Developer Blog

The AIR Artist Sandbox

We’ve just added AIR to the set of EMI sandboxes.  AIR is the French electronic pioneer duo, consisting of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Their debut EP Premiers Symptômes was followed by the critically acclaimed album Moon Safari, The Virgin Suicides score, and subsequently albums 10 000 Hz Legend, Everybody Hertz, Talkie Walkie, Pocket Symphony, Love 2, and Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

The AIR sandbox gives you access to AIR’s entire release history, as well as photos, posters, biographies, multi-language press releases, interview transcripts, high res layered artwork, music videos, video interviews, EPKs, TV ads, webtool templates and more, all detailing the duo’s remarkable career. The band’s lunar fixations have been evident since the seminal 1998 classic Moon Safari and they have now returned with the brand new and unique Le Voyage Dans La Lune – their full album soundtrack for the eponymous legendary 1902 film, one of the most important works in film history.

The historic audio catalogue and array of breathtaking graphics on offer lend themselves to the creation of a visually stunning and interactive app to showcase AIR’s unparalleled career. Take the next “giant leap” and bring a new interactive dimension to AIR’s celestial fascinations!

Available Assets:

• 66 audio albums, EPs and multi-track singles – representing AIR’s entire career, including EPs, remixes and rarities albums
• 16 official video singles – including all iconic music videos and the “Eating Sleeping Waiting And Playing” documentary about AIR’s 1998 North American & European tour.
• 119 promotional videos – live performances, EPKs, bonus films, and TV adverts available in various video encode qualities.
• 244 artwork files - layered, editable or high resolution artwork for the full audiovisual back-catalog.
• 139 high res press photos and video stills.
• 59 promotional graphics – including layered posters, logos, press ads, and album / DVD booklets.
• 23 biographies and multi-language press releases detailing AIR’s career.
• Webtools including webpage and banner templates, vector logos, wallpapers, layered artwork and more.

Read more about the AIR Artist Sandbox and register for access at the AIR Artist Sandbox page

Developer Newsletter for February 2011

Hey Echo Nest developers. In this month’s newsletter we highlight updates to the Echo Nest APIs, show off some really cool apps that were built recently on the Echo Nest platform, give a recap of the recent Music Hack Day in New York, present my new favorite non-music API,  and we announce a new partnership between The Echo Nest and Island Def Jam.

New API features: Catalog/Feed

This month we added a new feed method to our catalog API.  The feed method allows you to easily query for all of the latest information (news, reviews, blogs, audio and video) for all of the artists in a catalog.  You can use this method to create personalized information sources. For example you can build a catalog containing the favorite artists for a listener. With the feed method you can use this catalog to create a personalized music newspaper filled with the latest news and reviews for every artist in the catalog.

Music Hack Day NYC

During the weekend of February 12 and 13th nearly 200 music hackers gathered for New York City’s first Music Hack Day.  It was an amazing event that culminated in a standing-room-only crowd watching hackers demo the many hacks that were built during the weekend, including over 30 hacks that were built on top of the Echo Nest API.  Some of our favorites were:

• Heartbeat - A program that utilizes the familiarity and hotttnesss of songs, combined with the overall tempo of the song to gradually lower heart rate and stress.
• GridSong - a web app that allows you to visually interact with your music collection.
• Vib Ribbof - a music based reaction game that runs in your browser.
• Flowlist - an interactive playlist generator that bridges the gap between fully automatic recommenders and manual playlist building.  

Evolver.fm has great coverage of the many hacks built during the weekend.   Also check out this recap with links to photos and news articles: “We Will Hack”.  

Current tentative schedule for upcoming Music Hack Days are: Spring in San Francisco, Summer in London, Fall in Boston. Check MusicHackDay.org for the latest updates.  

My new favorite non-music API is Twilio!

While at the Music Hack Day NYC, I learned about Twilio, a cloud communications company that provides a web-service API to build scalable reliable communications apps.  John Britton, one of our co-organizers of the Music Hack Day is a developer evangelist for Twilio. John gave a superb live-hacking demo where he did some really clever things with our phones - including making one giant conference call that included all the hackers in the room. Check out this recording of a demo that John gave at the New York Tech Meetup.

