Music Info: "The Echo Nest And Columbia University Announce 'Million Song Dataset'

From a News Release:

The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform powering smarter music apps across the web and various devices, announced on Tuesday that it has provided music analysis and metadata to the Million Song Dataset, a collaboration between The Echo Nest and Columbia University’s LabROSA (Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio) department, with hosting by Infochimps and funding from the National Science Foundation.
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The core of the Million Song Dataset consists of detailed data about one million songs, but no audio files. However, it includes mapping to 7digital’s library of 30-second samples, allowing researchers to test their technologies in the real world. This large dataset (approximately 200GB, depending on which files the developer chooses) is hosted by Infochimps.
“There are a lot of compelling music applications that haven’t been built because of the heavy lifting involved with the infrastructure,” said Infochimps CEO Nick Ducoff. “Between The Echo Nest’s platform and the Million Song Dataset available on Infochimps, the only thing keeping a developer from building a compelling music-focused app is his or her imagination.”
Interested parties can visit http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/ for the code, instructions on how to use it, benchmark results for example tasks (such as automatic song tagging and artist recognition), artist mapping to Yahoo’s user ratings, and demonstrations of how to fetch audio snippets from 7digital and represent artists on a world map using the data, as well as a forum and FAQ.

See Also: “Massive database launched to help build the next generation of music apps” (via The Next Web by Martin Bryant)

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