Chasing Lions

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.

14 Comments »

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1. Didn’t Last.fm Just sell out to CBS for $270+ million in hard, cold cash?

   Comment by Alan A. — November 9, 2007 #

2. Audioscrobbler merged with last.fm in 2005. They were seperate projects. Im pretty positive that last.fm had nothing to do with coining the phrase “audioscrobbling”

   Comment by Douglas — November 9, 2007 #

3. Is this the Last.FM blog? I love Last.FM myself and I also just got turned onto http://Anywhere.fm and Im awaiting my invitation code to http://Sleep.FM. Anyone got a code to there yet?

   Well I think Last.FM will also be my favorite music discovery site, it’s just cool to discover new music through your neighbors!

   Jimmy

   Comment by Jimmy — November 10, 2007 #

4. [...] read more | digg story [...]

   Pingback by Music top DIGG news » Last.fm: Audio Fingerprinting and Artist Tagging — November 10, 2007 #

5. [...] Last.fm: Audio Fingerprinting and Artist Tagging - “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.” [...]

   Pingback by … piece 0 plastic - the revolution will be blogged … » Blog Archive » ruff linkage . 200745 — November 10, 2007 #

6. Douglas: Audioscrobbler and Last.fm were founded and run by the same people. Originally, Audioscrobbler was just the listening statistics side of things. Last.fm was the radio side, but it provided customized stations based on your listening statistics from Audioscrobbler. Together, they formed a really cool listening stats/music discovery/community thing. After a while, and for reasons unknown to me, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm were merged to become what Last.fm is today.

   Comment by Trevor — November 10, 2007 #

7. So, a media company is gathering listening habits not just by metadata, but now by audio fingerprinting?

   Hmmm…how many people are voluntarily (and unknowingly) sending evidence against themselves to CBS?

   Comment by will — November 10, 2007 #

8. The war between music fans and music companies continues…

   Comment by MusicNerd — November 10, 2007 #

9. Hi there…I Googled for salma hayek ask the dusk, but found your page about o.us poetry…and have to say thanks. nice read.

   Comment by Dina Hayek — November 10, 2007 #

10. @ will (and others)

    The fingerprint data of a song is the same for every format. It doesn’t matter if you listen to an original audio CD or some warezed MP3 file, the fingerprint is still the same. The fingerprint data isn’t interesting as “evidence”, not even to RIAA and alike. Last.fm always showed what music you played but not from what format it came, fingerprinting doesn’t change anything to that.

    If the fingerprint would be different per format it wouldn’t really be usefull for detecting misspellings.

    Comment by MenthiX — November 10, 2007 #

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12. [...] is fixing common misspellings in track information through Audio Fingerprinting.read more | digg story Posted by admin Filed in [...]

    Pingback by desinner » Blog Archive » Last.fm: Audio Fingerprinting and Artist Tagging — November 12, 2007 #

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