Music Hack Day London

UPDATED 2 (links fixed, apps added):

Another Music Hack Day (London) was held this past weekend. Below are the hacks:

• Paul G music-on-hold hack (call his conference number and select the music you want to hear
• Cuttle (access music library on iDevice under iOS 4, and run a live remix using realtime beat tracker)
• Big Piano (inspired by the movie Big - big floor piano that you can make music with)
• Future of music 2010 (a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to be listening to anymore based on your preferences, and then deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive)
• Gramophone (browse around the world, pick a month from history and find songs that were played live then and there)
• HOTTTABS (crawls the web for you and retrieve the guitar tabs of the hottests songs of the moment according to their level of difficulty)
• BumbleTab patient guitar tutor (a very patient guitar tutor)
• Daily Sample Set (ruby script that pulls the hottest downloadable uncompressed Creative Commons tracks from SoundCloud within last 24 hours)
• Piracy (android app that allows you to drop tracks from your music collection on your current location, allowing others to grab them if they're close enough)
• Playlistr (imports/exports XSPF playlists, imports tracklists from the BBC Programmes website, links to stream on Spotify and buy from 7digital)
• Disco Snake (play the classic game snake, but you have multiple pieces of food available at any time, and eating a piece of food adds a note to a playing sequence with a pitch and velocity corresponding to the position of the food, and crashing in to your tail results in switching to a new set of samples)
• Singalong (quick access to tablature from your favorite bands)
• Speakatron (a program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth)
• The Cut Liberator (a python script to autogenerate cut up hip hop mixes)
• Roomba Recon (The inspiration for this project is a robot solving a maze. Or cleaning a house. The general idea is to construct coherent playlists that traverse from a start to end song on the Soundcloud with minimal prior knowledge.)
• Webloop_Revisited (The webloop, in its first incarnation remotely presented at music hack day STHLM, is an ongoing experiment in using modern browsers to generate sound. On one hand. On the other hand it tries to find ways to allow people to collaboratively create music.)
• Earth Destroyers (For my London Music Hackday hack I built a web app called 'Earth Destroyers'. Give Earth Destroyers a band name and it will show you how eco-friendly the band's touring schedule is. Earth Destroyers calculates the total distance traveled from the first gig to the last along with the average distance between shows. If an artist has an average inter-show distance of greater than a 1,000 km I consider it an 'Earth Destroyer'. The app also shows you a Google map so you can see just how inefficient the tour is.)
• 7digital Never-ending Popquiz ("Arcade style" never-ending popquiz. Reaching next level will bring new type of questions and they get more difficult with each level. Wrong answers cost you lives. You can choose different genres to play and questions are generated randomly from top artists tagged with this genre. Options for answers are generated from similar artists to the correct answer.)
• 7x7 (a square of 7x7 notes, where the notes can be selected by using the mouse. All notes within the selected rectangle are played, creating various chords. When notes are selected they are played according to an Attack-Duration-Decay envelope, where the user has no control of the parameters.)
• MixCloudPad (a sit back way of enjoying MixCloud content on your iPad)
• MashBox (The user selects a track and the system mixes it with another that is chosen at random (within limits), and uploads to http://soundcloud.com/mashbox)
• SongkickGiglister (An Android oriented Songkick gig lister for people who agree to go to gigs before they've heard the band. Fetches the upcoming gigs for a given user, pulling in data about the bands: links to Spotify, tracks from around the web etc.)
• Accessible music (This hack is a web browser where songs are triggered with mouse over movements)
• MuseScore OSC Remote (several musicians scoring together)
• I was there (tour t-shirts from your Songkick gigography)
• Gowalla for SoundCloud (check in with Gowalla to a particular venue and get a free SoundCloud stream/download)
• Cleversounds (next time you visit a place with a cleversounds jukebox (at the moment, just laptops), you will be played artists that you like)
• Music Mag (create a music magazine from Guardian content)
• The Sound of Tweets (simple web app to turn tweets into pieces of music)
• Swearaoke (this is a game where you play Guitar Hero guitar, and this makes the words to a song)
• Auto Score Tubing (YouTube.com is stuffed with great musical performances. Imagine these videos playing along with the musical score! While manually synchronizing a score measure per measure along with the video is possible, automatic synchronizing would be even greater.)
• The Sound of Data About Justin Bieber (exploring how fan data could be presented not as visualizations, but instead as sounds)
• Political Echonalysis (exploring the style of politcal speech by analysing the audio data)
• Not That Song (add songs from your 7digital locker to playlist that tells you how well those tracks fit together, or not)
• Head Tracking Sound Installation (breakout Game with Procedurally Generated Audio - actions in the game affect the audio output)
• BBC Dance & Electronica Archive & Recommendations (tracklist archives for all dance & electronica shows, finds listed tracks on SoundCloud, after entering your Last.FM username, it recommends artists based on the _complete_ tracklist)
• Mortal Songbat (a musical version of Mortal Kombat)
• Radio Map (sweeping the frequency spectrum on an old analogue radio to the digital web-radio world)
• SoundWheel (Sound Wheel is a circular synthesizer that uses synesthesia and variable intonation to make funky sounding basslines)
• Chatter-FM (call a number and leave a message that will be uploaded to soundcloud)
• Nirtous Oxide (webcam midi controller that tracks colours / fruits)

