Our latest update to the MusicDNS reporting is now live. This includes one small adjustment - countries are now color coded to show hits per capita. Mostly, this makes the maps look a little prettier, but it does show some extra details which might be interesting. The map to the left shows our traffic for the month of January. (Compare this with the original reports we launched in November to see the difference.)

Uptake on MusicDNS is continuing to grow - the number of requests in January increased 28% from December! And we’d like to say hello to two of the most recent additions to the MusicDNS Projects page: Helium Music Manager and Jaikoz Mp3 Tag Editor. Welcome!

I just updated the previous post about MusicDNS to include some changes to the XML schema - these keep us in sync with the current MusicBrainz schema. One potential hand grenade to watch out for - track indices are now zero based offsets instead of actual track numbers, so you’ll need to add one to convert the offset into a track number. This should be the last change before we launch the new service.

Nine months ago, we launched the MusicDNS service, which provides song identification, and simple artist/title metadata. Today, we’re launching a preview of the next iteration (MusicDNS 1.1, if you like).

So, what’s new? Well, we’ve been spending a lot of time on the backend, improving our data mining algorithms, adjusting hardware and so forth. For our users, this should mean better quality data, and more of it. In particular, once we launch, there will ongoing updates to the data - this should be at least weekly. So new metadata will be flowing in much more smoothly.

Aside from the overall cleanup, we’re also introducing new types of data: Album data (name, year of release, and track numbers), first known year of release for tracks, creative commons licenses (if known), and a “consensus” genre. I’ll cover each item briefly, then wrap up with info on how to get the new data.

Album Data: The album data which will be initially available comes from our friends at MusicBrainz. This does a simple lookup from PUID’s to the MusicBrainz tables, and sends back whatever album information is available. To have MusicDNS return this extra information, add “ext=mb” to the URL when calling the service. If there are multiple albums available, information from each will be returned.

Release Year: The first known year of release for tracks also comes from MusicBrainz currently. This takes the form YYYY-MM-DD where possible, so it’s not restricted just to year, but may also include month and date. Because the data is coming from MusicBrainz, it comes in with the same option as above: “ext=mb”.

Creative Commons: The Creative Commons licenses will be available from artists who have registered their music with MusicIP, and indicated a Creative Commons license. This is free for artists. To get this metadata from MusicDNS, pass the “rmd=2″ parameter (this will include the regular data returned from the older rmd=1 option).

Genre: As I mentioned in an earlier post, genre is a tricky thing. MusicDNS will be providing consensus genres, meaning the genres that most people have those tracks tagged as, aggregated to broad categories. To get this metadata from MusicDNS, pass the “rmd=2″ parameter (this will include the regular data returned from the older rmd=1 option).

<release-list>
<release id="mbid">
<title>NN</title>
<release-event-list>
<event date="[year]"/>
</release-event-list>
<track-list offset="#"/>
</release>
</release-list>

<mip:first-release-date>[year]</mip:first-release-date>

<creativeCommons:license>URL</creativeCommons:license>

<mip:genre-list>
<mip:genre><name>Rock/Pop</name></mip:genre>
</mip:genre-list>

If you have any questions, come visit the MusicDNS forums and ask. We hope you enjoy the new free data.

Edit: The schema examples have been updated since the original post to reflect the current MusicBrainz schema.

With the latest update to MusicIP.com today, a projects directory has been added for MusicDNS projects.

This is exciting, and super-cool for a number of reasons. First, it provides a place for all of the hard-working developers and organizations working with MusicDNS to get their projects / products / apps out there in front of more eyes. It’s really important to us that those helping make MusicDNS better have a destination to get some recognition.

As the directory continues to grow we think it’s going to become a great source of cool music software. This ties back to one of the many reasons why we are so excited about MusicDNS in general, and why we have made it freely available. There are only two projects in the directory at the time of this post being written, but there’s a bunch of neat stuff out there, making us confident that there will be more.