Cool music apps

Here are just a couple of the cool apps that were built recently using the Echo Nest technology. 

• Pocket Hipster  - “It’s, like, the
•  coolest music app ever… but you’ve probably never heard of it..”  Pocket Hipster lets you listen to some of the hottest indie artists in the world right now. Each hipster will scan your iTunes library and recommend new music you should listen to. 

• Discovr - It’s an interactive map of millions of bands and
• artists. It lets you see how the music you love is connected, and makes it easy to discover new bands and artists that are similar to what you like.  

If you are interest in reading about new music apps (even apps that are not built with Echo Nest technology) be sure to read Eliot Van Buskirk’s new blog: Evolver.fm  

The Echo Nest partners with Island Def Jam to create opportunities for developers

The Echo Nest has partnered with the legendary Island Def Jam Music Group, a division of Universal Music Group, to form the first-ever alliance between a major label and the independent app developer community.

As part of the agreement, Island Def Jam will make its music available for any developer to create commercial apps using The Echo Nest’s APIs. ”Amazing music experiences for fans across all screens is our true goal.” says Jon Vanhala, SVP Digital at Island Def Jam Music Group. “The Echo Nest’s world class data and APIs combined with our world class artist roster and catalog creates a streamlined innovation environment, designed to inspire the best and brightest in the developer community, attract brand partnerships, and facilitate speed to market with more remarkable, engaging apps.”

Details about how developers can take advantage of this partnership and start building apps around IDJ content will be forthcoming.

On the calendar

Some Echo Nest talks and appearance for March:

• Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery   With so much music available, finding new music that you like can be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate the wheat from the chaff. In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting music that they will like.  Paul Lamere  SXSW Austin, TX, March 13
• Love Music & APIs  In the old days it was DJs, A&R folks, labels and record store owners that were the gatekeepers to music. Today, we are seeing a new music gatekeeper emerge… the developer. Using open APIs, developers are creating new apps that change how people explore, discover, create and interact with music.  Matt Ogle  SXSW Austin, TX, March 14 
• Topic TBD - Brian Whitman - momo Amsterdam, March 28

It is exciting for all of us here at the Echo Nest to see all of the cool things people are building on top of the Echo Nest APIs.  We are continually surprised and delighted by the creativity of you folks. 

Remember to let us know when you build something using our stuff so we can add it to our showcase. 

Thanks

Paul Lamere
Director of Developer Platform
The Echo Nest

Music Hack Day comes to New York City

Mark your calendar!  Music Hack Day is coming to New York City on February 12 and 13.  Registrations are live, and going fast. This event is guaranteed to sell out. Register early if you want a seat:  nyc.musichackday.org

The Developer Nest - January 2011

The Echo Nest Developer Newsletter

Happy New Year from The Echo Nest.  This year we are starting a developer newsletter where we’ll let you know what is new with our developer offerings, give you ideas for music apps, hints on using our API,  as well as offering examples and best practices to make it easier for you to build apps on top of the Echo Nest.

What’s new with the Echo Nest API?
We’ve been quite busy adding all sorts of new features to our API.  In July we released Version 4 of the Echo Nest API. In V4, we rearchitected our API and the back-end sever infrastructure so our API is faster, more reliable, and has better uptime than ever before.  An added benefit of V4 is that it is now much easier for our engineers to add new features to our APIs.  Here’s just a sample of the many new features that were added to the Echo Nest API in the last year:

