@lindsay.at

I'm planning on going to the Music Hack Day in London in two weeks. I'll be waving the flag for The Echo Nest and their fabulous APIs. There's a lot being said elsewhere about it, but I wanted to send out a special welcome to French and Belgian hackers.

The hack day is being held at the Guardian's offices neat Kings Cross, London. That puts it just a couple hundred metres away from the Eurostar terminal in London. So, for precisely the price of a round-trip fare to London, you can hop on an 8am train, get fed throughout the event, housed on Saturday night, and return Sunday evening. Nothing else to worry about. Well worth considering if you're close to Lille, Paris, or Brussels. Oh boy, what I would have given for a weekend like this when I was living in Brussels...

So register right away: the spaces are now filling up fast!

And we can get up to antics like this:

(Which is just the Dissociated algorithm applied to video in synch with the audio, in the latest versions of the Echo Nest Remix API. In my opinion, it moves the image of the subject from being quirky to having serious battles with mental health.)

I haven't been writing on this blog. Never mind why not. I have, however, been writing on this site, trying to fill in the CMS's content a little more.

I wrote a couple pieces on work I have done with The Echo Nest Remix API. It wasn't planned, but it ended up being a good way out of a writing logjam I had found myself in. It was prompted, of all things, by a tweet by a colleague. Was there a place that explains it all? Actually, no, there wasn't.

It's not the finest literature, but I hope that my overview at least communicates my enthusiasm for the project. I've been talking about the principles behind Remix for years and years, but never found quite the right framework for giving those ideas shape. Why, yes, of course multimedia descriptions can be used to drive changes to the underlying media.

My favorite way of thinking of Remix is that it makes each song its own API: each song offers queries into its own features, and can return any number of transformed versions of itself, all of which are sensitive to the original song’s musical features

That sentence wasn't written off the cuff: it distills the essence of my current personal research.

I had meant to write about some further examples, but instead got sidetracked and spent some time looking at automatic documentation methods. It turns out that epydoc is pretty useful software. I had never used the reStructuredText markup language before, either. Although I found it to be a bit heavy on the "ant turd tokens," it was surprisingly usable, especially for code documentation.

So the second release I made last week was of the API documentation. I'm not completely comfortable with where it's hosted, but I did design the URL to be stable and long-lived, if it needs to be. In editing and polishing the documentation, it definitely helped me understand things better, and appreciate that this is turning out to be one formidable bit of software.

The third release was the one I had been planning from the beginning. I had hoped to let the world at all in one go, but the enthusiasm behind them (my own and from the people to whom I showed early versions) was too great for things to wait for my explanation of the Dissociated Mixes.

I knew I wanted to tell people about these mixes after the surprising results I got from writing a code example that illustrated what a sorting operator could do. A bit of thought, and the card metaphor came about. I wanted to make it as accessible as possible to a general audience, but also give enough detail to people who were technically minded—whether about technology or about music. Although the other documentation has gotten some attention from developers, I'm really enthusiastic about this piece for a general audience. It also approaches a silly topic with a fairly straight face. Sounds familiar…

As previously blogged, I attended the BBC's Mashed08 hack day. I explored some of the noteworthy hacks on the LOLCODE site, but it's time that I explain what I did with my 24 hours straight of hacking.

The number of APIs and virtual toys unleashed by the BBC at Mashed08 was a bit dizzying with all the choices. In the end, however, I had to go with an idea that had been rattling around in my head for the longest: a twitter bot based on the Echo Nest Recommend API. Twitter bots are nothing new, not terribly original, and not even all that feasible nowadays with the API limits, but it seemed quite a nice application of the EN Recommender.

What I spent a lot of time on was the ergonomics, context awareness, and giving the bot a memory, all in aid of getting maximal information from minimal effort from the (mobile) twitter user. The bot's name, 'recomme,' was designed to be easily keyable with a T9 keypad. I spent a fair amount of time on maximizing the amount of information in 140 characters.