Getting your application into the directory is as simple as having a MusicIP.com account with your MusicDNS keys attached to it. Go the page with the list of your keys on it (once you are logged in). Simply click the edit button and you will be taken to a form where you can enter the name of your product, a URL associated with it (so users can get to the application itself), notes to tell visitors about your project and what it does, and a checkbox to indicate that you actually want to show it in the public directory (highlighted by a red box in the screenshot below).

You don’t have to worry about privacy — only this information will be displayed, which does not include your key.

Once you are done, click the “Submit Changes” button, and you will be taken back to your list of MusicDNS keys. You can now visit the projects directory to see your listing.

You’ll also notice that all MusicDNS content is now accessible under the MusicDNS menu item. This is to make sure everything is one place and easy to find, instead of having some info at MusicDNS.org and some info on MusicIP.com.

Let us know what you think of the new projects directory, and we look forward to checking out new products added to the directory.

According to a recent study, about 1% of all pages have adult content.

According to the MusicDNS database, about 1.1% of all songs in the world are about Christmas.

Winner (by a bright red nose): Christmas!

Ho, ho, hold on a minute, what does that mean, exactly? Well, one of the new features we are working on for our MusicDNS service is the addition of genre information. Now genres are a finicky thing at best. Sometimes they tell you something about the music, sometimes they tell you something about the people who listen to the music, and sometimes they tell you about the people who market the music. (And sometimes they might not tell you anything at all…)

Rather than trying to define what genres mean acoustically, or impose a top-down schema from above, we have taken all the data collected anonymously from around the world by MusicIP users, and pulled out the most consistently used genres. This information will be available to all MusicDNS users at our normal rate (free, unless you generate crazy amounts of traffic, in which case we ask for a nominal fee to help keep the servers running).

The current set of genres which seem to occur with high regularity, uniqueness and consistency include the following: Bluegrass, Blues, Children, Christian, Christmas, Classical, Comedy, Country, Easy Listening, Electronica, Folk, Hip Hop, Jazz, New Age, Pop, R&B, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soul, Spoken Word, World. I expect most people will have some objection or another to the previous list, but that’s where the data trends.

In MusicDNS, each track will receive 0, 1, or 2 genres from the above list. 0 genres means there is no consensus on fitting the track into the above categories, 1 means there is consensus on a single genre, 2 means there is split consensus on two genres (i.e. Rock/Country). The first genre will be the more prevalent opinion. Some applications may wish to normalize these genres, so “Christmas/Rock” and “Rock/Christmas” both become “Christmas Rock”. Or you may wish to drop the secondary genre altogether. How you use the genres is totally up to you (or the developer of the program you are using).

Which brings us back to Christmas. According to the current set of genres, the most popular genres currently have the following distribution:

Christmas music is a prime example of an oddball genre. If you had to define Christmas music acoustically, you’d be pretty hard pressed to cover the whole gamut. There are common themes, of course - religious or culturally based lyrics. And then there are simple tunes which evoke the feelings of Christmas, like Greensleeves. In the case of Christmas music, the combinations with subgenres more or less match the previous distribution, except the most popular combination is with Classical music, for 19.4% of the overall Christmas music (which is tagged with a secondary genre). On the other hand, Rap, Hip Hop, and Electronica hardly form a blip on the Christmas radar.

Finally, in the best gift giving tradition… looking for free Christmas music? Try Feels Like Christmas.

Yep, that’s right. We’ve started to rollout graphic reporting for those with MusicDNS keys tied to their MusicIP.com accounts.

Reports you say? Oh yeah…

Before diving in, I want to discuss where reporting fits in to MusicDNS as a whole. You may be asking, “isn’t MusicDNS just some technical mumbo-jumbo that’s only for programmers?” Nope.

We’ve been very hard at work here at MusicIP to enhance our products and make sure they are as effective as they can be.

At its core, MusicDNS is about digital music identification. We want both individual developers and organizations to have a way to enhance the experience for their users without impacting their bottom line or development time. In line with this, we want to assist our users and customers with determining their product’s performance.

This leads us to our first iteration of MusicDNS reports!