• Support for JSON and JSONP - all API methods can now respond in either XML or JSON
• New Songs API - search for any of millions of songs in the Echo Nest database and retrieve all sorts of information about the songs including song hotttnesss, tempo, loudness, danceability, energy and the detailed Echo Nest analysis.
• New Playlisting API - The Playlisting API  lets you construct playlists based on a flexible set of artist/song selection and sorting rules.  The Echo Nest has deep data about millions of artists and songs.  For instance, we know how popular Lady Gaga is, we know the tempo of every one of her songs,  we know other artists that sound similar to her, we know where she’s from, we know what words people use to describe her music (‘dance pop’, ‘club’, ‘party music’, ‘female’, ‘diva’ ).  With the Playlisting API you can use this data to select music and arrange it in all sorts of flexible ways - from very simple  playlists of similar sounding songs to elaborate playlists drawing on a wide range of parameters.  
• Personal catalogs API - This API lets you make all of the Echo Nest features work in your own world of music. With Personal Catalogs (PCs) you can define application or user specific catalogs (in terms of artists or songs) and then use these catalogs to drive the behavior of other Echo Nest APIs.  PCs open the door to all sorts of custom apps built on the Echo Nest platform.  
• Project Rosetta Stone - Project Rosetta Stone is an update to the Echo Nest APIs  to support non-Echo-Nest identifiers.   The goal for Project Rosetta Stone is to allow a developer to use any music id from any music API with the Echo Nest web services.  For instance,  if you have a Musicbrainz ID for Weezer,   you can call any of the Echo Nest artist methods with the Musicbrainz ID and get results.  Additionally,  methods that return IDs can be told to return them in different ID spaces.  So, for example,  you can call artist/similar method and specify that you want the similar artist results to include Musicbrainz artist IDs.

What’s next?  We have lots of things planned for 2011 so stay tuned. We can’t say exactly what we are doing yet, but suffice to say we’ll be adding lots more cool stuff for you to use in your next music app.  If you have suggestions about what you’d like to see in the API post them to our Feature Request forum.

The sun sets on V3 of the Echo Nest API
We released version 4 our our API back in July of 2010. At that time we indicated that support for version 3 of the API would stop at the end of 2010. We have now picked Feb 1, 2011 as the date when V3 will be turned off. Calls made to V3 of the API will no longer work after Jan 31, 2011.

What does this mean for you? If you already using V4 of the APIs you do not need to do anything. Likewise, if you are using a recent version of Pyechonest (our Python client), Remix or jEN (our Java client), you are already using V4 and don’t need to do anything. If, however, you are using V3 of our APIs, then you will need to switch to V4 by Feb 1, 2011, otherwise your application will stop working. But, really, you should already by using V4 since it is faster, has many more features and supports all sorts of coolness like Rosetta Stone, JSON, JSONP and so on.  If you have any questions or concerns about the sunsetting of V3 of the API send me an email at paul@echonest.com

Music Hack Days
Here at the Echo Nest we love Music Hack Days.  The main goal of Music Hack Day is to explore and build the next generation of music applications. It’s a full weekend of hacking in which participants will conceptualize, create and present their projects. Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related. In 2010 we’ve participated and/or helped organize Music Hack Days in Stockholm, Amsterdam, San Francisco, London, Barcelona and Boston.  If you like music and you like writing code, you should try to make it to a Music Hack Day.   Some upcoming Music Hack Days:

• Cannes Midem Hack Day - January 23, 24, 2011
• Music Hack Day New York - February 12, 13, 2011 - yes! Music Hack Day finally comes to the big apple!
• Music Hack Day San Francisco - Late Spring (Date to be determined)

Interested in what happens at a Music Hack Day? Then read What happens at a Music Hack Day.

Get yourself an Echo Nest t-shirt!
We love it when people build stuff using our API. If you’ve built something cool, let us know and if it is sufficiently cool we’ll add it to our application showcase and we’ll send you an Echo Nest tee-shirt.  If you build something that is süper-über-cool, we might even send you the coveted, and extremely rare Echo Nest sweatsedo.  Send
your application showcase submissions to paul@echonest.com.

Cool music apps
Here are just a few of the cool apps that were built recently using the Echo Nest technology. 

• The Swinger - This app takes any song and turns it into a swing version. Read more here, and try out a web-based version called The Swing Thing.

