Last.fm: Audio Fingerprinting and Artist Tagging
Last.fm began offering Audio Fingerprinting on August 29, to recognize and properly classify each track submitted to their enormous database. Within 24 hours, Last.fm received over one million fingerprints from their users, or 42 fingerprints per second.
Last.fm coined the term Audioscrobbling, their “unique music recognition system”; scanning and gathering song information (artist, track, album, etc.) as Last.fm members listen to songs… then using this data to create a musical profile of each Last.fm member. According to Wikipedia, over ten million songs are scrobbled every day.
The problem is that artist names are often misspelled, track names may or may not contain the track number, and album titles are also misspelled as they’re passed from person to person through file-sharing. Last.fm’s answer to this is by fingerprinting audio files.
Audio fingerprinting goes as step further and actually scans your music files on your computer. It uniquely identifies the audio file, then sends the information back to Last.fm so they can gather common misspellings. This way, if enough copies of Radiohed’s In Rainbrows is passed around, Last.fm won’t be tricked into creating a new artist entry for Radiohed.
Audio fingerprinting is voluntary, so Last.fm isn’t secretly scanning your music collection. They’re asking that if you have a large music collection to consider downloading the beta Last.fm Fingerprinter application. It’s available for Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux. A new and improved Fingerprinting app is promised to be released within the next few days.
For you music geeks that obsess about editing artist wikis on Last.fm, there are more tags to familiarize yourself with:
- Place formed
- Year formed
- Year split
- Year reformed
- Band member (and specifying which years they were active)
- Official website of the band
Information marked with these tags will show up in a Factbox on the artist’s page. If it bothered you that a link to the artist’s website isn’t easily found on their Last.fm page, this will change soon with the help of these tags.