac OS X
Linux .deb
Source code
What we’ll do next is figure out all the popular (mis)spellings for tracks with the same fingerprints. We will publish lots of stats, example data and graphs showing our progress as the fingerprint database grows in the coming weeks. We need people with MP3 collections (of any size/quality) to download and run the fingerprinter to make this work, so spread the word.
Remember, you don’t need to clean up your ID3 tags before running the fingerprint app: This time round, people with imperfect tags are actually going to be of some use to us, and don’t deserve all the terrible things we normally wish on them ;)
Download the app, and watch this space for lots of stats and graphs detailing our findings in the coming days and weeks!
RJ
Comments
Nectar_Card
29 August, 16:22
Can you give us some reassurance about the privacy of the data we submit with this app?
christiand
29 August, 16:22
Nice to see such interesting things happening at last.fm.
Are there any issues with fingerprinting and DRM’ed files?
Sean
29 August, 16:26
Curious as to why you have to provide the program with your last.fm login, doesn’t seem like the data really needs to be user specific to serve its function.
Russ
29 August, 16:26
@Nectar_Card: The fingerprinting client only submits the fingerprint and your metadata, nothing else. This is pretty much the same as scrobbling, privacy-wise. All we know is that you have that particular file.
@christiand: The client won’t be able to read DRMed files, so we won’t be able to fingerprint them.
elias
29 August, 16:26
Christiand, the current version cannot handle DRM’ed file. I actually doubt we will ever have a version that works with DRM’ed files. I would strongly recommend not to buy DRM’ed files :-)
Macca
29 August, 16:31
Interesting idea, nice.
However, this release for OSX doesn’t appear to allow me to select a drive other than the boot disk. Symbolic linked folders don’t work either so I can’t scan my MP3 collection which is on an external drive…
(Unless of course i’m being retarded, which is quite possible.)
Oh, and the FAQ page (Under Help/FAQ) is empty.. =D
chris
29 August, 16:32
The current version doesn’t appear to support external discs on Mac OS X.
Russ
29 August, 16:32
@Sean: We record your username in order to prevent abuse of the system, and also to ensure uniqueness of the fingerprints we get.
As I mentioned before, all this system does is let us know what music you have, which is the same as scrobbling does.
Tae
29 August, 16:32
There’s no version for QT3?
Max Howell
29 August, 16:33
chris: yeah sorry dude. We’re looking into that one as we speak.
RJ
29 August, 16:34
Yeah seems like it doesn’t support external disks on the mac (wtf, some QT bug?). We’ll update this post when we have a fix.
christiand
29 August, 16:44
@elias: it seemed like a necessary evil at the time, wait for a cd to ship or instant 1 click gratification… luckily it’s only two albums.
but does this audio fingerprinting mean we’ll see the addition of content based recommendation at last.fm in the future?
breun
29 August, 16:48
Almost all of my files are in AAC (.m4a) format, which I ripped from my own cd’s. Looks like you’re not fingerprinting those. Too bad.
d
29 August, 16:49
Umm. Maybe a stupid question: If you have a really well tagged music collection (99+% tagged with MusicBrainz), is the meta data of that collection of any use for you?
Russ
29 August, 16:52
@breun: Yup, I think we only support MP3 at the moment. AAC support shouldn’t be hard though, we’ll look into that at some point.
@d: Yes! We need as many fingerprints as possible with valid metadata in order to work out what metadata is the most correct.
daddsy
29 August, 16:54
I can’t get this program to run on vista…just crashes before it opens. Any ideas why? (I’ve tried compatability modes and running as admin)
nectarine
29 August, 17:02
Are they any plans to expand this eventually so that we can get suggested tags to correct our local files, Musicbrains Picard style?
Jester-NL
29 August, 17:05
The tool tells me that it will have to munch for about 70 hours… I can live with that, but unfortunatly I am not able to minimise it. And it does look a tad untidy, in the middle of my screen…
red_erik
29 August, 17:10
how do I compile the source code; I’m using Slackware so I can’t use the debian package?
for4saken
29 August, 17:11
oh… the good old times ;)
What about using mbid?
Anyway, I’ll give it a try at my “musicbrainz compliant” music collection, hehe.
Max Howell
29 August, 17:14
nectarine: yes, absolutely, how awesome would that be? :)
Jester-NL: sorry about that, indeed, this application is rouhg around the edges, but we were desperate to push it out as soon as possible. I’ll clean it up this week.
red_erik: install Qt4.2 and above, enter source directory, type qmake && make, run from the subdirectory bin/
Enjoy! :)
Max Howell
29 August, 17:15
A new Mac build is up that shows /Volumes. And well. Everything else on your system. Non-ideal but function over form eh? :)
Brad Root
29 August, 17:16
Hi, can you please fix iPod scrobbling, too? Is it too much to ask? I’ll fingerprint all 200gb of my music as long as you fix iPod scrobbling. ;)
Max Howell
29 August, 17:21
Brad: I’ll promise to fix it for the next release if you’ll promise to fingerprint your music. And that you also promise to think of me, hard at work at my London desk, desperately compiling, holding back frustration at shiny strange music laden devices, longing for a cool, light ale, but ignoring the urge so I can finish up the work, and make iPod scrobbling work properly. For the good of mankind.
Brad Root
29 August, 17:23
64 hours until all my music is fingerprinted.
You better get to work, Max!
…or else it gets the hose again!
Macca
29 August, 17:23
Cool, thanks Max. It’s working now.
Is ~6 secs per track really the benchmark?
Seems pretty slow to me! =S
Macca
29 August, 17:25
p.s @Brad – I scrobble my iPod plays fine (most of the time) using the last.fm client on OSX.
Brad Root
29 August, 17:31
@Macca – The Windows client is the one that has recently gone completely haywire for a lot of people when it comes to iPod plays.
http://www.last.fm/forum/34905/_/315141/1
Since shortly before my old 4G died, the Last.FM client only sporadically would detect new plays. For whatever reason the last update seemed to screw it all up. Now, with my new 5.5G iPod, I think I’ve only submitted something like five out of 300 tracks I’ve listened to. Starting yesterday, every time I sync my iPod, the Last.FM client detects it as a new iPod and asks me if I’d like to scrobble it… and yet nothing gets scrobbled. ;(
Sorry, that is off-topic, but I am sad.
Fingerprinter went from 64 hours remaining to saying 55 hours. Now it’s back to 64 hours.
It’s also only using 20-50% of my CPU time. Make it threaded, use both my cores!
Macca
29 August, 17:35
@Brad – argh, that sucks a fat one.
I’ll be sure not to update then…
Max Howell
29 August, 17:36
Brad, we were using both as many cores as you had, but there was some crash bug we didn’t have the guts to fix. If we still need the Fingerprinter in a few weeks, we’ll see if we can fix it for then.
Brad Root
29 August, 17:36
@Macca – I’m pretty sure it’s only a Windows issue. I don’t think you have anything to fear on OSX.
@Max – I sent you guys $3 out of the last $15 I have to my name. <3
HanSolo71
29 August, 17:43
everytime i goto log on to use it it freezes am i doing something wrong cause its using 0-1% of my processor
Jelle
29 August, 17:56
Great initiative, once again!
Kimiko
29 August, 18:10
My music files are all in Ogg Vorbis format. The fingerprinting program keeps asking for MP3 format files. Can you modify the program so it will read Ogg and other formats as well?
And while you’re at it, why not get rid of the Qt frontend? I mean, all it does is process those files and submit the info it extracts, right? No pretty graphical interface is necessary.