It's inspiring to see what can be developed in a weekend - congrats to all! While I haven't experimented with any of the above hacks, based on the brief summaries they've provided, my favorites are Disco Snake, Earth Destroyers, I was there, Gowalla for SoundCloud and Mortal Songbat. Btw, if you are not familiar with Music Hack Day, watch these two videos:

musiXmatch: next generation song lyrics API

musiXmatch (mXm) is a new startup that's aiming to build the next generation song lyrics API, providing detailed metadata about the artists who performed it, the genre, influences, related artists, and digital rights management for clearing content for distribution. The company has partnered with MusicBrainz to help acquire metadata, and recently raised 400K EUR (about 500K USD). While musiXmatch is presently a restricted alpha product, additional features will include:

• search lyrics using either unstructured queries or open source identifiers such as MusicBrainz;
• take advantage of metered search-engine friendly lyric displays without the worry of copyright infringement;
• obtain a complete list of performing artists, organized and filtered in a variety of ways, including biographies and images;
• obtain a complete discography for each performing artist, complete with release dates, tracks and cover art

Free Concert Discovery App

Updated:
Flyer is a free concert discovery app that searches your iTunes music library and provides an up-to-date listing of shows for those artists based on the geographical area you define (see video demo below).

Presently in beta, the initial version of Flyer is a desktop-based app that utilizes the Bandsintown API, and works with both Macs and PCs using iTunes. If you have any questions/comments, please contact Shane O'Donnell.

ReverbNation updates their My Band Facebook App

Yesterday, ReverbNation released the latest version of their already successful My Band Facebook App, based on feedback and suggestions from their users (read their full announcement here). Some of the new features include:

• tour map, show schedule with details, ticket links, sharing
• fan-exclusive downloads
• custom header banner
• aggregated fan count stats (MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation Mailing list)
• song lyrics
• links to retailers like iTunes and Amazon

Here's a screenshot of how it works (it's their fake band to demonstrate the app) - what do you think of their revisions:


 

Top 10 Music-Based Facebook Apps

According to All Facebook, the unofficial Facebook resource, below are the current top 10 music apps on Facebook (based on monthly active users):

ArtistData Opens Developer Environment, Approaches 4 Millionth Update

ArtistData announced earlier today that they just passed the 3.75 millionth update to their partner network (see below) on behalf of the 25K plus artists that use their service. Wow, congrats Brenden!

ArtistData also announced today 7 new partners to its platform, for a total of 28 (see above), including Bandzoogle, LiveMusicMachine, MobBase, MobileRoadie, Scout66, SeeJoeRock, and Songkick. They join existing partners, like Bandsintown, FanBridge, Jambase, and Sonicbids - there are now over 50 companies currently working to integrate with ArtistData (to be announced as they become available).

Additionally, ArtistData has opened its developer environment to all developers - all you need to do is sign-up and you'll receive a free developer key. For more information, please see: http://developers.artistdata.com.

