Wanted: a tool to identify music.
by Vinay Gupta • March 10, 2007 • Everything Else • 2 Comments
That’s a legal torrent file to download 726 tracks, one per artist, from South By Southwest. Unfortunately it turns out to be really really hard to get through even a fraction of what’s there because there’s no genre information or other way to filter for taste.
What I’d like is a tool that does one of two things:
1> makes an album-cover like image which represents the sound on the track: something like a frequency spectrum but smarter about “semantic” differences. This could be really crude and still useful: female vocals, pink, male vocals, blue. Loud = bright, quiet = pale, lots of electronics = spiky. You know what I mean here… a quick visual ID of what’s on the album.
2> Something that listens to your music library, or some subset of it, then categorizes new tracks as “like Soundgarden” “like Bjork” “like They Might Be Giants” “like Mahler.”
How hard can it be?
Check out Pandora. http://www.pandora.com/
Yeah, exactly – I want to be able to run the Pandora algorithms over two datasets: the music from SXSW, and the music on my hard drive, then have it return similarity findings on the new music!