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Songdata

songdata.io

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Re: Songdata

#31

Post by mountain_peak »

elefantastisch wrote: post #15
PopAlongKid wrote: post #13

The moment I saw on the front page that Adele's "Easy On Me" was listed at 142 BPM, I was flabbergasted. You only have to play the song while looking at a timer for about 15 seconds to see the BPM is far less than half that number.

It seems they just don't understand time signatures. Andy Williams "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" is listed as 202 bpm. In some sense, this is correct. The song is in 6/8 time and if you count each of the six beats separately, there are 202 bpm, but this isn't how 6/8 works. Typically you would set the bpm based on a dotted quarter (= 3/8ths) instead of a quarter. From a listener's perspective, 6/8 basica…

> but 3/4 is exceeding rare in popular modern music.

So true, which is a shame, since 3/4 songs such as "Suspended in Gaffa" by Kate Bush or "All in All (This One Last Wild Waltz)" by Dexy's Midnight Runners are great to listen to and stick with you. Not to mention "Golden Brown" by The Stranglers - although that one is apparently in 12/8 and 13/8 for the riff [0].

My favourite modern waltz would have to be "Paristocrats" by Gonzales [1].

[0] https://www.goldradiouk.com/news/music/stranglers-golden-bro...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNVzS3p8KKU

Re: Songdata

#33

Post by wswope »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #32

MusicBrainz has been around for more than two decades and is the gold standard for this kind of data (and more): https://musicbrainz.org/

Adding on, for anyone looking to fetch MusicBrainz data automatically for a big library, this is the gold standard tool to do so:

https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Re: Songdata

#34

Post by alastairp »

marstall wrote: post #11

super cool. would love a "has lyrics" feature (for my player, https://avant.fm ). Always wonder how hard that would be.

Do you mean if the song has a vocalist singing? At the Music Technology Group (https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg) we have some classifiers that do something similar there are some demos at https://replicate.com/mtg/music-classifiers, see the output of the "voice_instrumental" classifier. This is built with a dataset of examples of instrumental songs and songs with singing in them. Normally classifiers are trained on timbre of the song to identify this. Earlier versions of this classifier are also available at AcousticBrainz: https://acousticbrainz.org/

Re: Songdata

#35

Post by alastairp »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #32

MusicBrainz has been around for more than two decades and is the gold standard for this kind of data (and more): https://musicbrainz.org/

For key and BPM data, the MetaBrainz foundation also has AcousticBrainz: https://acousticbrainz.org/ (I'm a developer on this project). Unfortunately, I would say that the data that we have in AcousticBrainz isn't as good as what's in the Spotify API, although the algorithms that we use are completely free (available in the Essentia signal processing library - https://essentia.upf.edu/). Over the last few years the algorithms in Essentia have improved and we're hoping to release a new version of the tool used in AcousticBrainz to improve the database.

Re: Songdata

#36

Post by alastairp »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #13

The moment I saw on the front page that Adele's "Easy On Me" was listed at 142 BPM, I was flabbergasted. You only have to play the song while looking at a timer for about 15 seconds to see the BPM is far less than half that number.

This is actually still a difficult task and still under active research. The name of the phenomenon is "tempo octave error". Typically an algorithm looks for evenly-spaced strong pulses of energy, and infers the BPM from that. If there is a strong beat at multiple of the actual BPM (half, double, 4x, etc) then it could be mistakenly identified as the BPM. As alin23 points out in a sibling comment it seems like the Spotify algorithm at least has a confidence level here. There is some more information about BPM computation and octave errors at https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/resources/MIR/FMP/C6/C6S2_...

Re: Songdata

#37

Post by marstall »

svantana wrote: post #20
marstall wrote: post #11

super cool. would love a "has lyrics" feature (for my player, https://avant.fm ). Always wonder how hard that would be.

I love avant.fm! Do you know about musixmatch? They have an API for time-synced lyrics and is the source of that data for a bunch of large services.

thank you!! that's very nice to hear. and I will check out musixmatch for sure.

Re: Songdata

#38

Post by marstall »

alastairp wrote: post #34
marstall wrote: post #11

super cool. would love a "has lyrics" feature (for my player, https://avant.fm ). Always wonder how hard that would be.

Do you mean if the song has a vocalist singing? At the Music Technology Group ( https://www.upf.edu/web/mtg ) we have some classifiers that do something similar there are some demos at https://replicate.com/mtg/music-classifiers , see the output of the "voice_instrumental" classifier. This is built with a dataset of examples of instrumental songs and songs with singing in them. Normally classifiers are trained on tim…

thanks for pointing me to that. avant is powered by musicbrainz actually - so I will look to see what I can pull from acousticbrainz!

Re: Songdata

#39

Post by soheilpro »

svantana wrote: post #28
alin23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m serving everything from the Spotify API directly on Noiseblend ( https://noiseblend.com ) and rate limit has never been a problem. When a request fails because of a rate limit, Spotify responds with 429 and a Retry-After header so you know when to schedule the next request. In my tests, that header never had a value greater than 10 seconds, and 429 responses were very rare.

Right, but you are using user login, and I think that gives you a lot more rate than a single account doing all the requests, which is what you need to get the no-sign-in experience on songdata.io - right?

Spotify rate limits are per app, not per user.
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