Do you have a fingerprinted music collection?
I can see lots of advantages to having one: potential auto-tagging, better playcounts (i.e., if you play a lossy and lossless version of the same song, they should update the counts of both), audio analysis may help generating playlists (see what musicIP mixer does), you can compare your collection to those of your friends (even if you use different audo formats and have different tags), etc.

Here at HA we may have the most obsessed people when it comes to music collections. I see fingerprinted collections as the logical next step. But how many people actually use fingerprints?

PS: I wonder how last.fm can manage their -huge- collection without fingerprints. Do they rely on people having perfect tags? What if I submit a song with a mispelling?

Edit: I screwed up the poll options, and don't know how to edit the poll (!). Sorry.

Do you have a free fingerprinting implementation? (free as in freedm)

AFAIK, there's no serious free one available.

I don't see much sense in using proprietary technology for such an immense task like scanning a whole music collection.

Last.fm can now also submit fingerprints where available but they mostly rely on people with perfect tags.

I myself don't use fingerprints, picard has had trouble matching my music, plus I hate the extra tags.

libFooID?

I don't maintain the server much anymore, but the library is free and open souce, and the algorithm performs extremely well.


I was hoping someone would take it up from there, but what happened is that I just get a flood of emails of people asking "how do I do get_fingerprint("file.mp3"); ?????/"

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/AudioFingerprint

Has both open source and proprietary ones there.

I use Musicbrainz Picard to tag my files with the help of fingerprinting. It doesn't recognise all my files correctly, but it does help a lot. I don't really mind about the extra tags (and I can always remove them later with foobar), and don't really care about the algorithm being proprietary or not, as long as it works.

the options in the poll were going to be:
yes, MusicIP
yes, libFooID
No, I don't see the point.
No, I don't care.

I thought MusicIP was proprietary. This is also what musicBrainz uses now. BUT... I think musicIP is actually two things, fingerprint AND audioanalysis. The fingerprint part seems to be open source:
http://www.musicip.com/dns/faq.jsp
Why did MusicIP open-source MusicDNS?



Garf, if the libFooID performs so well (using psychoacoustics, while libofa doesn't use it) why is musicIP not using it?

What do you want people to take up with the foosic server?

The fingerprinting code is open source. The server maintaining the mapping to unique id's is proprietary. Having a central repository is key to making sure the puids remain unique, as opposed to having to use the full blown fingerprint representation. Access to the server is as close to free as we could make it - you only pay after 5 million hits per month, something crazy like that, and it's only $250 per year. Basically we're trying to offset the costs to keep the servers running.

We provide MusicDNS because we believe that metadata is basic information which no one really owns. Since the fingerprinting is a side-effect of our main business (music analysis), and not the core feature, we believe that can work to everyone's advantage. We've also set up our relationship with MusicBrainz so that if MusicIP ever gets bought/taken out for business reasons, MB will get a copy of the server, so they can maintain the canonical puids independently if necessary.

Wendell

See response above. Essentially, they've got a "good enough" alternative with a commercial entity paying for the costs of running the servers etc.

http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/mus...ust/013252.html



Well, I don't want anything, I had fun writing the library and demonstrating that the server works. But I was disappointed to see that the only people to try the libFooID library were the ones who really had not enough clue to do anything usefull with it.

Obviously, the lack of a free fingerprinting library is not what is holding back nice applications based on fingerprinting. It seems to be more a lack of capable people who are interested.

I fingerprint some tracks by me writing "eldino" into the ID3V2 Comments tags.. it's not exactly a fingerprinting but helps friends to remember who gave them those tracks ehe hehe =)

I dont know why I should fingerprint my collection. I dont need it at all.

Well, for a start, I use MusicIP to automatically grab tags.
Before, I used free DB, and was out of luck in I didn't have a complete album or if I didn't have the order right. Plus there were a lot of false positives, and incorrect tags. Far cry form an automatic process.

Now I just highlight all songs, and press "fix tags" in Music IP. That IS automatic.

If only musicIP grabbed album art and applied replaygain, I'd be in heaven.

Nice poll!

I've been using MusicIP since it was MusicMagic Mixer
My collection has close to 30,000 tracks fingerprinted - with more added every day. Since a little over half of my music consists of full live shows (from The Live Music Archive), the fingerprinting isn't very effective at discovering/fixing tags. I use them for what MusicIP shines at - creating interesting mixes based on the accoustic fingerprint.