The Echo Nest adds Music Library to Developer Platform with Play.me Partnership

Over the last year, Music Hack Day and other music developer events have been a sandbox for hundreds of new music apps built on The Echo Nest’s platform, from music video games to remix apps, playlisting tools to mobile apps and more; here are a few. But, most have never been commercialized, as content licensing constraints have been a roadblock, until now...

Beginning today, and just in time for Music Hack Day San Francisco, developers will have access to millions of songs powered by Play.me. The partnership gives developers both open access to The Echo Nest developer platform along with Play.me’s deep library of licensed music content, allowing anyone to potentially commercialize their hacks through affiliate revenue. Additionally, developers can earn money from cash incentives for the most popular applications.

Interactive Facebook Promotion Widget from ReverbNation

ReverbNation has created a super easy widget to assist their artists in promoting themselves on Facebook. It's intuitive, interactive and easy for fans to share, and the artist's music doesn't stop while a listener is learning more about the band - expect this tool to be a hit quickly! Check it out in this video overview:

Bandsintown is on the Move: Announces Partnerships and Expands Board of Advisers

My friends over at Bandsintown just announced significant API partnerships with EMI, Shazam and ReverbNation, as well as the appointment of Paul Vidich to their board of advisers. Paul is a former EVP with Warner Music and a former director at Ticketmaster UK.

These are key partnerships for Bandsintown, as it will expand their reach considerably. For example, Bandsintown will now deliver tour dates and ticket links to more than 60 million songs tagged each month on Shazam, Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM) RED apps. Additionally, Bandsintown will also provide concert information to over 20 million music fans throughout ReverbNation's network looking to purchase tickets, and a similar arrangement with EMI artists as well. Nice work guys, congrats!

If you haven't had a chance to explore Bandsintown, now's the time, and they have a great iPhone app too. Not to mention, they've made tremendous progress since their launch in 2007, just take a look at some of these stats:

• aggregate ticket information from more than 100 different ticketing companies in 160 countries
• expose concert data to more than 50 million people monthly through their partner network
• over 150,000 upcoming events
• an active developer community with more than 70 developers utilizing their data in various global music sites and applications - here's just a few of them

To read their full press release regarding these partnerships and the appointment of Paul Vidich to their board of advisers, please go here.

RadioDNS

The RadioDNS project is creating an extensible DNS based specification which could significantly improve the delivery and experience of broadcast radio over the Internet by linking the stations signal to IP delivered services, allowing for interactive enhancements like music ratings, artist news, visualizations, meta data, and more.

ExtensionFM

Just found out about ExtensionFM from Paul Lamere; it's a pre-release Chrome extension to help you discover, play and build a music library. Looks cool, and seems like they're giving out invite codes.

ArtistData Releases Improved UI, New Features, Paid Options and more

ArtistData just released some significant improvements this morning. Below is a little bit of what Brenden Mulligan had to say (go here to read his detailed announcement):

"Today we released the single largest revision to the ArtistData platform. For the past few months we've been reworking and improving the user interface to develop a framework that will allow us to drastically expand our site's capabilities. We are thrilled to share it with everyone today....

There are many back-end upgrades, including time-zone support to make our timed notifications more relevant, full character support so users all over the world can use their native characters and a ton of smaller bug fixes just to make the site work better.

The biggest and most visible user interface change is the way we organize our features. While previously the features were mashed together on one huge, confusing screen, now they are presented as separate installable applications. You can expect to see this application library grow this year as we introduce more apps that we build, as well as introduce 3rd party applications. This is a major step in our goal to provide artists with a central platform containing a robust set of apps built by a number of different developers...

We know going from a free service to a partially paid service is a tough transition, and we're expecting to hear frustration. But we're excited to make this transition because it will just make ArtistData stronger, smarter and more valuable not only for our users but for the music industry as a whole. Just as artists can buy better gear after their fans support them by buying albums and concert tickets, we will be able to build a stronger platform when our users support us. This is a major, exciting step towards providing the entire community with better resources."

Great work Brenden, congrats!!

MeCanto: listen to your digital music collection online and on your mobile phone

Similar to music lockers provided by companies like Lala and MP3Tunes, installing MeCanto enables storing, organizing, searching and listening to your digital music collection between your laptop, desktop, iPhone, etc. while at home or on the road. Anyone tried MeCanto? Thoughts?