Btw, would files that already have MusicBrainz metadata need to be processed too? All my CD tracks have those tags.
muesli
29 August, 18:17
@kimiko: the fingerprinting is going to be implemented in the real client anyways. this is just a test-version to bootstrap the fingerprinting database.
ogg and other file formats will be supported soonish.
cheers,
muesli
Paul
29 August, 18:20
How is this fingerprinting/metadatabase going to relate to MusicBrainz? I know last.fm recently came to an agreement with MusicBrainz. Is this data ultimately going to find its way to musicbrainz? Will the soon to be released web services allow me to resolve a track to an MBID? Is this using the MusicIP fingerprinter? I’ll fingerprint my 1.5TB of music if you answer these questions ;)
gix
29 August, 18:25
Is there any plan to implement a cache into the fingerprinter just like the scrobble-plugins have? At the moment you cannot scan (and submit) if the last.fm-servers are overloaded or not reachable.
pauldwaite
29 August, 18:32
> Can you give us some reassurance about the privacy of the data we submit with this app?
Yeah. If you tell people about my ABA collection, or that I can’t spell “ABBA”, I’ll sue you into the ground.
Kimiko
29 August, 18:36
@muesli: Putting it in the ‘real’ client doesn’t help much because I use Rhythmbox.
elias
29 August, 18:36
Paul, we’ve done some testing, and we weren’t really happy with MusicIP’s fingerprinting service. We want to work together more closely with MusicBrainz and maybe at some point MusicBrainz might even want to switch to the fingerprinter we’re using? It really does a pretty good job and the source code is already out there and the web service will be open. I’m not sure how we will map MusicBrainz IDs to ours, but I’m guessing we could run MusicIP’s finger printer on our music.
Kimiko
29 August, 18:42
Better sort out the MB tag conversion before this thing goes live. People won’t like having to scan their files twice to get essentially the same result.
muesli
29 August, 18:58
elias: we do actually read and submit the musicbrainz id if i remember correctly. also we have mb-ids for most of our stuff serverside.
whatsoever: scanning twice is surely not gonna happen.
Brad Root
29 August, 19:00
2 hours into the fingerprinting (only 600 tracks) and it tells me the servers have crapped out (overloaded) and stops it.
Paul
29 August, 19:07
Thanks Elias – Kimko is spot on … it’d be nice to understand how this is going to fit in with MB up front. I’m guessing there are some folks who wouldn’t mind contributing this kind of data if there’s a guaranteed path to a Musicbrainz ID resolver. If there’s no guarantee, then it starts to feel a bit like CDDB. I may contribute lots of data that someone else gets to use and make money with. Certainly there’s value in cleaning up metadata, but please don’t overlook the tremendous opportunity to create a single, ubiquitous, track-level song ID. Last.fm is now in a very influential position in the industry. I really hope that you will explicitly adopt the MBID and support it in your web services.
Rob Szarka
29 August, 19:07
Do I understand correctly that this app doesn’t modify our files in any way?
Also, my two cents: as far as I’m concerned, not supporting DRMed format is a feature, not a bug; but I do have a growing percentage of my collection in FLAC, as well as some old OGG files.
Nectar_Card
29 August, 19:09
I take it this means MusicBrainz is officially toast?
cubus
29 August, 19:38
I seem to only succeed to fingerprint my local files. My Mac OSX does show all the volumes, and my iPod. But when I try to fingerprint them they don’t get recognized.
cgregs
29 August, 19:53
Spread the word by digging the story for last.fm to get as many people to fingerprint as possible:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Last_fm_does_Audio_Fingerprinting
hawkse
29 August, 19:54
Great initiative indeed!
Any risk that bad data from freedb and other popular meta data services will be so commonly used that they automatically will be considered the norm?
Too bad my collection’s entirely in ogg format. Where will you notify of updates to the software? This thread?
ssundell
29 August, 20:00
Are you going to use the MusicBrainz information when verifying the data? Gathering data isn’t really a democratic process (well, you know that already) and it would be a shame if the amount of work done on the MB regarding wrongly attributed tracks/albums, wrong names, misspellings etc. wasn’t used here.
Norman
29 August, 21:37
Macca: “Is ~6 secs per track really the benchmark? Seems pretty slow to me! =S”
6 seconds is average, but don’t worry: we currently fingerprint the whole track, but on recognition (the part which will eventually go into the client) it needs only 30 seconds of data! :)
swanksalot
29 August, 21:56
What about multiple libraries hosted on different computers (laptop and desktop)? Not identical, but there is certainly overlap. Could have different metadata for the same tracks even (artist, the vs. the artist for instance)
chris
29 August, 23:08
245 GB (only 42,300 files) of music = ~120 hours to fingerprint :(
yowwwch. for the good of the nation, i suppose.
duckworth
30 August, 00:10
About 5 minutes into my rather large collection it started crashing. Oddly I traced it down to a particular file which was also causing problems with another app recently (Simplify Media). In that case it was due to the ID3 tag library they were using. Hope it doesn’t keep choking on the meta data every so often. Well, only 262 hours left to go now ;)
Max Howell
30 August, 00:47
We use taglib, could it be the same lib? These tag reading libraries are never particularly stable it seems :( For the client we should separate it into another process I reckon just to be more stable.
duckworth
30 August, 01:06
Yes, it was taglib. Is there a place to file a bug report? I have a sample file that can reproduce the crash.
Ian
30 August, 02:22
Here’s hoping for clean universal data, a few questions:
Will the all of the analyzed (fingerprint) data be publicly available after you have received it from your community members?
Is there documentation for the source code, what are you analyzing?
Can you explain the reasoning for not using/enhancing/extending MusicBrainz?
Kimiko
30 August, 02:35
@duckworth: taglib bugs go in bugs.kde.org
Rob Szarka
30 August, 04:42
I’ve got 300+ GB of files myself, so I’m sending the badly-tagged stuff first… ;)
I’m wondering, though: does your app send the ID3v1 or ID3v2 tag? Or both? I clean up the v2 tags but often leave the v1 tags whatever eMusic or whomever set them to to assist in tracing where they came from…
Lukáš Lalinský
30 August, 05:21
Speaking of TagLib… the Windows installer and the source code tarball include binaries of my old port of TagLib to Windows, but not the source code. For the sake of LGPL, I think it would be better to fix this.
And while you are on it, you could probably remove the .dmg file from the source tarball. :)
LANjackal
30 August, 07:06
First of all, great job again team. I’m running the app perfectly with no problems at all on Vista Home Premium.
Question: will fingerprinting eventually be folded into the mainline client? Otherwise we would have to repeat the process as more files are added to our libraries, right?
mll
30 August, 08:15
This kind of news, and the (sometimes contradicting) comments, calls for an urgent need to clarify if, how and when last.fm will use MusicBrainz’ data and tools.
ICWeener
30 August, 08:38
How about a Makefile for the non-Debiam linux users. Tried it with Wine but it don’t seem to like the dll’s provided.
hishou
30 August, 08:42
This is great! Hah, I can’t clearly remember if this re-incarnation of the older checks & balances was part of the old AudioScrobbler when I joined [I was a bit daunted by the layout then, but quickly overcome.].
However, knowing music collections as large as mine [& ever growing], I’m quite thankful for it!
I’m positive there’s sure to be sooommme thing that I’ve missed. xP
Thanks much for all the hard work!
I’m still loving AS/Last.FM ;] for well more than 2 years, & those to come.
Jelle
30 August, 09:01
Problem: The Fingerprinter crashes when I try to run it. It “collects files” for about a minute or so, and then I get an error message saying the program crashed.