Given a tweet with a bandname to @recomme, it responds with the closest recommended bands:

If you name one the BBC's (pop) music radio stations, then the bot is aware of the context at the time: it goes off and checks on what's currently playing:

If you messaged the bot too late, however, you can correct it, asking for the track immediately preceding:

If the recommendations are on target, you can ask for more of the same:

As you can see, there's a fair bit of state saved with each interaction with the bot, and it responds with as much information it can fit into the space allotted.

The fairly terse URLs that follow each set of recommendations are give each query some persistence, an easily accessible reminder of what was requested, capturing the context of the moment, and offering more verbose detail than can be captured in a 140 character message. The user's past queries (saveable, sharable) are also accessible via a linked user page.

The cherry on top, and perhaps the only part of the hack that couldn't conceivably be done last year, was that the BBC Audio & Music Interactive team brought live archives of the BBC pop music radio stations. For the Mashed08 event, I was able to link to these live, time-indexed archives, so in the above "BBCR1" query, the persistent link pointed to the right time in the past such that you would hear the BeatFreakz song that was playing at that time.

Most of the development time was spent re-learning parts of Django, and getting the model for the underlying web application ("memory") right. The twitter bot is a separate process that requests information from and saves things to the Django webapp with some special POST requests.

The project was a a fair bit of fun, and it felt rewarding to see it through. I'm a bit conflicted on whether to deploy it: I think it would be good, fun, and useful to some, but it could easily use another solid 24 hours of polish before it's presentable. Furthermore, Twitter is in no state to support a new bot: 20 API requests per hour are nearly useless for something that's ostensibly an interactive mobile application.

As a postscript, I noticed that the "recomme.com" domain was cybersquatted by the time I returned to my hotel in London. I wasn't too bothered by it, as I have other domains that could be pressed into service for this, but I was mightily impressed at who's paying attention.

I wish Brian and Tristan and the whole echonest crew the best of success. Beyond dropping the Analysis API on the public last autumn, they've finally come out to the public with a real corporate website and a hint of what they do.

The real treat is their this is my jam web application. It's audio mosaicing made popular and fun. Best of all, it's let me realise something I've dreamt of doing for years upon years:

Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine has been my personal earworm for about 30 years, back to when I first heard it on AM radio. I rediscovered it late in college, early grad school, and then around 2001, I discovered just how many covers were out there, via a long-forgotten file-sharing protocol. It's immensely satisfying to have a terse mix of fifteen versions of the song with a couple minutes' effort.

It would be nice to be able to return to the mix and tweak it a little, without creating another one, but then there's a rough perfection to it already. It's also worth noting that the RSS created on each page is also an iTunes-enabled podcast, if you want a way to get the MP3s onto your computer. My feed has already been duly added to my everywhere feed.

Hey, has anyone else noticed that there has finally been a boost to the iTunes Plus library on Apple's iTunes store? I noticed while browsing the iTunes Wi-Fi music store, but confirmed it using the normal store.

There are some notable things about it:

• The independents have arrived: it's not a cluster of further EMI songs, but rather they appear to be from small labels.
• The per-track price of the iTunes Plus (DRM-free, 256kbps AAC) tracks are $.99, not the increased $1.29 price. See, for example, the new Iron & Wine album's listing. The album costs $9.99, but the individual tracks are still only $0.99.
• As of this writing, the FAQ has not yet been updated: it still says that "iTunes Plus songs are available at $1.29 per song."

Which came first, the agreement with the indies on the new price, or Amazon's MP3 store? From where I sit, this looks like a reaction to Amazon, which seems like a first for Apple with the iTunes store.

Oh, in case anyone is curious, but hasn't been following my Twitter feed, I got an iPod Touch last week. It's magnificent, and a delight to use. It's even more of a joy to demo it to my colleagues and friends around here. They're very impressed with the price (£199), as well.

