SoundMaven 0.7 beta
Let me introduce our new project. Have you ever had files like “Unknown artist - unknown track.mp3″? SoundMaven can recognize music files by its content using an “acoustic fingerprint” technology or find missing tags, e.g. find an album title if only artist and track tags are present.
If the album title is known (or detected), SoundMaven will automatically download and display album art (currently from Amazon.com and Discogs).
This is a screenshot of a SoundMaven Main window. The “Identify” button creates an acoustic fingerprint for an audio file and downloads proper tags from MusicBrainz database. To save these new tags, click on the “diskette” icon.
The “Explore” button takes you this artist’s page on soundmaven.com. This is also true for other panels.
The “Lyrics” button opens a separate window with lyrics for currently playing song, often with synchronization.
Artist panel shows artist photo and biography excerpt taken from Last.fm, a list of similar artists, and links to official and fan pages, wikipedia article and other related sites.
To view full biography, click on the text.
Album panel shows some information and average rating from Amazon.com, as well as an album description (if any). Click on one of the bottom links to search this album on iTunes Store, Amazon.com, eBay or Discogs.
And finally the track panel. Click on the file to locate it in Explorer. Bottom links still present, the last “Lyrics” button is in fact a Google search.
If you click on the folder in the screen above SoundMaven will display the following menu:
Last screenshot shows an Album Art Finder, which can be used to rename existing images to “folder.jpg” or download album art from Amazon/Discogs with a single click.
Current version can control iTunes, Media Jukebox, Winamp and players that support Winamp api (AIMP, Foobar, KMPlayer, etc) via Previous|Play|Next buttons and sleep timer.
Download • Support development
We consider this a beta version. If you have thoughts on what functionality you’d like to see in subsequent releases, or how it should look like, feel free to post them. Any ideas on how to improve SoundMaven are greatly appreciated.
Sounds like a very cool project.
You state:
“Have you ever had files like “Unknown artist - unknown track.mp3″? SoundMaven can recognize music files by its content using an “acoustic fingerprint” technology or find missing tags, e.g. find an album title if only artist and track tags are present.”
Will this then re-write the filename and/or tags to match the actual acoustic fingerprint information ? That would be especially valuable.
Meanwhile I am downloading it to give it a try with Winamp.
In fact, if you want a giant flood of beta testers, post it in the Winamp Forums…
Yes, you can rewrite current tags to match the acoustic fingerprint information. Just click the “diskette” icon on the main panel.
We’ll add an option to overwrite file names soon.
Thanks for the winamp forums tip, btw.
SongBird integration would be nice.
Unfortunately, this may be less useful than it looked at first glance.
My unidentified files are mostly live performances, with a few very obscure studio tracks. Neither are likely to be in any online database of acoustic fingerprints, if that it what is being used for identification.
I suppose that anything more would be beyond the realm of possibility.
Ken, firstly, thanks for taking time out to visit our blog. I’m not sure if that was a question or not, but SoundMaven uses MusicDNS for music identification. As far as we know, it’s the largest acoustic fingerprint-based music database in the world, but if you want to experiment on this you can try the similar feature in Winamp to deal with your unidentified files. Winamp uses Gracenote’s CDDB technology, so.. maybe it helps. And please tell us about the results.
As for the realm of possibility - yes, the function itself is unlikely to change in future versions, simply because there’s nothing to improve. It is up to the MusicIP database to expand. The good news is that as songs are digitized, the database grows. As they claim on their site, “as metadata availability expands, so does the ability for MusicDNS to accurately identify songs.” For more info please check out this link: http://www.musicip.com/dns/
Anyways, there are plenty of other features yet to be implemented. Stay tuned for news.
I think a small usage guide would be nice. I have downloaded soundmaven and at this point of time I have no clue on how should I be using it.
cheers.
Hi, SGS. The usage guide/documentation will be added in version 1.0. When it will be released is still undecided - maybe next month. I believe that you are best off waiting until the public release. The current version is an early beta under testing. Version 1.0 will feature a far more user friendly interface, as well as other major improvements.
This is great, but is there something like this that will go through automatically and retag/rename all of my music at once? I tried Magic MP3 Tagger (which supposedly uses the same database), but from what I can see it hasn’t pulled a single correct tag from MusicBrainz, and the tag detection by folder (which you can’t turn off) is very annoying. And a lot of my songs are of the “track 01″ variety.
Hell, I bet this program could be made to via some basic command line switches (since it can already identify and retag/rename a song, it just needs to do it automatically and traverse sub folders).
Hi,
Soundmaven almost always (only 1 succeeded) crashes on clicking the save (diskette) icon. I’m using itunes on vista. The crash reporter also can’t connect to the server. Weird. Any help on this one?
I would recommend running a disk check. chkdsk c: /R /F /X will probably ask you to schedule a disk check for restart, let it do it. I’ve been seeing lots of computers come in to me recently with dying hard drives.
Or… try turning off UAC or running as administrator. Hate UAC, haven’t missed it.
Brent, this is exactly what we’re working on right now (aside from making SoundMaven understand commands from G1 phone ;) - an ability to retag (and rename) all files in a folder/subfolders. The development is painfully slow right now, largely because of lack of time.
We’re also playing with a new interface a lot, which will be much more humane than what we have now. Ver. 1 will feature it’s own small database, with various charts, top lists from publications such as Pitchfork or Rolling Stone and other music-related info, where it will search for useful data and show it to you as you’re listening. In other words, it will be much more fun just to have it minimized in tray saying something like “This album is on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1990s list”. Finally, there’s a very cool new design almost ready, very clean and futuristic :)
Dries, we’ll test it under itunes on vista/7 as soon as we get some free time.
I’ve been trying out the program Jaikoz and it does a decent job, but I don’t really like the interface. I think I’ll be buying it just to get the majority of my songs retagged.
Feel free to email me if you get an updated version out, if it does a better job I’d buy yours instead.