Salocin
30 August, 09:16
This tool is unusable with big collections unless it implements some sort of cache for times when the servers are overloaded (which they seem to be every 30mins or so).
iten
30 August, 09:43
Couldn’t get the .deb file to work with my 64-bit machine.
However it works fine under my wine v. 0.9.31.
btw: For non-debian users, there is a tool called “alien” available somewhere that will convert it to a rpm or tgz.
Russ
30 August, 09:43
We will be using this in addition to MusicBrainz and our data feeds from labels in order to improve our data. More data sources are better.
Philip Jägenstedt
30 August, 09:51
Nice, I’ve been walking around waiting for something to replace the proprietary MusicIP for a long while. This will only be interesting if it is tied to MusicBrainz though…
oo0oo
30 August, 09:53
Overloaded Servers/Network Error message is received about every thirty seconds for the four times I tried fingerprinting my entire collection.. Trying single albums/folders at a time does the same thing.. Maybe server-side issues could be fixed/amplified before releasing the next client-side fingerprinting upgrade?
Also, along with Jester.NL, a minimization to task bar or system tray option would be great so it can run in the background.. A memory allowance would be nice too down the road.. I understand this is the initial “quick” release and beta.. Great overall idea though.. I’ll try it again another night..
Pointless stuff for developer(s) in case it matters: Using Windows Vista Ultimate with over 50,000 mp3 files (Raid-0/500GB/2 Hard drives + three external drives).. ID3v1 and ID3v2 tagged initially by CDex then re-tagged with TagScanner as are the ones I “share” and “borrow” from SLSK and from free Last.fm mp3s..
Peace..
Russ
30 August, 09:54
Sorry about the “overloaded servers” bug – we ran out of disk space – it should be working again shortly.
RJ
30 August, 10:12
Doh, fixed the fingerprint server. That’s why it’s called “beta” :P
No idea what the client did whilst the server was down, maybe it needs to re-run.
RJ
30 August, 10:16
BTW, to anyone wondering what to do if they have multiple collections (laptop/desktop, home/work etc), I would recommend to just fingerprint it all. Don’t worry about overlap, that’s what the fingerprints are eventually supposed to fix :)
Norman
30 August, 11:11
A quick note on the algorithm: as we specify in the source, it is based on the work of Yan Ke, Derek Hoiem, and Rahul Sukthankar (see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~yke/musicretrieval/).
They’re idea is rather simple: use a computer vision algorithm to identify “patterns” in a (noisy) visual representation of the audio (i.e. spectrogram). The patterns that better discriminate between same/different pairs of songs are found by training a smart machine learning algorithm, and they are codified into binary thresholds, which are then applied to overlapping snippets of the song. Since we have 32 of those threshold, each snippet (2048 frames at ~5kHz) can be summarized into an integer (a key). For about 30 seconds we have about 2500 of those keys, which are sent to our searching service! And.. voila’! Fingerprint is served! ;)
Norman
30 August, 11:18
@Lukáš: Was it your port? Wow, thank you very much, it saved us a lot of troubles (even though, the compilation was kinda tricky)! :)
Can you provide us with an updated link to the source? We would like not to include the source of ALL the libraries we use. :)
muthecow
30 August, 11:24
90% of my music is stored on an external hard drive – it may just be me not being geeky enough but the mac version couldn’t find my external hard drive to fingerprint. just thought i’d let you know.
martind
30 August, 11:35
muthecow, try the latest version. should be fixed now.
Salocin
30 August, 11:41
@RJ
Thanks, that’s much better ;)
Ciarán
30 August, 11:53
Ingenuity at it’s best!
mrhAWK
30 August, 12:07
The font on this blog is unreadable :(
Vlad Rafeyev
30 August, 12:09
I want it to rename my MP3 files and rewrite my tags. If it do so with 50% of my MP3s, I will download the tool
RobotsThink
30 August, 12:10
gr8 work.
but with my loads of music … its so slow. Expected it to be fast enuf :)
maep
30 August, 12:15
proxy support?
Tomas Eriksson
30 August, 12:16
This is awesome! I actually missed the old moderation system, but this seems like a mutch better solution!
I will run it on my macbook as soon as I get home.
David
30 August, 12:19
I have about 1/4 of my music in FLAC? Also, will the fingerprints be able to tell that the fingerprints for different formats are the same song, i.e. ogg and mp3 if you ever add more than mp3? The reason I ask is I have most of one artist in 5.1 24 bit, so I figure the channels will have different fingerprints but it would still be the same song?
Tribaal
30 August, 12:26
how about parallelizing the process? The .deb build seems to spawn only a single thread… Is this a design decision?
Anthony Agius
30 August, 12:26
To fingerprint my 46,205 the app says it will take 128 hours :(
That’s 16 nights if I leave it go overnight!
simon
30 August, 12:44
the last.fm servers are overloaded…
stef
30 August, 12:46
The app crached under latested osx 10.5 seed
Oliver
30 August, 12:48
Would love to help, but as already noted the Mac client doesn’t support external drives.
MaastrichtBiker
30 August, 12:55
I’ve been using musicip’s fingerprinting for over a year now. Their support for FLAC being the main reason.
I’m curious about why you rejected their solution (apart from it being proprietary) and if we can expect FLAC support from you guys anytime soon.
lol
30 August, 13:00
Ill do as many as i can for now, it’s saying it will take 50 hours for 25,000.
CSG
30 August, 13:02
Proxy support required…Also I would like to know how much bandwidth this would take…I have about 5000 songs…
Norman
30 August, 13:14
@David: FLAC and AAC will follow (among others), it’s just about getting the wav data out of the format and that’s why we will NOT support DRM. Regarding different formats, the algorithm is good enough to be format agnostic. Clearly if there is some difference in the music (i.e. a drum or some rearrangements) this will generate different outputs.
Norman
30 August, 13:18
@MaastrichtBiker: we rejected openIP for several reasons:
1. It’s proprietary ;)
2. It needs two minutes of audio data. This is a lot of decoding+processing! Ours will (during detection) only need about 30 seconds of data.
3. It does not seem to be very reliable. Musicbrainz is full of duplicate ids for the same audio.
4. The actual fingerprint recognition is quite slow. It seems fast because they collected a huge database of file hashes!
5. Others.. :)
Don’t get us wrong, we love MusicBrainz and the MusicIP guys. It’s just that we feel our solution works better for what we need.
PocketMumble
30 August, 13:28
You mention it can pick up where it left off, but if I’m adding stuff all the time, does it go back and pick up ones I’ve added? Or should I wait until I have it all ripped from cd to mp3 to start fingerprinting?
Adam
30 August, 13:41
I would be concerned that the the user metadata which is maintained along with this process would be subpeona’d by the RIAA.
Jordan Meeter
30 August, 13:43
Why not just join forces with MusicBrainz rather than developing your own system?
mattR
30 August, 13:48
The ‘server overloaded’ message seems fairly constant right now…maybe the digg effect?
Neil
30 August, 14:40
So what will this data be used for? (aside for charts, and graphs)
Is it just to help Last.fm… Or will you guys be releasing some type of mass ID3/filename fixer?
Or even some type of open library?
I’ve never had great success with MusicBrainz/amaroK… I would love to see a more well rounded application/database.
BTW… Thanks for the native Linux client. I love when we get first releases on the same day as Windows clients. :D
martind
30 August, 14:49
Having good Linux support is a pretty selfish move I reckon, most people in this office are not on Windows machines… :)
CortJstr
30 August, 14:54
6 seconds? Dang, I’m averaging about 3.6, peaking at 4.5. Is this because all of my stuff already has MBIDs or is my 2.5 year old computer magic or something?
