Audio Fingerprinting Spike

[agrieser]

When accepting audio files, we should not rely on user submitted metadata. It would be better to use audio fingerprinting to get the metadata.

We should spike the following libraries
http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/song.html#identify
http://acoustid.org/faq
https://github.com/lastfm/Fingerprinter
https://github.com/sampsyo/beets

[agrieser]

Echonest spike: Easy to use, fast and identifies files. Unfortunately they provide very limited metadata. We only get an echonest id, an artist, and a track name. While they claim to integrate with other services (music brainz, etc) they only do so on artists and albums, not tracks. The reason they give is that they can't tell which album an individual track comes from.

The workaround would be to take the track title, and artist name and look them up on a separate metadata api.

Here's the problem: I have a track, and echonest identifies it as artist: ratatat, title: stomp.
Musicbrainz has an entry for it: http://musicbrainz.org/recording/203161fc-fe6c-4584-941e-69809e34f461

But musicbrainz is using artist: Young Buck, T.I. & Ludacris. So searching for ratatat doesn't find anything.

So the fingerprinting is basically meaningless because we don't get any real identifier that would allow us to look it up elsewhere.

Here were the steps and data I used:

I downloaded the ENMFP binary from: http://developer.echonest.com/downloads/license
The api documentation for fingerprinting is found at: http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/song.html#identify

./codegen.Darwin ~/remixes/Ratatat_-_01_-_Young_Buck,_T.I._\&_Ludacris_-_Stomp.mp3 10 30

[{"metadata":{"artist":"", "release":"", "title":"", "genre":"", "bitrate":247,"sample_rate":44100, "duration":306, "filename":"/Users/agrieser/remixes/Ratatat_-_01_-_Young_Buck,_T.I._&_Ludacris_-_Stomp.mp3", "samples_decoded":661814, "given_duration":30, "start_offset":10, "version":3.16, "codegen_time":0.295904, "decode_time":0.193694}, "code_count":141, "code":"eJwllYl5hCEIRFv6EQ8ox7P_EvJmk_2C68ghMLhfGd_3lXERMREZiFkkhC1hW9sjvbMRVypP2EPFP1TcKgIIIcyF1Y5oRUJYx8yHMEXzkEhtp2wVzRfufUvvyOzIy5V46NWvSKBXTduCWfVPArOqaLVpq2i1Y1YVrYbMQiopTIHqktg6PfJyZfaI2wjwNfskUG5FmNw3uW9Np12nHZM2dCr3Tcm0lN6Sity3LQdHZlcqV5hidOXRFaPLfXdUetW24qDLf5f7PrQNTnpqu3SwpSfPXcWR2tffT7Ad-P6G4X4UbR3bIc9DGY4mTO0euvgICXkeUwe6-Ng_Iezqm5o8HjFDTQ41WekihFVt5TTU2hhFAtsQkfSP6BLCllTEoRCHQhxKdl-ql1mKBAcp5qQ8pzyn2pjKQbxEaPvjS-da93hv31mPisbJ6r0cjwLIusg5ylisx6lKXq3vs93H8lfo6jDWt-OJyW-vV2y_xad4xPD7rlEggfhpl4rZu3nPSEKMN8f6xW3vlviPa43CE9dntjrDxa3ZWil2PgMkfpBN9dt9AzqXT8Wv9fV3IYSnAdqGfrdW-w5NDQev3rb5YCDPdxiyc28orxWAkJm8rspiAr9cZ-26C_TseGYoGLVcXs2sN9XlMDKtLLj1qhUKfcjnW3u2uXrh7wF-s0cEYxmt5CSNFcXq7D4n0QCD-cwVVuDkE49qXYAfX83U0FlmMKu44n2Z33yziUzHy7rZjRzqno91_MCxxmRjutfhkHHQvWgcdeZeX2weg2ajUO-PRpnmLGBG7DYKU1U6oPn650yttB_mrG0CqXuhGNVgQJKXUd1N3U3zCki8-gGyEg87OpSjN38Mk-LefGdzz9nHHG_YXDPzJmufdyq0Cqn-cZ-5yk4iuLm3VYjA9336Tj_X4jl52BuBQsy2B2DngskIBwZie2UKDqW2oG_h6DPjPHOOfrXgft9F38-mjj6Nbg9A7luhwCaPdw4lyY88SCK_WcVTyktTeO57myOV8oQhqbd6A5LHJ-rhJ3gT3GZ_57oVez3XGyVrjEO-NLgBwovAWXXLrteOELs3qPk6cS392jtLw-ovxutlNep5rawyTz10sc89V9OcqWzg9L918gGn_wxIghNnJyC_WP0C_qh-9Lak7arfMn4lqkBKphfmZhniX2Mka17fGyZe8PFcYC2ebzM8DGjc8QeI4b7u", "tag":0}
]

This was then posted into their api:

curl -F "api_key=SDLKFJSDFLKJSDFL" -F "query=@query.json" "http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/identify"

Which responded with

{"response": {"status": {"version": "4.2", "code": 0, "message": "Success"}, "songs": [{"tag": 0, "score": 6, "title": "Stomp", "message": "OK (match type 6)", "artist_id": "AREPZK61187B990670", "artist_name": "Ratatat", "id": "SOWNNKW12B0B806712"}]}}

I also tried it with Wheezer - Hash Pipe, and got the following response:

{"response": {"status": {"version": "4.2", "code": 0, "message": "Success"}, "songs": []}}

Which means they were unable to identify it. Definitely not a good sign for a popular track like this.