• MTV Music Meter - Find out what artists will be the next big thing. The MTV Music Meter is a music discovery experience. The ranking is determined by the real time buzz across the Internet. We look at tweets and other social mentions, blog posts, news articles, streams, and purchases for over one million artists. Then every day we show you the top 100 artists that are trending upwards in these categories.
• The Super Awesome Music Blog Finder Thingy - Getting tired of the same old Music Blogs? This app will help you find new blogs about your favorite artists.

If you are interest in reading about new music apps (even apps that are not built with Echo Nest technology) be sure to read Eliot Van Buskirk’s new blog: Evolver.fm

It is exciting for all of us here at the Echo Nest to see all of the cool things people are building on top of the Echo Nest APIs.  We are continually surprised and delighted by the creativity of you folks. Remember to let us know when you write something using our stuff so we can add it to our showcase and send you a t-shirt and maybe even the Echo Nest sweetsedo.

jQuery based Echo Nest API Plugin

Melbourne developer Samuel Richardson (aka Rodeoclash) has pushed out the first version of Echonest-jQuery-plugin.  The plugin lets you access the Echo Nest Artist APIs from your jQuery-based web-app.  Here’s a quick and dirty example of a couple lines of code that will populate a web page with images of Radiohead:

var echonest = new EchoNest("YOUR_API_KEY");
echonest.artist("Radiohead").images( function(imageCollection) {
    $('body').prepend( imageCollection.to_html('<img src="${url}">') );
});

Sam has released Echonest-jQuery-plug as open source- so head on over to github and grab yourself some jquery/Echo Nest coolness.  

QT/C++ client library

Leo Franchi has released version 1.0.0 of libechonest - a QT/C++ client library for the Echo Nest API. It currently supports all of the features of the Echo Nest API, including all the API functions.

Author: Leo Franchi

Language: QT/C++

Website: Latest version of libechonest

New API Release with playlisting upgrades

We’ve just pushed out an update to our APIs with lots of new goodness.  Here’s what is new:

Major Upgrade to the Playlist APIs

We’ve upgraded the dynamic playlisting APIs to allow you to steer a playlist based upon acoustic or cultural terms.  There are two new parameters:

• steer - allows you to steer the playlist based upon song-level attributes such as loudness, danceability, energy, tempo or song hotttnesss
• steer_description - allows you to steer the playlist based upon artist-level cultural attributes

With these two parameters you can steer playlists toward or away from songs based upon the current songs attributes. You can steer toward more danceable tracks, you can ban emo artists from appearing on the playlist, you can steer toward hottter songs.  

We’ve also added the ability to ban artists and songs on the playlist via the ‘ban’ parameter.  A banned song or artist will never appear on the playlist.   We’ve also updated and improved our algorithms such that when you rate a song on a playlist, we adapt the playlist to better match the type of music that you like.

We’ve added two new playlist types that work with Personal Catalogs:

• catalog - with this playlist type - you give a source catalog. Plays will be restricted to items that are in the catalog.  
• catalog-radio - with this playlist type you give a source catalog. Plays will be restricted to items that are in the catalog or similar to items in the catalog.

We’ve added a new API method called session_info that returns all sorts of interesting information about the current playlist session including top terms for the session, all seeds (artist, song, description or catalogs) used to create the playlist, banned artists, banned songs, skipped songs,  playlisting building rules, rated songs, and a complete play history.

There’s lots of new stuff in the playlist API. We’ll think you’ll like what you see.

Other API changes

There are a few other changes to our APIs that you might find helpful

• Song search now takes a ‘start’ parameter
• Track profile now returns a Song ID for many songs
• artist/songs response now includes the song title as well as the song ID

Finding similar artists with the Echo Nest API

The Echo Nest has spent years crawling the web to find out what people are writing about music. We take all this information, and run it through a bunch of NLP algorithms to look for meaningful patterns in the text that can help us determine attributes such as artist similarity.   We make this data available via an artist/similar API.  WIth this API you can get a set of similar artists for any of the many thousands of artists in the Echo Nest database.