I think the problem with Picard is that it freaks out if my file isn’t exactly what it expects. Well when I rip stuff Audiograbber automatically trims off silence, so my files are often a second or two shorter than the track on the CD, and Picard can’t seem to get past that to realize it’s still the same song.
Also, iPod people, I’ve been using iSproggler for years now and it scrobbles just fine. The only thing it has issues with is that it doesn’t recognize anything with a playcount of 0, so you either have to listen to each track once in iTunes before playing it on your iPod or be willing to be off by one for each new song.
Neil
30 August, 14:57
Sounds like a GREAT office to work in… If only they could all be that way.
I suppose that based on your reply, – and the comments that have no responses – you guys are not ready to spill all the beans on your intended use of the collected data, quite yet.
Fair enough…. But I do hope it’s something cool, and something better then the tools currently available. And having use last.fm for as long as I have… I’m sure it will be.
fractalgp
30 August, 15:18
what about a command line version for linux? I don’t wanna install X on my file server just to submit files.
running via smb on windows takes an estimated 144 hours :/
Craig
30 August, 15:26
Sounds great, except the program doesn’t wanna find any of my mp3’s on my computer! Using the explorer built into it, the only folder it thinks is on my c: is the Documents & Settings one – not very useful when I store all my mp3’s in c:\music, not in the My Music folder inside My Documents! Yet oddly, it can see all the folders fine on my other hard drives.
So yeah, tried and failed… but I suppose that’s the issue with beta software :P
Phil
30 August, 15:27
What about watermarked mp3s?
Never studied the structure of music files…help me ))
CortJstr
30 August, 15:31
Craig, I thought I had the same problem is you (I use C:\mp3 and C:\new) but I realized that my folders were all there, just not in the right order. For some reason the program doesn’t show the folders in alphabetical order, they’re just all jumbled up which made it look like some were missing.
PRC.
30 August, 15:51
Count me among those having trouble with a folder other than the default Windows “My Music” folder.
“The folders you selected didn’t contain any tracks in MP3 format.” is what I’m told.
Norman
30 August, 15:52
@Phil: watermark does not affect recognition: it will return the same id regardless of such things. If it sounds the same then it will get recognized.
RJ
30 August, 16:21
I will post an update soon with some initial stats and retorts, namely musicbrainz and a bit more about our plans. Kudos to everyone who is fingerprinting their massive collections of mp3s.
David Grant
30 August, 16:27
The *.deb won’t work on my amd64 machine. Missing libtag.so. If anyone can make a 64-bit deb that would be great. Maybe I’ll try compiling from source.
JoJo
30 August, 16:29
I ran the fingerprinter for an hour last, stopped it to do other things. I just started it up this morning, it remembered where I left off (altho I did have to reselect the folders with my music), and it’s chugging away again today!
What a great project!
RJ
30 August, 17:00
Over a million fingerprints received so far :)
Wondering if i can post a mini league table, or will people be upset if we reveal how many mp3s they fingerprinted?
Arty "Fucking" Smokes
30 August, 17:03
What’s in it for me?
LANjackal
30 August, 17:13
Please put up a league table, that would be great :)
Max Howell
30 August, 17:23
David Grant, install libtag. I forgot to add this as a dependency. It also depends on libmad and libfftw.
RJ
30 August, 17:38
We will post to the MB mailing list soon about how this will impact the Lastfm->Musicbrainz relationship.
The jist will be that although we will use a different fingerprint system, it will still be possible to use it to resolve MBIDs, and once we’ve cleaned up our metadata a bit, we will endeavour to match our catalogue with Musicbrainz. Matching our catalogue to MB atm is hard, because it is so messy.
Kimiko
30 August, 17:55
@David Grant: You need to install libtag1c2a
RJ
30 August, 17:56
Here is a post from Russ to the Musicbrainz mailing list regarding fingerprinting
jaknudsen
30 August, 17:59
Leauge table would be awesome!
Maybe there should be a way to communicate on the last.fm profile of fingerprinters that they are doing it?
Just got started with my collection now.
Kimiko
30 August, 18:07
The complete thread at MusicBrainz can be found here
PAStheLoD
30 August, 18:16
Huh, my raid5 is really slow.. remaining time: 22:24:40. Pff.
Nick
30 August, 18:22
It does allow me to select my external drives – where I store my music – only the local disk
I am running OS X
:(
eduardo
30 August, 18:36
the last.fm servers are still overloaded…
LANjackal
30 August, 18:42
Yeah the servers are STILL overloaded… Help please…
Jelle
30 August, 18:44
I’m still getting the “Fingerprinter.e.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows.” error. :-/
Baris
30 August, 18:46
wouldn’t it be nice if you collect rating data of the audio files too? so maybe later we can get our unrated files rated with a global opinion?
maddox
30 August, 19:09
man 180 more hours left, is the server still overloaded?
Jester-NL
30 August, 19:11
Please realise caching in a soon to follow version…
Kevin
30 August, 19:52
:( Servers overloaded 8 hrs left – pulling network drive.
I bet I’d get better ‘Time Per Track’ if it wasn’t on a network attached USB drive.
Please get the servers back!
django_sr
30 August, 20:06
This sounds great!! I have 12 mp3 files from Brazilian artists and I don’t know the names of the songs nor their artists….would this tool be able to help me out in such a way that I’ll be able to get the names of the songs?
Macca
30 August, 20:06
Still overloaded… I’ve had enough of restarting it now, this is the last time. I’ve left my Mac on for the last 18 hours and it quit out after 2, AGAIN.
Half measures…..
I hope you’ve offloaded this to a different server farm or is this just going to be yet another slowdown on the last.fm servers?
(off topic I know but last.fm website is really really slow, even as a subscriber)
Rich
30 August, 21:00
It stopped after 17 mins….
Hopefully it will last longer next time!
Undertakr
30 August, 21:04
You can select external drives on the mac. Click On Volumes, they are under there.
Drunk And Unruly
30 August, 21:06
It’s rare that I would participate with any company that asks me to download something ‘for the greater good’ but Last.fm is such a great service that I am happy to oblige!
Royce
30 August, 21:19
I just looked around and didn’t see any reference to this; please let me know if what I’m describing is in use.
If many listeners have ripped their own CDs using the default settings of their player, that we have many files that are exactly the same.
To leverage all of the CPU work that’s already happening out there, couldn’t a music-profiling app perform a quick MD5 of the file, and if the file has already been profiled, skip the expensive analysis?
Perhaps it could ignore the metadata and only MD5 the music data itself, to improve the chances of finding a hit.
What would be wrong with this approach? Somebody must have already thought of this — is it just not worth the effort? Even if there were only 5% overlap, it might save a lot of time, and would only get more useful with time.
UntoAshes
30 August, 21:21
It seems this is going to take me about 48 hours if I just leave it.
40k tracks getting fingerprinted.
Only for last.fm…
Rob Szarka
30 August, 21:29
@Royce: I am not a last.fm developer but… The way I see it, it’s the disk read that’s expensive, not the CPU time or bandwidth. You’d still have to read the file from disk to hash it, and you’d still have to communicate with the server to check the hash, so I can’t see that you’d save all that much.
Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were subtle differences that would throw off the has. Not everyone uses Exact Audio Copy to rip their files…
Rob Szarka
30 August, 21:44
@RJ: Regarding Russ’s comments, I can certainly understand that there may be good reasons for not giving all your IP away; and offering an API to a song identification service is not a bad compromise. I guess I’d ask, though, which business last.fm is in (or wants to be in): metadata (narrowly defined) or recommendations and social networking? Assuming the latter, I can’t really see how keeping the metadata piece proprietary helps. Isn’t better song metadata better for last.fm, regardless of how it’s generated and who makes money off of it?