Projects from Music Hackday Boston 2009

Part hackathon, part music tech gathering, Music Hackdayis an event where participants conceptualize, create and present/demo their music applications all in one weekend. As Music Hackday Boston concludes this afternoon, I've listed their creative projects below - almost 40, which is extraordinary considering they had less than 48 hours, so congrats to everyone - you guys did some great work!

• Paul's Music Wreckommender: an anti-recommender. Give it an artist that you like and it will return a list of artists that are as far away as possible form the original (project page).
• Remix Shell: a simple command shell for Echo Nest Remix one-liners (project page)
• Fugueomatic: Fugues are pieces of music that follow a certain set of rules and a number of voices come in, like a "round", and end up in somewhat different places than where they start out, all the while following a fairly strict and established form (project page)
• EchnoNestLive: EchoNestLive let's producers sample songs in ways they never have before. Using EchoNest's APIs to analyze songs and using Java, Max/MSP, Ableton Live and MaxForLive to play back pieces of a song based on specified pitches, loudness levels, timbres, and other parameters (project page).
• MySpace Hacked V1.0: a user friendly MySpace design/template, that supports the new 360 environment (project page).
• Bricolage v10e-6: The EchoNest Remix API includes functionality to break down a song into short units of sound [segments], and also to measure features on these segments [pitch classes, timbre, and volume are currently provided].  Previous work by Ben Lacker [afromb.py in the echonest remix examples directory] resynthesized a track by mixing in closely matching segments from a different track (project page)
• LastFMD2FWTFBBQ: hacked LastFM and the Topspin applications to show offers from an artist inside the LastFM buy button drop-down menus (project page)
• Playdar SoundCloud resolver: resolves SoundCloud search results for Playdar (project page)
• SoundCloud Paulcast: enables podcasts for SoundCloud resources, both private and public.(project page).
• Noteflight Audio-to-Notation Import: a hack of the Noteflight web-based notation editor to import free-range MP3s on the web into a rough "skeleton" of a musical score, using the EchoNest Remix API to supply a metrical and key signature analysis and some rough notions of pitch and harmony.  The resulting score, when played, follows the score in metrical synchronization with the original audio track (project page).
• Melody Search with Noteflight API hack: a hack to use NoteFlight's embeddable Score Objects to let users pick out specific pieces of a melody to search a large database of scores for similar songs (project page).
• HTML5 <audio annotation: a jQuery plugin that uses the HTML5 media elements API to show elements at certain timestamps during the playback of audio or video media (project page).
• Location-aware Blog-aware Contextual Concerts Listing: create an upcoming concerts listing, specific to the users location, but based off the posting history of a music blog. In essence, highly relevant upcoming concerts (project page).
• Ambient Text Mashup of "HashMap" & "Frequency" for Modest Mouse: The Good Times Are Killing Me: ambient Text Mashup of "HashMap" & "Frequency" for Modest Mouse: The Good Times Are Killing Me (project page).
• MixApp Live Acts Mashup: given an existing social music listening application, add a pane which displays upcoming shows for the artist currently playing, and a link to buy tickets.  Integrate the buy function into the live chat. (project page)
• Sonar: a front-end to control your Sonos multi-room music system that allows you to scan your friends Twitter, Last.FM or other (to be implemented) feeds for music recommendations. We then use Playdar to resolve those songs to playable tracks, and enqueue that music for playing anywhere in your house on your Sonos system. (project page)
