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Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

maroofy.com

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Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#201

I've never commented on HN before, but I feel compelled. Congrats, you get my first. I've been using your site for 10 minutes and already added song after song to my library. I'm sure you'll improve the matching algorithm over time. This is a great first step; I'm being exposed to songs I've never come across before. Good job!

Thanks a lot, definitely have a lot of work to do with improving the model!

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#202
post #186

You are into something here I am telling you, while spotify does provide recommendations of what you would like to hear, it does not provide similar sounding songs, as a musician I love it.

Haha, thanks! :)

Will definitely work to improve the current model!

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#203
post #184

It's actually great. I got a ton of good recommendations. The key is to actually use it to search songs of similar beat or tone.

Personally, from using it a lot during development, I found that I kinda developed a sense for which types of songs it'll do really well on, and which types of songs it will sometimes struggle with.

But a lot of this should go away with a better, improved model!

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#204
I'm wondering if anyone has done something similar, but instead of trying to find similarities in the raw audio, they use tags available from sources like Last.FM, Musicbrainz, Discogs etc? And the ultimate answer to that is probably "those sources kinda suck". Discogs is like a trainspotter on the spectrum, fascinated by release IDs. Musicbrainz is kinda similar (each song will have a dozen matches of wildly different quality). Last.FM tags are used-generated which make some of them amazingly useful, and others amazingly detrimental.

I have a human-powered recommendation service that uses my own tags that I've added to my mp3 library over 25 years. I add instruments (not all, just the ones that stands out, like synth, flute, distortion, violin, piano), vocals (male/female, falsetto, spoken, rap), moods (happy, sad, angry, mellow, dramatic, chillout) and genre (I don't go too deep here, because I hate getting recommendations stuck within some obscure sub-genre). And that's it. I get it to play a random highly rated track with a keyword or two, and then use the tags from the first 10 songs to generate the next. But since, for me, music is a somewhat interactive experience, every 10 songs or so, I'll think of something that I want on the list (maybe reminded of it by another one that just played).

Other things I think might be useful for recommendation is Last.FM histories. Think about it, the are hundreds of thousands of active listeners "scrobbling" their listening history. You could easily parse that and group songs together that have been played within 5 songs of each other as long as they're not by the same artist and the time between the songs is around zero (ie: listened to in order, no pauses). Similarity is higher for songs that were next to each other and score drops.

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#205

I've found probably the most egregious example of what knaik94's comment is talking about: https://maroofy.com/songs/214977681 ("Being Alive" from Company) All the AI model seems to understand is the opening 5 seconds piano. Listen to the actual song it just opens like that because it's from a play. I think this will struggle with any song that has build up, it's very promising, though you need a sample of entire son…

Definitely understand the current model's shortcomings that people have mentioned.

I actually think this is largely in part due to how the current model + training process is designed.

I have some ideas for improving things on this front, will give it a try and push an update soon! :)

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#206

I love the idea, but the results were far off the mark. Perhaps they should be weighted according to some vectors, including language. I chose 'Let it be me' by the Everly Brothers. 8 or so of the top 10 were foreign songs, and sounded much older even.

Thanks for your feedback!! Yup, model can definitely be improved (and perhaps I should also add a language filter)! Noted! :)

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#207

Tried Erreur 404 by L'Impératrice[1], and I noticed the beat of the other recommended songs were eerily similar!! I'd argue your project is actually too good. Where Spotify's Discover Weekly tried to connect you to music other people listen to {B, C, D, ...} because you've listened to a particular song {A} {B...->A}, your model quite literally tried to find other music {A₂} that sounds like what you're looking for {A…

This approach is better for remix beat-matching than as new song recs, IMO.

Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#208

I find it disheartening that the comments are loaded with people saying how bad it is. The interface is awesome, the ability to have search results pop up and offer suggestions is impressive. I thought the results for a Lana Del Ray song and a song by Carlos Santana were both interesting and suggested new things. We should do a better job of supporting creators here.

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Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#209

Great initiative, but if it's sampling only the few seconds previews from the songs, then I doubt it will be useful. Also, a language filter is essential for both training the model and listing the results. I searched for a few Hindi language songs that I know of, and it listed only English, Chinese and Spanish songs as related ones - which is good to explore other music, but at times I'd just want to be in my native…

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Re: Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes

#210
post #177

Thank you. This is really great. Of course not everything is a hit but it did find some beautiful tunes for me. One little problem: if you press play and wander off after it stopped playing it can be rather hard to find what you played.

Thanks a lot for your feedback! You're right, I should probably add a better song player UI element.

Also, as I improve the model & add user accounts, recommendations should hopefully get much better and more personalized!

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