Anyway, just a thought. And, FWIW, I’m also in favor of a league table. The distributed.net RC5 project just doesn’t waste enough time each day—I need more ways to procrastinate.
Billy
30 August, 23:08
Why not make the fingerprinter run without needing to connect to the last.fm server… my computer is just sitting here doing nothing because it cant connect to server. Let me store the fingerprints temp. on my server and upload later.
Norman
30 August, 23:12
@Royce: an equivalent of MD5 is performed and stored in your local machine (it’s a superfast operation rob :) ) to avoid re-fingerprinting the same stuff.
But this solution cannot be applied in general, since even the slightest variation in the parameters of the encoder generate a different file hash. If we really want to be able to correctly tag files, we have to look at the audio.
DeathSeeker
30 August, 23:16
10,000+ tracks being sent by me. Only going to take 36 hours. ;_;
Fred
30 August, 23:23
Will the fingerprinter take into account iTunes’ Album Artist tag? Not to mention iTunes’ compilation “tag” which is always misused.
mosquitokillah
30 August, 23:23
Great idea!
Paul
30 August, 23:28
RJ, Russ, Elias – thanks for the clarification on the MusicBrainz-last.fm tie in. I’m really glad to hear it.
Rob Szarka has a good point … free and readily available clean song metadata, along with a widely used song ID will help all and embed last.fm even further in the center of a thriving, non-riaa-dominated music ecosystem.
The Giant Metal Man From Outer Space!
30 August, 23:44
Neat application! I’ve got nearly 35,000 songs in my, erm, “collection.” Too bad I can’t scan them because this application doesn’t run on Mac OS X Leopard.
Gary
31 August, 00:06
Are you going to support m4a files? 80% of my tracks are in that format. That is many thousands that aren’t getting counted.
Royce
31 August, 00:07
@Rob Szarka: I’m not sure how much of the per-song time is server lag, but one of my CPUs is pegged doing the analysis right now, and my average time across the first 300 songs was 15.6 seconds … so I don’t think that I/O is the bottleneck. By contrast, I just ran MD5 against 300 songs and averaged 1.2 seconds each. It’s relatively inexpensive, from my perspective.
@Norman: Understood; I do see the need for actual audio analysis. I was only advocating using MD5 as a quick first pass. Sounds like you’re using something similar anyway, and I’m just advocating reordering some of the sequence and using it in a slightly enhanced way.
If the Fingerprinter is checksumming just the audio, then the Fingerprinter have to reanalyze my music if I change my tags? If you’re checksumming just the audio, then I would love to see some statistics on how many matches there are so far. It would either refute or support my argument. :)
If 80% of the MP3s in the entire world are entirely unique — even when leaving out the metadata — that’s 20% of them that matching somebody’s, and could turn my 10-hour pass into an 8-hour pass as you accumulate more data.
If you’re computing an audio-only checksum anyway, and you’re doing it after you’ve done the analysis, you could move it to happen before the audio analysis instead.
To get the CPU savings, you’d have to connect to the server prior to analysis, which might be expensive from a network perspective. To minimize the cost of that, you could do the following:
1. Compute the audio checksum for File 1.
2. Upload the checksum, receiving found/not-found information.
3. Perform audio analysis of File 1.
4. Compute checksum of File 2.
5. Upload results of #3 and #4 and combine the result codes.
6. Perform audio analysis of File 2.
7. Compute checksum of File 3.
etc.
Even if you didn’t want to go to the trouble of trying for the CPU savings, you might as well upload the checksum and use it for statistical purposes, IMO. You might discover patterns that you hadn’t considered before.
kaline
31 August, 02:53
Only 45 hours to go before all of my 12726 tracks are fingerprinted. I have no idea what this means but I assume it will help someone, hopefully me, in the future. I’m assuming if my tracks are stolen, I can use the fingerprinting feature to find the culprit, right?
Sorry if this was used earlier in the thread. I started to see the words “thread”, “CPU”, “makefile” and “MD5”, dozed off, hit my head on the space bar, and ended up here.
Yeah(!) for whatever it is you’re providing us. I’m sure in 6 months it will make perfect sense to me…just like Twitter. I’m slow, but I’m assuming this is something kick ass and worth 2 days of 100% CPU time that I would have spent viewing pr0n or something…
c26000
31 August, 05:33
I finally did it 6700 tracks :), can I uninstall the application now or I may need it for something else?
miikkah
31 August, 07:09
Boohoo! I’m still getting the Server overloaded message and I’m not able to fingerprint my collection. Any advice?
Mika
31 August, 07:45
Someone mentioned earlier that the app shows the folders in all jumbled up order. Not entirely true. Looks like it’s alphabetical with a twist. It orders capitalized folder first, then low-case folders, and then foreign letter folders. Kind of messy, but logical in it’s own crazy way?
Mika
31 August, 07:51
Also, it looks like it will take about… well, the time estimate changes around a bit too much, but maybe 40 hours to fringerprint my 70k collection. Not too bad. Averaging 2 secs per track.
Hooray.
mll
31 August, 08:07
Thanks for making things a bit clearer on the MB mailing-list.
Now to another topic: apart from the idea of making user stats (league table etc.), what’s the point in providing user login & password to the fingerprinter?
Phil
31 August, 08:12
One again, what about WATERMARKED Tracks??
I mean, the watermark is part of the sound, like…we can’t hear it – yet it is there!
RJ
31 August, 09:42
mll: the main motivation for asking for user/pass at this stage is for stats. I can imagine the FP process being an optional part of the scrobbling protocol in future tho, and it would be tied to the username there for security reasons. Wiping out all data from malicious users / spammers and so on. We didn’t anticipate any privacy issues because it’s more or less the same data that is sent when scrobbling.
Phil: the algorithm only looks at the audible data, so it ignores watermarks.
Royce: we only checksum the entire file atm, not the audio part. This may change. We took the easy option to start with, and it will still be a good shortcut. (Seems to work ok in p2p apps that do multi-source download based on file hash ;)
Most FPs from a single user atm is 16,409.
I’m in the midst of moving house atm so haven’t managed to fingerprint my collection yet.. Maybe i’ll pester max/norman to make the trunk work on multi-cores so i can catch up :D
Vincent
31 August, 09:51
By the way, I’d like to ask the same question for the official Last.fm Player.
Thanks,
Vincent
mosquitokillah
31 August, 10:21
already fingerprinted!
Mika
31 August, 10:47
Multi-core would be awesome.
Scarm
31 August, 11:07
can’t get this program to run on vista
RJ
31 August, 13:04
Here are the top 10 users who fingerprinted the most files so far:
skr
whocarez2
MightyJay
BenRad
ag3mo
Sanchless
mustaqila
nivshah
Strider3000
enumerix
skr wins with over 20,000 files so far :)
MightyJay
31 August, 13:36
Wow, Muz is in the top 10 even though he is on holidays? :)
@Scarm: I am running it on Vista Business edition just fine… Have you tried restarting your computer, that helps sometimes (it did with the client)
fontgoddess
31 August, 14:21
I’m on a G3 iBook and have 840 hours left to index 40,272 songs. Well, once that’s done we’ll do the 40,000 on the other hard drive.