• Sonos-Twitter Rewriting: artist, album, and track metadata are conveniently supplied to the Sonos-Twitter service, but they are currently being ignored by the official service.  This hack takes advantage of the metadata and adds rewrite rules which can be shortened in many convenient ways (project page).
• Audio to Midi to Score: using the EchoNest API for audio analysis in conjunction with spectral imaging tools, it's a prototyped audio-to-midi conversion.  The resulting midi file can be played or imported into NoteFlight (project page).
• Amazon EC2 image for music mashup sites: an amazon EC2 image for easy bootstrapping of music- and audio-heavy websites (project page)
• iTunesAirBridge and Playdar AS3 Lib: This project demonstrates using the NativeProcess API to access iTunes via Windows COM.  The demo only contains two commands for retrieving the user's library and playlist.  However, because the iTunes interaction happens via VBScript on Windows (and soon AppleScript on OSX) so anyone can easily extend the library to do more (ie creating playlists, writing a download manager for a music store that imports to itunes) and not have to deal with compiling and scripting C (project page)
• Music-Synchronized Composing Interface Using Echonest API: musicpainter is a collaborative graphical composing environment created by Wu-Hsi where novice users can easily create and share music (project page).
• Outlier FM: Outlier FM is a weekend's attempt to utilize advanced technology to search for beauty and surprise in even the most overproduced of popular music (project page). 
• PartyLister: the PartyLister is a playlist generator built to try out new collaborative playlist generation ideas (project page).
• playdarTunes: playdarTunes allows you to play your iTunes music inside the browser using Playdar. It will open and parse an iTunes Music Library XML file. The music can then be played from a local disk or anywhere Playdar resolves it to (project page) 
• Large-scale similarity using EchoNest: looking at usual patterns in a subspace of the EchoNest dataset made out of 43K songs (project page).
• Cowbot: used the Echo Nest Remix API to extract beat timings, then fed these timings to a servo that plays the cowbell in time with any song (project page).
• Bandsintown City Mixtape: mixtape of artists playing shows in a given city, links to buy tickets through Bandsintown. (project page). 
• Bowie S-S-S-Similarities: I used the Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging api to analyze and tag all of David Bowie's music.  Then I lined it up in order and calculated the similarity between every 10-second clip and every other 10-second clip in terms of the automatically generated descriptions.(project page). 
• Lyric Similator: Lyric Similator lets you explore songs based on the similarity of their lyrics (project page). 
• NPR Tourfilter Mashup: adding NPR stories about music artists to tourfilter's drop-down metadata section for concert listings (project page). 
• Quasiphone: The Quasiphone is a new instrument which uses musical notation in the browser as the controller (project page). 
• DJ Hot Scene: DJ Hot Scene is a hack that pulls MetaData from Native Intruments Tracktor Scratch Pro DJ Tool. The current artist and song is extracted through a faux icecast server (project page).
• Hammond Organ Hacking: Hammond organ "chopping" is an industry unto itself (making large and heavy organs into manageable and modular pieces (project page).
• JamTones on Android: (project page).
• SoundCloud Phanai iPhone App: (project page).
• Living Playlist: The Living Playlist is a real-time, collaborative playlisting web app to encourage social listening through the web (project page).
• Napster Playdar Resolver: Napsdar uses the Napster API to provide access to Napster's streaming collection via Playdar (project page).