[tonywok]

lastfm spike: Relatively easy to setup, available via homebrew. When lastfm finds the track, it includes track title, artist, and a *mbid.

If the search returns multiple tracks, as it seemed to do pretty regularly, it ranks the track matching. In my limited use, sometimes the highest ranking track did not contain a musicbrainz id, and one of the lower ranking tracks did have the musicbrainz id.

The workaround for this would be to search for a track, and grab the highest ranking result that also has a musicbrainz id. Then we'd hit musicbrainz for metadata.

Here are the steps and data I used:

I downloaded the lastfm Fingerprinter from: https://github.com/lastfm/Fingerprinter

Obscure Test

lastfmfpclient ~/remixes/Ratatat_-_01_-_Young_Buck,_T.I._\&_Ludacris_-_Stomp.mp3

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <lfm status="ok">
    <tracks>
      <track rank="1">
        <name>Stomp</name>
        <duration>284</duration>
        <mbid></mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Young+Buck,+T.I.+&amp;+Ludacris/_/Stomp</url>
        <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
        <artist>
          <name>Young Buck, T.I. &amp; Ludacris</name>
          <mbid></mbid>
          <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Young+Buck,+T.I.+&amp;+Ludacris</url>
        </artist>
      </track>
      <track rank="0.300999">
        <name>Young Buck, T.I. &amp; Ludacris - Stomp</name>
        <duration>306</duration>
        <mbid></mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat/_/Young+Buck,+T.I.+&amp;+Ludacris+-+Stomp</url>
        <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
        <artist>
          <name>Ratatat</name>
          <mbid>f467181e-d5e0-4285-b47e-e853dcc89ee7</mbid>
          <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat</url>
       </artist>
     </track>
     <track rank="0.275712">
       <name>Stomp (Young Buck, T.I. &amp; Ludacris)</name>
       <duration>306</duration>
       <mbid></mbid>
       <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat/_/Stomp+(Young+Buck,+T.I.+&amp;+Ludacris)</url>
       <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
       <artist>
         <name>Ratatat</name>
         <mbid>f467181e-d5e0-4285-b47e-e853dcc89ee7</mbid>
         <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat</url>
      </artist>
      </track>
      <track rank="0.166383">
        <name>Stomp</name>
        <duration>306</duration>
        <mbid></mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat/_/Stomp</url>
        <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
      <artist>
        <name>Ratatat</name>
        <mbid>f467181e-d5e0-4285-b47e-e853dcc89ee7</mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ratatat</url>
      </artist>
    </track>
  </tracks>
</lfm>

Mainstream Test

lastfmfpclient ~/remixes/Weezer\ -\ Hash\ Pipe.mp3 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<lfm status="ok">
  <tracks>
    <track rank="1">
      <name>Hash Pipe</name>
      <duration>186</duration>
      <mbid/>
      <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer/_/Hash+Pipe</url>
      <streamable fulltrack="0">1</streamable>
      <artist>
        <name>Weezer</name>
        <mbid>6fe07aa5-fec0-4eca-a456-f29bff451b04</mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer</url>
      </artist>
      <image size="small">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/34s/75285224.png</image>
      <image size="medium">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/64s/75285224.png</image>
      <image size="large">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/126/75285224.png</image>
      <image size="extralarge">http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/300x300/75285224.png</image>
    </track>
    <track rank="0.087046">
      <name>Hash Pipe (from CD)</name>
      <duration>186</duration>
      <mbid/>
      <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer/_/Hash+Pipe+(from+CD)</url>
      <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
      <artist>
        <name>Weezer</name>
        <mbid>6fe07aa5-fec0-4eca-a456-f29bff451b04</mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer</url>
      </artist>
    </track>
    <track rank="0.002058">
      <name>Weezer - hash pipe</name>
      <duration/>
      <mbid/>
      <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer/_/Weezer+-+hash+pipe</url>
      <streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
      <artist>
        <name>Weezer</name>
        <mbid>6fe07aa5-fec0-4eca-a456-f29bff451b04</mbid>
        <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Weezer</url>
      </artist>
    </track>
  </tracks>
</lfm>