LordGartenzwerg
31 August, 14:24
I made a debian packages for amd64 (works nice for me on Kubuntu Feisty), you can get it here:
http://www.box.net/shared/3su6byg1vz
I hope this is legal, but since the code is under the GPL, I think it’s okay, if not contact me on my last.fm profile and I will remove it :)
Fingerprinting 4000 songs takes 4 hours for me on my Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz ^^
Laurie
31 August, 15:40
Vincent, sure, you can do what you like with it… we actually have our own apt repository at http://apt.last.fm
Jessi
31 August, 16:18
I’m slowly working my way through – I’m on the C’s in my library of artists. Thanks for the stop-restart feature. Otherwise, my poor little laptop would probably burn up; I can almost hear the teeny weeny fan crying from exhaustion. ;-)
The Giant Metal Man From Outer Space!
31 August, 16:20
I rebooted back into Tiger and loaded the Last.FM Fingerprinter. I have 46,000 songs.
Screenshot: http://tinyurl.com/2akztv
wesleyj
31 August, 16:30
It keeps crashing for me on one mp3 can not work out which one it is but wont get past it. Any way to work out which one it crashes on?
Alien2k_UK
31 August, 16:51
The fingerprinting takes much longer than a normal MD5-style hash is because it’s looking at the actual sound of the MP3 files, rather than the compressed MP3 data in the file (which would be pretty much useless for something like this). This means that the fingerprinter has to decode the whole file, as it’s playing it, then create what sounds like a quite complicated set of data from it. Usually, no-one notices the processor power needed to decode an MP3, because it’s played realtime, but it’s not exactly a simple thing to do – I’m only 20 but I can remember the days where you couldn’t do anything else on a computer while playing MP3s! Don’t get me started on how long it took to rip anything…
I’ve just fingerprinted 1300 tracks from my MacBook – not a large collection, but I doubt there’s many people with Durwood Douche’s Big Banned and Blue! Including such musical gems as “Everybody’s Fucking But Me,” “I Just Can’t Keep My Mitts Off Your Tits” and “Just A Little Christmas Blowjob,” I felt that it was an album just dying to be fingerprinted!
Sam
Alien2k_UK
31 August, 16:54
Argh, “as it’s playing it” should be “as if it was playing it”. Sorry!
Sam
Phyltre
31 August, 19:30
As of 3:28 eastern US time (and for the last 12 hours), I can’t submit a single fingerprint without getting a “servers are overloaded” message. I’d sure like to help, but you seem to be lacking in the resources department.
Mr man
31 August, 19:36
I’m trying to finger print 47000 tracks but it says that the server is overloaded just after collecting files. Why are last.fm servers always overloaded!!
The Giant Metal Man From Outer Space!
31 August, 20:09
45,000 to go, 114 hours. :)
It looks like your servers have a limited number of inbound connections, like a cell phone tower, and each song submission looks like a unique session. So if too many people try to submit at once, the server gets clogged.
The server overload messages haven’t returned for at least half an hour now. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
tozé
31 August, 20:38
no support for foreign characters in folder names :(
echodeck
31 August, 21:00
My count just jumped from something like 3123 of 35234 to 35234 in the space of thirty seconds!
I clicked done, added another folder to scan but it still thinks that my unsubmitted tracks have gone through.
echodeck
31 August, 21:02
Just to clarify, it thinks that its completed all of my files when I still had almost a week of processing to go at last count.
echodeck
31 August, 21:07
Is there a way to clear the list of previously submitted tracks?
asfd
31 August, 22:26
echodeck, i think there is a file in the last.fm directory that keeps track of all the submitted files. just delete the file or the whole directory and reinstall maybe
echodeck
31 August, 23:01
I couldn’t find any file recording the previously submitted tracks, so I tried uninstalling then reinstalling.
Its now gone back to 2018 of 32766, which is stange because I would have expected it to either go back to zero or the previous incorrect count.
.tomi
31 August, 23:17
It would be good if it supported flac, ape, wv, tta, mp4, aac… besides mp3 only. ^^;;
da_asmodai
1 September, 00:35
All of my music is in 192 Kbps WMA files I ripped from CD’s (no DMA). Any plans to support WMA?
fotomotor
1 September, 00:58
works fine with my external usb2 drive on macbook pro 2.4 core2duo running osx tiger. it takes 27 hours for 16.500 files…
frozenbubble
1 September, 03:22
holy moly,
Time remaining, 700h..
I’m out. Sorry.. An average of 20s per track.
I know that I’m using a G4 Powerbook, you don’t have to tell me if he’s not at its best anymore :)
pete
1 September, 03:43
if anyone cares…
c2d 6850 (3Ghz)
8 hrs
14000 tracks.
2.9/sec track
got a few errors during the 1st 2 hrs saying that the server was overloaded or something to that effect
UW
1 September, 12:21
iBook G3, 900 MHz = approx. 95 sec./track! :-((
but anyways: PLEASE add support for AAC as soon as possible! at least 90% of my collection is in AAC …
THANX a lot for everything, last.fm is great and all those new features are really good as well!!!
Adriaan
1 September, 17:33
Hello Last.fm people. Thanks for the great sites. May I ask of you to make statistics on Last.fm more diverse? Like, I dunno, just more diverse. Anyhoo, thanks for everything. I am looking forward to all the new updates and upgrades and what have you.
Veiona
1 September, 18:23
I would love to sent the fingerprint on the try like it’s with Last.fm big plugin, but nevermind. I love to participate :-)
Graham
1 September, 19:46
Eventually are you planning on releasing some software to clean up my MP3 tags? Software is scanning my 25404 mp3s now.
Johannes
1 September, 19:59
I see a problem. The program is processing the audio files in alphabetical order. Processing seems to take a couple of days for elaborate music collections. There will probably be quite an account of people, who won’t let the program process their whole collection, when it takes very long.
Because of this, there will be less and less data, for artists with »big« names (i.e. towards the end of the alphabet).
Wouldn’t it make some sense to either shuffle or start with a random offset?
Rob Szarka
1 September, 20:40
Still tens of thousands of tracks to go here… You’d probably have twice as many fingerprints from me by now if the program didn’t just give up and quit when the servers get overloaded. :(
Norman
1 September, 21:17
@Graham: Yup, this is part of the plan! :)
@Johannes: Don’t worry. That’s just phase 1. Soon we will add it to the client, and since a query to our FP servers needs only 30 seconds of audio, it will be much faster too!
To all: yes we will support other formats! It’s just a matter of finding the right library! :)
Peter
2 September, 03:40
Will there be any support for Apple Lossless?
Anonymous
2 September, 09:47
I have very little experience with MusicBrainz, but I think it’s important to be more dynamic when interpreting mp3 tags. I format my albums in the “<year> – <albumtitle>” format – and I know a lot of other people do too – so in any list of albums, they are displayed chronologically. This in turn means that not a single album has been sent to my last.fm profile. Pretty average. For either last.fm or MusicBrainz to dictate what is simply ‘correct’ or not, is too simplistic.
I hope there is some kind of support for tags using a different (read: better) syntax like this. Thanks.
Julian
2 September, 11:21
Well, one could argue that displaying albums chronologically should be done via the year part of the ID3 tag.
But that’s what fingerprinting is about. The tags don’t matter so much anymore, we suddenly know what the song/album is, even if you put the year in the album title field and hence can display it ‘correctly’ on Last.fm.
adam
2 September, 11:21
@Anonymous: The problem with your theory is, it isn’t the correct title for the album. It might be useful for personal sorting, but that is it – the ID3 tags have a year entry for that reason otherwise.
Adriaan
2 September, 13:57
Hello Last.fm people. Say if I scanned fingerprinted or whatever my collection a bit and then stopped, added some hundred music or so, and then start fingerprinting again, how will the program know that I added music and which music I added?