This looks like such a good time that I'm gonna try and bring it to Atlanta and Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.

ReverbNation Partners with Label 2.0

ReverbNation has teamed up with the Internet music marketing community, Label 2.0 to offer advanced music promotion training for their 450,000+ members called, “Advanced Tips." This free step-by-step training module located in ReverbNation's Control Room helps "users to learn how to fully utilize their ReverbNation memberships." Presently, there are 8 chapters, from the "basics of getting started" to more advance customization and features, but Label 2.0 will continually update and add to this module as new tools and enhancements from ReverbNation are added, as well as "how to build the ultimate website using Wordpress and ReverbNation." See what this module is all about below - looks really informative! Hats off to Greg and Eric for a job well done!

Real-Time Search Engines for Artists: A Quick Look at Some of the Leaders

There's been a lot of activity around real-time search during the past year, and rightfully so, as apps like Summize have readily shown the power in real-time information - it's part of what we do at Band Metrics for musicians and bands as well, as there is significant value for artists to see what's being said about them and their music at any given moment. But, there are now dozens of real-time search engines, and there are differences between them so here's a quick breakdown between today's leading, real-time search engines (listed alphabetically):

• Collecta: This may be today's present winner from the list below, as not only are the results the most recent, relevant and comprehensive, but Collecta has some nice filtering options, a solid API, and their pulling from comments in the blogosphere as well.
• OneRiot: A bit cluttered, and most of the results are seemingly coming from news topics that are shared on Twitter, but they do have an API, and I like the ability to see how a topic/story is shared by expanding it.
• Scoopler: Possibly the second best from this list, as they've got a great UI that easily separates popular content from videos, images and links, but they do not have an API yet.
• Summize: Arguably the first, and very fast, simple and accurate, but it only searches Twitter, possibly because they were acquired by Twitter - it's still my first choice for running a simple Twitter search.
• Tweetmeme: Nicely displays both tweets and online content that is being tweeted, and I like the breakdown of information between Best Match, Highest Tweets and Age, but it's a bit too Twitter-centric.
• Topsy: Possibly the least accurate of this list, as the results are not comprehensive enough, but they have a nicely designed UI, and I like the ability to easily search by day, week, month and all-time.
• WhosTalkin?: Probably the most comprehensive from the above list, as they gather information from about two dozen sources or more, but they only have a URL API at this time, and you have to refresh the page to see the most recent information, and even then it may not be displayed.

Thoughts? What did I miss?

Nudge: A Virtual Instrument from the Creators of Audiotool

I just discovered Nudge, a new creation from Hobnox - the developers of Audiotool. Essentially, it's a virtual instrument that allows you to easily create electronic music by selecting from 8 different sounds (I'm sure more will come), and then drawing your music, adding/removing individual notes, and adjusting the tempo and mix. It's a fun shareable widget - here's my creation, which you can modify:


Btw, if you haven't experimented with Audiotool, a flash based, virtual studio environment for creating electronic music, you should check it out. Here's a tutorial, and they've added several new features since this demo:

Live Music Machine

By the look of this post and recent tweet from music industry veteran David Sherbow, he's announcing his music tech venture, Live Music Machine, a booking utility and platform for "connecting fans to the bands they love for their own live music events." While similar to SonicBids, they seem to be focused on the fan communities. For example, their app will help fans connect with other fans of a particular artist in the same geographical area that are interested in hiring that artist for an event. Here's an example of how it works in both MySpace and Facebook, and a demo as well:


Good luck David!

Band Metrics Partners with The Orchard

Are you looking for deep social, radio, and fan analytics that show geographical correlations to your digital and physical CD sales? Than our new partnership with The Orchard (NASDAQ: ORCD), which has a client base that represents 15% of all digital music may be what you're looking for, as that's what we aim to provide in the coming months.

Below is a clip from The Orchard's press release this morning:

The Orchard announced that it is launching a groundbreaking platform, using an API (Application Programming Interface) to provide clients access to third party business solutions from a marketplace within The Orchard’s proprietary client Workstation. For the launch, The Orchard has tapped many of the entertainment industry’s leading marketing, sales, and analytics application companies, including ArtistData, Band Metrics, TheBizmo, BMAT, FanBridge, Mediaguide, Mobile Roadie, New Reach Technologies, Peekok, Topspin, Trendrr, and uPlaya.

These launch partners will offer turn-key products geared to serve the needs of Orchard’s global client base, which represents 15% of all music available digitally. Within the Workstation’s marketplace, clients will be able to easily choose from this broad array of tools, each the best in its class. Over time, as the market continues to proliferate with innovative applications and services, Orchard will include additional qualified partners and continue to build out and manage the largest and most robust platform of third-party developers in the industry.

At launch, the applications, all selected with client needs in mind, will include various forms of sales and analytic tools, marketing vehicles, email and mobile services, widget creation, iPhone App creation, and data tracking. Orchard clients will receive a discounted rate for the services they choose, enabling these clients yet one more way of reducing their operating costs through their Orchard affiliation, without sacrificing sophistication or reach. Payment for use of the third party apps is secured through The Orchard and is reflected in client billing.

When clients opt in to a third party tool, the application will draw information (e.g. metadata, audio and video files, art work) from The Orchard’s secure interface to power customized marketing tools. To close the loop, clients can choose a data solution, which uses The Orchard’s metadata, to track their online exposure.

mDef Logo and Update

We've made a few updates to the Music Data Exchange Format (mDef) and created this logo for anyone to use. You can also grab it here. Again, we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on how the format can be improved.

Also, SoundCloud is planning to incorporate elements of mDef with the next release of their API. If you have any questions/comments about mDef, please post them here.