Streaming commercial music on the web (for free)?

In that post, from April 2009, I mentioned I was looking for a way to add audio to our RAMA application (artist network visualization tool). Since then, Diogo implemented that functionality using the Flash last.fm artist radio player (following what the Music Explaura guys did). However, since a few weeks, that doesn’t seem to work anymore (neither on the Music Explaura). Guys at Last.fm must have changed something…

We thought about using Spotify, but as it is not yet available in Portugal, we had to use a proxy (to make it look as we’re from UK or Spain ) and that only seems to be working for a while and then stopped working. Are the proxy servers detected and banned rapidly?… dunno… but the fact it that this doesn’t seem to be the solution for us.

So we are looking for another way to stream music in our application.

Soundcloud looks good, but its music seems mostly non-commercial (or at least non-mainstream)… Looking into other possibilities. If anybody reading this has an idea, let us know. Thanks!

Post-SMC2009 post

After a crrrazy month of July, with the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2009) and the Summer School, here in Porto, and the following holidays in August, … I am back to work. And to blogging a bit…

I’ll certainly be blogging a bit here about diverse outcomes of SMC 2009. To start with, here is a first link to one of the student projects done during the Summer School. The name of the project is Andante, and it is about walking and exploring the city of Porto and 4 dimensions of its soundscape… check it out here. You will find more about all projects on the Summer School blog.

Trying out OmniFocus

OmniFocus looks good… This is a task management software that (supposedly) help you getting things done.

I’m trying it out… so far, I’m wasting time That’s always what happens with a new piece of software… But I’m confident I will eventually like it.

First comment though… it would really be better to be able to attribute more than 1 context to an action, and more than 1 project to an action…

I need a Spotify invite!

It seems Spotify launched a new developer website, including the “libspotify” C API package opening the way to write applications that utilize the Spotify music streaming service. 

Now… that seems to be just what we’d need in our RAMA application for adding audio to the interface (clicking on an artist name starting an audio feed). Apparently  that’s what the people behind the Music Explaura application used to do for playing audio. Now it seems they do it differently: using last.fm artist radios.

We should definitely look into both options…

George Tzanetakis MIR lecture in Porto

Today, George Tzanetakis is giving the last couple of lectures on MIR at the Catholic University here in Porto. Students will learn about MARSYAS.

Another paper

Monday, Luis Sarmento presented another of our recent research papers in the Workshop on Information Retrieval over Social Networks, at the European Conference on Information Retrieval, in Toulouse (yes, Toulouse!!!). The paper is about propagating tags from Wikipedia onto last.fm artists. Here goes the abstract:

In this paper we tackle the problem of automatically assigning tags to music artists in the Web 2.0 radio Last.fm. We present a proof-of-concept method that, using a reference list of Last.fm user-defined tags, searches Wikipedia abstracts of music artists (only those written in English language) for new tag candidates. Tag candidates are ranked using an heuristic weighting function. We evaluate the top ranked tag suggestion for over 27,000 artists
by (i) performing automatic evaluation using diachronic Last.fm data, and (ii) by performing manual evaluation on a sample of artists.

Our method shows promising results regarding the accurate propagation of artist tags: the top ranked suggestion is relevant for more than 50% of the artists. More specifically, the method shows good performance for artists with no previous user-defined tags, confirming that it can be worthwhile to investigate further in the context of the “cold start problem” typical of social tagging system. After analysing and discussing errors, we present several directions for future improvement of our method.

You can read the paper here.

RAMA in Lisbon

A few days ago, my very good friend and colleague Luís Sarmento, from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering in Porto went to Lisbon to present our work on “Visualising Networks of Music Artists with RAMA” in the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies. The paper is about visualizing music artist data from Last.fm, here goes the abstract:

“In this paper we present RAMA (Relational Artist MAps), a simple yet efficient interface to navigate through networks of music artists. RAMA is built upon a dataset of artist similarity and user-defined tags regarding 583.000 artists gathered from Last.fm. This third-party, publicly available, data about artists similarity and artists tags is used to produce a visualization of artists relations. RAMA provides two simultaneous layers of information: (i) a graph built from artist similarity data, and (ii) overlaid labels containing user-defined tags. Differing from existing artist network visualization tools, the proposed prototype emphasizes commonalities as well as main differences between artist categorizations derived from user-defined tags, hence providing enhanced browsing experiences to users.”

RAMA is still work in progress, but can already download the application here. Go ahead!

The best tool for project management?

I’m looking into different project management software to help me keeping track of the diverse projects I am involved in/leading.

Ideally, I’d like it to have the following features:

• an issue tracking system (or “tickets”) 
• keep track of diverse categories of things: people, tasks, experiments, etc.
• wiki
• multiple users
• Source code management (at least SVN)
• private-public options for any content
• tags (or multiple categories) for any piece of content
• export content in diverse readable formats, at least Latex (but also text, word, pdf)
• a citation system (a-la BibTex)
• comments
• multi-project support

I can’t seem to find all these features in a single framework… I’m looking into RedMine and Trac… and their respective plugins (here and here and here)… but there are some features I can’t seem to find…

Help, somebody!

Funds for scientist mobility

I have just found out about a number of grants for fostering scientist mobility between Portugal and a number of other countries: Brazil, France, Algeria, Bulgaria, China (only for Social Sciences), Corea, Croatia, Denmark, Slovakia, Greece, India, Ireland, Luxemburg, Mexico, Romenia, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany  and United Kingdom. (So far….)

That doesn’t seem to be much money, around a couple of thousand euros, depending on the particular grant, but that should cover travel and accommodation costs for a couple of trips per year. That’s still interesting.

The following ones look especially interesting (for us at INESC Porto):

• The grants of the “Conselho de Reitores das Universidades Portuguesas” (thanks for the tip Carlos)
  • Acções Integradas Luso-Alemãs (deadline 5 June 2009)
  • Acções Universitárias Integradas Luso-Francesas (deadline 5 June 2009)
  • Grants for collaboration with Spain and UK are closed now, but I should have a look at it some other time in the future
• The FCT Grants under Bilateral Protocols, especially that between FCT and CNRS (deadline probably around October 2009)

FCT funds?

Looking for funds (Fundo de Apoio à Comunidade Científica) from the FCT, both for the conference and the summer school.