Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#71

Post by acjohnson55 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

iambatman wrote: post #69

I think it's crazy that echonest still doesn't have any album information in their api, for building anything to do with music when is album info not useful?

Maybe they don't want to duplicate the effort of MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is about warehousing preexisting metadata (track listings, credits, etc.), whereas EchoNest specializes in using algorithms to extract novel features.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#72

Post by acjohnson55 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

mox1 wrote: post #36

The fact that so many of these online services are basically using The Echo Nest to build their "music discovery" engines (aka their radio option) is a bit unnerving. What's there to differentiate them if they all use the same methods to pick what song they send you...? Also shameless plug, I got really tired of Spotify, Pandora, last.fm robotic stations and built ( http://www.ssradio.me ). 100% NOT powered by Echo N…

It depends. EchoNest has a similar track feature for any given track, which could trivially be used for playlisting. But it also provides an incredible amount of data. There are countless ways you could create different playlisting algorithms with their APIs.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#73

Post by cheshire137 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 3:37 PM UTC

Great, this'll probably adversely affect Rdio and I'll have to leave them to go back to Spotify with its shitty mobile apps.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#74

Post by dclowd9901 » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #70

dclowd9901 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, am ecstatic. I started a project to catalogue every single live music event on the planet, no matter how small or big. That's one less ogre in the way. Enjoy your new leashes, Echo Nest.

Are you familiar with Next Big Sound?

Nope, I'll be sure to check it out.

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#75

Post by diydsp » Fri, Mar 07, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #62

daturkel wrote: post #43

I was a QA intern at Echo Nest in Somerville over the summer and was super surprised to see this today! They're a really a fantastic and fun group of people and doing incredible work, having a fun time while they do it. (Speaking, naturally, only my own opinions here:) I'm excited for the possibilities of growth that it'll offer the company, but also a little nervous about how it'll affect the Nest's ability to serve…

Hi, I'm curious what are the other applications of Echo Nest API besides music recommendation? Can it assist composers or performance artists in composition? (e.g., input scores of Charlie Parker, output a solo on key of X based on previous known solo's). Can it identify harmonic structures in music? (e.g., which mode is used in song X and in a composition, when a key is changed). I also live in the greater Boston ar…

The API has some excellent stuff regarding audio segmentation. It represents any track as a list of ~2,000 segments. Each segment has energy in 12 chromatic bins measured, too. There's also information on beat times, and a Machine-Learning-based estimate of verse/chorus/solo and even more great stuff like that.

Full on auto-transcription like you hint at is a hard AI problem, like speech recognition, which will never by fully solved (according to me), but I, for one, would LOVE to see a musical editor enhanced by EchoNest metadata. One of these days, i'll add to to Audacity hahaha.

BTW, if you are in Boston area, come to the Music-Tech meetup. It's a "gem" and I'll be happy to intro you to the EN API (I worked there 6 years ago as a consultant).

Re: Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

#76

Post by jggonz » Mon, Mar 10, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

saaaaaam wrote: post #52

6cxs2hd6 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Echo Nest have any patents in the area of analysis? That would be my concern about this deal. Not just for you, but for the whole area. I hope this doesn't become more grist for our borked software patent system, wherein this deal mostly benefits only West Texas lawyers and their car dealers and realtors.

http://www.patentgenius.com/assignee/TheEchoNestCorporation....

Wow, that's a generic list indeed. I may need to come up with some non-scientific way to tell which songs go well together... Maybe I'll have to take into account the current alignment of the stars.