Nectar_Card
2 September, 13:58
Will this fingerprinting help to weed out the live tracks masquerading as studio versions?
Hate it when a live track turns up in the radio when I’m expecting the studio version.
PAStheLoD
2 September, 14:32
What about the live DJ sets? What about .cue files? What about stream-ripped stuff? :)
I’m at 7830 of 8102, but now a file takes ~50 sec, but these are the 120 min trance sets.. wohooo, it’ll finish in 5 hours :)
hecatomber
2 September, 21:11
i’m trying to fingerprint nearly 20k well tagged MP3’s but all i have is the “overload error” nearly every 100 mp3’s. (i previously used MusicIP’s tools on them to fingerprint too)
kL
2 September, 22:02
It keeps failing on the same track always!
“Network error… servers overloaded…”.
I’m tryng to push it for over 24h now. Are you that overloaded?
The track in question is freely available here:
http://www.breaksblog.biz/?p=1422
Paul
2 September, 22:42
A little tip for all of you who own multiple cores:
You can just start multiple instances of the fingerprinter, so unless all your music is in a single directory, you can use multiple cores.
closedmouth
3 September, 02:09
Heh, I fingerprinted some of my sister’s badly tagged music. (y)
Anonymous
3 September, 03:17
This was exactly my point; tag info needs to be sent regardless of whether it’s deemed “correct”. Measures should be taken to interpret “incorrect” tags like the syntax I mentioned.
terry
3 September, 04:37
when the program opens, it immediately wants to go to window’s default “my music” folder. well MY music isn’t in there.
Adriaan
3 September, 04:53
Mine neither, it’s kinda annoying to select the real folder every time I open the app.
jaknudsen
3 September, 11:04
I linked to this blog post in my last.fm profile (click my name), maybe you would consider too?
PocketMumble
3 September, 11:46
Just thought I’d try and ask this again, I’ve noticed someone else asking the same question (and hoping I haven’t stupidly missed the answer!)….is the stop/restart feature of the fingerprinter smart enough to pick up anything it hasn’t done already, or does it just work top to bottom and not go back and pick up anything that has been added in the meantime? (So if I have a Pink Floyd directory which is scanned, then I stop the fingerprinter, add a new bunch of mp3s under that folder and then restart, will the fingerprinter pick the new files up at any stage, or just continue on to the next directory?)
I ask ‘cos I’m right in the middle of converting my cd collection to mp3 and just wondering if I should start fingerprinting now, or wait until I’m done (a long way off)….
pieman
3 September, 14:40
36,000 done . . . . that took some time, but glad to help :)
Jester-NL
3 September, 14:59
@pocketmumble (and all the others with the same question):
The fingerprinter will remember where it was before you stopped it (even after a reboot) and will do a quick scan to see if any new files have been added in a previous scanned directory, or alphabetically before the last scanned track.
So, all your music will be scanned, without any double work.
At least, that is my experience.
Kristofer Carlson
3 September, 16:06
Anonymous,
I think it has to do with how you store your music. If it is stored in one large folder, then it will be fingerprinted alphabetically. However, if you use some sort of hierarchal directory structure, the algorithm appears to move through the higher level folders in alphabetical order, then the lower level folders, down to the actual folder containing the music. For me, this means that my folder containing “Blues” is fingerprinted before my folder containing “Classical” and so on.
SubZero5
3 September, 17:24
planning to top 17K here.. :P
Hope it helps.. :D
Mika
3 September, 18:57
I (and I suspect others too) would be done already if the damn fingerprinter wouldn’t give up everytime the damn server overload comes back. I mean, sure it’s beta, but even betas can have basic features like fingerprinting to cache?
But then again, if we fingerprinted to cache, we would most likely kill the server with the cache submissions.
Afterall, it has happened before with the scrobbling, so I guess the lack of cache might be a feature that has been left out purposedly for the time being. Inconvenient for us, but necessary I suppose.
Adriaan
3 September, 19:48
Maybe they can make the app just pause in its tracks until the server is not down again?
Amr Hassan
3 September, 22:43
i haven’t fingerprinted anything all day because the sever has been overloaded to me for the last 15 hours!
is that normal!??
Rob Szarka
3 September, 23:43
@terry: I agree! That silly “My Music” directory is for tyros! The kind of folks who are running this app probably have their music stored elsewhere, like a dedicated drive…
mehrtuerer
3 September, 23:46
Too bad, that a part of my collection is ripped in .ogg…
Amr Hassan
4 September, 03:25
maybe the folks who have tons of music stored elsewhere changed the path to the “my music” special folder to lead to that directory. it’s very useful in this kind of situations. :)
btw. i still can’t fingerprint. the servers have been overloaded for like 20 hours now..
Jordan
4 September, 05:05
I’m getting runtime errors on Windows XP.
Normal occurrence or is something up on my end?
Niklas
4 September, 08:11
Hi guys, it’s also crashing on app start up for me too on Win XP SP2.
MightyJay
4 September, 08:47
I agree with Amr Hassan; I have my music stored on a dedicated server, but used TweakUI to change the “My Music” folder (actually “Music” folder, Vista dropped the “My”) to this server. Now everything that tries to access “My Music” automatically will find all my music there, even though it is physically elsewhere… Works great…
Paul
4 September, 10:34
Why does the tool collect signatures of files larger than 60min? They won’t get scrobbled anyway and take a lot of CPU time!
Ivanerr
4 September, 14:47
Borat joke:
This tool was made by RIAA to find pirates with tons of mp3s.
.
.
.
NOT!!
Tom Williams
4 September, 19:38
I’m having overload errors, especially when it comes to 60 min+ songs.
Al
4 September, 22:08
“I’m getting runtime errors on Windows XP.
Normal occurrence or is something up on my end?”
I was too but I figured out a certain folder was causing it to show that message.
Skipping that folder stopped that message.
Ben
5 September, 00:55
I have my files on my main pc, but it won’t let me get at networked files!
Ben
Marek
5 September, 08:54
@Ben
Try mapping network folder to local disk :-)
Greg_x7
5 September, 10:03
Gah, trying to fingerprint for the last 90 minutes or so, but servers are overloaded :/
lee grainge
5 September, 11:32
Was just about to start this then I read about internal drives being looked at only. All my music is on Externals… Oh well.
JoeRamboUK
5 September, 22:01
When are we going to get an update about the progress?
dAtAfLaSh
6 September, 08:42
Now, after 3 or 4 days of fingerprinting, i’m through it. Hope my data is useful ;)
martijn
6 September, 13:13
excellent feature, last.fm keeps on improving their services. especially [free] meant a lot to me and made me read further ;-)
Michael Saunders
6 September, 13:36
So, what’s happening with this now then? Any updates at all?
Adriaan
6 September, 17:04
All my music is on external drive and Last.fm picks it up perfectly.
Russ
6 September, 17:25
We still haven’t begun to scratch the surface of processing all the data we’ve got – it’ll be a few weeks before we’ve got some meaningful stats out of it :).
Rich
6 September, 20:16
Will it say on our profiles how many tracks we have fingerprinted?
Hope so! The internet is about collecting big numbers!
Greg_x7
6 September, 21:34
I’d like to contribute but server overloaded messages keep me from fingerprinting. Not even one track got analyzed.
vraa
6 September, 22:27
For all the guys that are experiencing overloaded messages — wait a few minutes and try again.
I was getting those messages a lot, granted I was also maxing out my connection (with a sister and mom who love Skype :D )
I just finished doing roughly 26k tracks. Most of them are perfectly tagged so that should help out a ton. Took me a while to do all the tracks considering I could only analyze during the evening while I was home.