Introducing Personal Catalogs

Here at the Echo Nest just added a new feature to our APIs called Personal Catalogs. This feature lets you make all of the Echo Nest features work in your own world of music. With Personal Catalogs (PCs) you can define application or user specific catalogs (in terms of artists or songs) and then use these catalogs to drive the behavior of other Echo Nest APIs.  PCs open the door to all sorts of custom apps built on the Echo Nest platform. Here are some examples:

Create better genius-style playlists – With PCs I can create a catalog that contains all of the songs in my iTunes collection.  I can then use this catalog with the Echo Nest Playlist API to generate interesting playlists based upon my own personal collection.  I can create a playlist of my favorite, most danceable songs for a party, or I can create a playlist of slow, low energy, jazz songs for late night reading music.

Create hyper-targeted recommendations  - With PCs I can make a catalog of artists and then use the artist/similar APIs  to generate recommendations within this catalog.  For instance, I could create an artist catalog of all the bands that are playing this weekend in Boston and then create Music Hack Day recommender that tells each visitor to Boston what bands they should see in Boston based upon their musical tastes.

Get info on lots of stuff – people often ask questions about their whole music collection. Like, ‘what are all the songs that I have that are at 113 BPM?‘, or ‘what are the softest songs?’  Previously, to answer these sorts of questions, you’d have to query our APIs one song at a time – a rather tedious and potentially lengthy operation (if you had, say, 10K tracks). With PCs, you can make a single catalog for all of your tracks and then make bulk queries against this catalog. Once you’ve created the catalog, it is very quick to read back all the tempos in your collection.

Represent your music taste – since a Personal Catalog can contain info such as playcounts, skips, and ratings for all of the artists and songs in your collection, it can serve as an excellent proxy to your music taste.  Current and soon to be released APIs will use personal catalogs as a representation of your taste to give you personalized results. Playlisting, artist similarity, music recommendations all personalized based on you listening history.

These examples just scratch the surface. We hope to see lots of novel applications of Personal Catalogs.  Check out the APIs, and start writing some code.

Danceability and Energy: Introducing Echo Nest Attributes

Tristan and I have been working hard to add a new kind of information to the Echo Nest’s audio APIs. We’re calling these things attributes, and they are quantities that are calculated with data from our track analysis. Our attributes depend on ground truth data generated by The Echo Nest’s awesome Data QA Team, a passionate group of musicians and music lovers that includes several Berklee students. When they tell us a song is danceable, we believe it.
 
Danceability
We each groove to different music; what constitutes dance music is inherently subjective. The Echo Nest defines danceability as the ease with which a person could dance to a song, over the course of the whole song. We use a mix of features to compute danceability, including beat strength, tempo stability, overall tempo, and more. One cool thing that I’ve noticed is that remixes of songs tend to have a higher danceability score than the originals.

Here’s the distribution of danceability over all the songs we have analyzed (over 14 million).

Energy
Energy is less subjective. How energetic is the music? Does it make you want to bop all over the room, or fall into a coma? The feature mix we use to compute energy includes loudness and segment durations.

Here’s the distribution of energy over all the songs we have analyzed (over 14 million):

Where’s the dance(ability) at?
Paul posted a teaser yesterday that hints at what kinds of things you can do with energy and danceability, together.

Here are the various ways you can interact with danceability and energy through the API:

• song.search - You can specify min/max danceability & energy when searching and sort your results by ascending or descending danceability/energy.
• track.profile - You can retrieve danceability/energy for a track.
• audio_summary -  danceability and energy are now part of a track’s audio summary.  Any place you can specify the audio_summary will give you danceability and energy (e.g. track.upload)
• playlisting (both static and dynamic) - You can specify min/max danceability & energy when creating a playlist  and sort the output by ascending or descending danceability/energy.

Attributes show how powerful and complete The Echo Nest’s analyze data is. Armed with only those JSON documents, you could make own attribute, too. Maybe you want to implement goodness? But seriously, what are you going to do with danceability & energy for Boston Music Hackday? I can’t wait to find out.

(Source: runningwithdata)