I just found out that Apple's having its annual shareholder meeting today. Here's a question that I was surprised didn't get asked on the financial statement phone conference a few weeks ago:

How much did the settlement with Apple Corps cost?

I mean, Apple clearly paid a lot of money to be absolutely in the clear with the name, and it seems that it's essentially buying goodwill and the ability to work in the clear in the music industry. I wondered about this before, but still haven't turned up any answers.

I spent most of last night offline, and only logged on at midnight to see what was up. Well, it turns out that a lot was up, and I felt compelled to spend the next couple hours crafting my response to the news at the mediadescri.be blog:

The majors’ implicit message in floating the idea of DRM-free music was, “You may enjoy your position as the major digital music portal today because of the dominant position we granted you, but we can take it away and open it to all comers by advocating MP3s.”

That brings us to today. Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music” is a masterful document.... It is an open letter to the majors in response to the anti-DRM whispering campaign of the past couple months. Jobs calls the majors’ bluff and says, “Go ahead, punks. I’ll call your bluff. Let’s all sell DRM-free music. Apple still has the clout to offer the most compelling top-to-bottom experience.” In one swift blow, Jobs has cut off any majors-initiated whispering campaign at the knees by getting worldwide attention as only he could.

I sort of bury the lede, but I like how the thousand-word post is pull-quoteable. I'm also fairly pleased to have something to say about the issue that's at least a little off the beaten track. Sadly, there are thousands of responses already, and it'll be hard to get any attention. I do faintly regret that I hadn't gotten to writing up the first half of the article (that the anti-DRM whispers are really the majors trying to find a bargaining wedge with Apple) earlier, as those thoughts had been forming for a while, but I like how it all comes together with yesterday's news.

I was impressed with the Digital Music weblog's further digging on Tower Records' demise... Majors pushed Tower over the edge, now the minors feel the pain:

The final nail in the coffin that sent Tower Records spiraling into its second bankruptcy came when three of the big four labels stopped shipping product and demanded payment to resume. Tower, unable to order new major label music had no choice but to file bankruptcy, and the rest is history.

What you may not have realized though, and what interests me most is, the major labels had very little to risk when they sent Tower into its final death throes. When Tower filled for bankruptcy the first time, the major labels asked the bankruptcy court to become secured creditors. When Tower toppled, its weight fell squarely on the competition of the majors; scores of independent labels for who Tower Records meant big business. The major labels will be paid just behind the banks who financed Tower's attempt at recovery, but well before the minor labels who compete with the majors for shelf space.

(Via The Digital Music Weblog.)

The ever-excellent Guardian gives a nice overview (and eulogy) of where Tower Records stands today:

Tower Records, once a sign of the vitality of the US music retail market, a multinational purveyor of musical knowledge and influence, has gone under. Two years ago the company filed for bankruptcy. It recovered and at the start of this year a new chief executive, a bankruptcy and crisis management specialist, was brought in. But on August 20 the company again filed for bankruptcy and three leading record labels stopped supplying the chain, saying that it had not paid its bills.

It's a bit of a shock to be reminded of yet another fondness of my past in America being destroyed. My whole time at MIT, I lived within a decent walking distance from large Tower Records outlets: across the river as an undergrad at Baker House, and in Harvard Square while living in north Cambridge as a Masters student. They made for a great (if not necessarily cheap) evening out, with Tower's late hours. I think a very sizable proportion of my CD collection came from Tower (probably second to Newbury Comics' wicked deep discounts), and a lot of my most treasured finds were from there.

With the force of their retail presence in the Boston area, I always thought of Tower as representing the solid establishment, with enough sway to have a definitive catalogue alongside the popular stuff. It turns out this was just a product of the times, and since I left America ten years ago, the landscape has changed dramatically. I don't think I can work up the energy for an anti-globalisation/homogenation rant at the moment. It's more of a melancholy recognition that America really has changed, and each time I return, I know it less and less.

[Update: I had no idea this was such a popular topic.]