Onno
7 September, 07:08
@vraa: I thought they said that perfect tagged tracks did not help as much as badly tagged ones ;-)
Nick Novick
7 September, 07:11
Proxy support needed.
Or do you have any ideas how to avoid domain proxy (e.g. by installing some third-party software that redirects any ip request from local machine via proxy)?
Ivanerr
7 September, 12:11
I give up.
Way too buggy.
Crash, overloaded, crash, crash, overloaded…
Xavier
7 September, 13:53
It’s going well for me atm! It would be great for us to see what we’re processing in a last.fm page.. Just my opinion
hwat
7 September, 15:29
that would be pointless as well as time-consuming. processing takes up 6 seconds at the most. multiply that by the number of users currently fingerprinting and the number of users accessing said page and the last.fm servers would certainly crack under the strain.
Shaddy
7 September, 17:03
/me excited :)
vaguerant
8 September, 06:03
This fingerprinting business is driving my nerdlust wild. foosic’s been doing fingerprinting for a while, nice to see last.fm get in on the game. Fingerprinting my collection now.
Vincent
8 September, 17:59
> Vincent, sure, you can do what you like with it… we actually have our own apt repository at http://apt.last.fm
Thanks Laurie :D
Sahmeepee
8 September, 21:16
In case anyone’s worried about the data sent by the fingerprinter, here’s an example submission:
The actual fingerprint isn’t human readable, but obviously that’s sent as well.
Rob Szarka
9 September, 00:26
That bunny is almost as cute as Tux himself!
Closing in on 47,000 fingerprints…
Ukatoton
9 September, 18:02
How will translated track names be handled?
I have many tracks by POLYSICS, as well as some other artist with foreign-alphabet track names
A lot of their tracks have been submitted in both the original Japanese and translated into English/Romaji.
I’d prefer if they were displayed in the original Japanese (as that’s what’s on the back of the album case), but oters will want it in English. Will this be given special treatment with some sort of prefernce for dsplay?
Will old submissions with bad metadata finally be fused with the correct versions?
Michael Saunders
9 September, 19:45
“Will old submissions with bad metadata finally be fused with the correct versions?”
Just what I wanted to know… Hopefully this won’t just apply to new track submissions, and hopefully most of the older mess can be sorted out.
Mika
9 September, 23:51
Well I finally finished fingerprinting my 70k+ collection. Now let’s just hope that it will have some effect sometime in the next five years.
barryd
10 September, 06:25
Now how about network drive support; 99% of my music is on another machine, but I can’t point the fingerprinter to it, so you’re missing much of my data.
NocnikStargazer
10 September, 06:59
I have a lot of live bootlegs, won’t it cause any mess? Or maybe I should leave them out while scanning?
Sparkz
10 September, 08:52
A commandline linux-client would be welcome. I have several tens of thousands of mp3’s on a fileserver. Fingerprinting via SMB is just silly.
RJ
10 September, 10:43
news update coming today, including a (hopefully live) graph
lotharz0r
10 September, 10:47
Agreed, I could also use a linux commandline-client
Marc Wright
10 September, 15:07
<@Rj>… news update coming today … is there a special section at my profile, where I’ll find fingerprint news / even a live graph? – all this sound very interesting to me, looking forward to what comes out + appreciate your work on this. Thanks, marc (still fingerprinting 1% idle… whoo… ) + IS THERE AN EMAIL LIST FOR INTERESTED PEOPLE/ TEAMS</@Rj>
Andrew Clunis
10 September, 17:58
Hey, this is pretty neat stuff!
However, I hate to say it, but your source tree is a bit of a mess. You included a big mess of binaries in the source tree! Eww!
Since I’m one of those pedantic folks, I decided to try to build the entire thing from scratch. After a little bit of mucking about I manged to figure out that I could do so by removing the original bin/ directory, and then running make in src/libLastFmTools, src/libFingerprint, and finally in the top level directory. Hope this helps anyone else who wants to rebuild it.
Still, it would be nice if the tree was a bit cleaner…
Many thanks!
Andrew Clunis
10 September, 18:09
Oops, you have to do `qmake -config release` (or `debug`, as long as you are consistent) in all those directories first.
G M
11 September, 03:32
Yes, a command line Linux client would be greatly appreciated. I don’t run X on my file server for good reason. :)
hawesie
12 September, 08:15
I fought through and got the source compiled on Fedora Core 6, but proxy support is definitely needed as it won’t start without the magical internet.
djaycee68
12 September, 21:02
Slow… 7.6 seconds per track. Only 23 hours to go
But a little question. End result, will be and I’m guessing, that a mistagged MP3 will be recognized as the correctly named/tagged MP3.
Will it give suggestion to the users with a wrongly named MP3?
How will it decide which are the correct tags?
I am a meticulous freak when it comes to correctly naming/tagging my MP3’s. Sorry :)
mtakanen
13 September, 06:40
@hawesie: can you provide some pointers for me how to build this on FC6?
pboehi
13 September, 11:59
The application has been working fine for a while, now it started to crash frequently. I have 91’738/131’516 of my collection fingerprinted, but now I am struck due to crashes. I use version 1.0.3.2 on Mac OS X, my mp3 collection is on an external firewire 2TB Raid.
Moof
14 September, 09:03
Hmm, probably brilliant, but it’s a bit difficult to get it going on my main music player, a Samsung Q1 with a 640×800 screen res. Any chance you could make the window resizable to fit in with smaller screens?
Darko
14 September, 22:21
I salute this effort, and i support the requests for a command line version (preferably with a -silent option) and ability to query files located on a local network. My current avg is 11.2 sec, and about 8hrs remaining. For this, i expect the full office tour (swag and free booze included) when i come to London :D Cheers
Jordan Peacock
15 September, 12:24
Can’t wait for the FLAC support. I spend a lot of time getting my tags perfect, and I don’t have room to convert things to MP3.
Good luck!
some guy
15 September, 14:33
Can someone tell me what it needs libqt4-sql for? One of the dependencies, and I don’t see what that’s good for.
Or should I check out the source?
mattgcn
18 September, 05:50
This seems like a cool idea. I’m fingerprinting my 3000~ songs which are for the most part tagged right.
Though for instrumental music in video game soundtracks, I still haven’t been sure how to tag so it’s all in the music lead’s name for now. Oh well.
Also hoping for ShoutCast scrobbling soon
ibrahim
18 September, 20:53
i firgerprinted 18,000 songs <3
venky80
23 September, 05:03
what about FLAC fingerprinting.
All my music is in FLAC format
kander1
29 September, 16:58
I know I’m a bit late to chip in with this (and perhaps it has been suggested already.. stopped reading after the 100th comment or so), but how about a version that does the fingerprinting in a ‘cache’ mode? That way the process isn’t interupted every time the servers get overloaded, and the client can just keep retrying until the server is able to process… should speed up things for a lot of people?
TheConfuzed1
2 October, 05:30
This is very interesting. What I’m most interested in learning though, is will this correct old tracks that have been scrobbled with incorrect tags, or will it only affect those tracks from which point this system goes live?
kakalto
2 October, 08:30
CLI version would be very welcome :)
Jake Wharton
3 October, 22:46
All my music is stored on a remote server and accessed via a network share which the fingerprinting program will not recognize. Any chance for this to be updated or should I leave this to all the users who store their music locally?
FFI-IX-Player38
8 October, 18:34
I don’t want to read through all the comments now but does the Fingerprinter compute the TRM of a file, the fingerprint used by Musicbrainz?!?
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