Let’s dive right in and look at some of the super-cool stuff our dev team has created. First off, I need to point out general requirements to view the reports I talk about in this post:

• You must have a registered account on MusicIP.com
• You must have an active, registered MusicDNS key
• One of your keys must have been used and received data

Traffic Report

This report shows the number of server calls made to the MusicDNS servers on a daily basis.

Each account will have their own version of this report, showing the traffic being generated by each key tied to their account. Users can page back & forth between months to check out how their volume has changed.

Geolocation Report

This report indicates all of the MusicDNS traffic for a single key, and where that traffic is coming from all over the world. Yep — there is meaning to those colors. Red indicates a point with the highest number of calls and blue indicates a point with the least server calls.

There is lots more amazing stuff in store for MusicDNS. And of course, we always welcome product feedback! Please e-mail us with your ideas, and bug reports. You can also visit the MusicDNS section our forums.

Also, the issues generating MusicDNS keys that have popped-up the last couple of days are now resolved.

One of the more powerful, less known services provided by MusicIP is the humble puid. The name stands for portable unique identifier. Here’s a sample one:

3567d380-f43a-4c1f-a5de-694150b093ac

It doesn’t look like much, does it? In fact, it looks just like an old-fashioned guid. The real value, however, comes from how puids are generated, and how they can be used.

Let’s start with the UID: unique identifier. For any given recording, the puid is a unique number. This means you can use a puid to talk about songs - like “Hey, I really dig 3567d380-f43a-4c1f-a5de-694150b093ac”. “Naw, I like 6afaf934-f2ee-d434-a477-57c804c9a6be much better…” This allows you can be very precise talking about a song. The puid includes all the necessary info to identify the exact song. Do you mean the initial release? the greatest hits remaster? the live version from 2003? The puid is that precise. Of course, you’re probably not going to use puids in every day conversations, any more than you use Social Security numbers to identify different people name John Smith. But when you’re exchanging data with programs, it’s the best way to go.

What about our P: portable? Where does this come in? Because the MusicDNS service allows any application access to the same set of identifiers, you can use the same id between different programs built on MusicDNS. Finally your ratings, play histories, and so forth should be able to move freely between services without sloppy metadata matching.

Also, the core fingerprinting code, although patented, is available as open source (under two different licenses, in fact) - this allows the code to be used in pretty much any free or commercial setting with a minimum of licensing issues.

Not bad, you might be thinking, but now that I have 3567d380-f43a-4c1f-a5de-694150b093ac, how am I supposed to know which song it represents? That’s where the MusicDNS service comes in - anyone can get a free service key, and lookup the relevant metadata for a given puid as easily as generating a URL in a browser. Full details of the protocol are available online. Example output might look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<metadata xmlns="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/mmd/1/">
<track>
<title>YYZ</title>
<artist>
<name>Rush</name>
</artist>
<puid-list>
<puid id="3567d380-f43a-4c1f-a5de-694150b093ac"/>
</puid-list>
</track>
</metadata>

Some extra things you might want to know about puids: Fingerprinting is in some ways as much art as science. While the concept of a unique identifer per master recording is easy enough to grasp, many people get confused about different cases - if you reencode the file at a different bitrate, does the puid change? (generally, no). If you reencode an MP3 as an Ogg file, does the puid change? (generally, no). If you record a track from the radio with some static, and part of the recording is truncated, does the puid change? (generally, yes). If a track is remastered, does the puid change? (it depends on the nature of the remastering). Because we want puids to be unique, we err on the side of assigning different id’s when the think the file might have changed. We’re still looking into ways to improve the MusicDNS service, let us know what we can do.

Another cool thing you can do with puids today is use them to look up rich metadata from MusicBrainz. This can point to cover tracks, band members, and all sorts of interesting relationships.

In order to make it even easier to find puids, we’ve put together a standalone program called genpuid - this lets you generate a puid just by passing a filename. You can use this in your own applications if you don’t want to link in the open source MusicDNS library. We’re in the middle of beta testing right now, but we hope to release it fairly soon.