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Q: What is the Flavour eXchange?
A: The Flavour eXchange is a music recommendation service.
It takes your musical tastes as input, searches music lovers who have a similar taste and then recommends music that these people like but you don't know yet.
Q: Why do I need it?
A: If you are a music lover who is tired to listening to the same mainstream stuff all the time and want to discover new artists without spending hours in record stores trying to find the few gems in the heaps of mediocrity - then Flavour eXchange is for you!
Q: How does it work?
A: First you need an iPod to start with.
You upload your iPods database (not the music), which will describe your musical tastes.
This is compared to other iPod users databases.
Of those users who have a similar taste to you, we'll take artists that are not on your iPod and suggest you give them a try.
Q: OK, but how does it really work?
A: The software does an anlysis of your iTunesDB file which is a database with info about all the music on your iPod.
Then it creates a multidimensional weighed vector of the artists that you listen to and compares this to others users artist vectors.
Users with a similar vectors are searched for artists that are not on your iPod.
Q: Wait a minute - this sounds familiar?
A: Yeah, actually this approach is nothing revolutionary and quite straight-forward.
Vector space models have been used in classic text information retrieval systems for decades.
Other examples of music recommendation services based on user preferences are amazon.com, audioscrobbler/www.last.fm, www.musicmobs.com and www.pandora.com.
Q: So what's so special about Flavour eXchange?
A: You don't have to tediously define your musical tastes - your iPod already has that info.
Thus all you have to do is upload your iTunesDB file.
Q: Is this legal ?
A: Yes absolutely. You are not sharing music, you just share some information about what kind of music you like to hear. In fact, the music industry should love this service, as it promotes music and will probably result in you "consuming" more of it. The big record companies may actually not like it so much though, since this service circumvents their marketing machinery for mediocre mainstream and allows you to discover little known artist easily. ;-)
Q: What are the prerequisites for my iPod?
A: Any generation iPod/iPod Mini will do.
All it needs is an iTunesDB file.
You need to have a minimum of 30 artists on your iPod to reflect the complete range of your taste.
Q: How can I improve the quality of the search results?
A:
- Make sure that the artist/track info (ID3 tags) is correct! Check out Musicbrainz for tools that can automatically fix your ID tag info.
- The more users are know to the system the higher the likelyhood to find someone with similar tastes - so tell your friends
- There should be certain minimum amount of music on your iPod for the Flavour eXchange to ba able to make qualified assumptions about your taste - at least 50 artists
- The music on the iPod should reflect your complete musical taste, the more it represents everything you like, the better
- The music on the iPod should correctly reflect your taste, you should actually like all the artists on there - if you keep a lot of junk (hunter/gatherer phenomenon, e.g. "I can always delete it later") this will impact the results
- You can use the star ratings to indicate artists and songs you like better
So it is best if you "clean up" your iPod a little before you upload your iTunesDB
Q: Why did you build this service?
A: For fun!
I wanted to play around and experiment with music recommendation.
Mainly I want to find music that I like without spending too much time on the searching.
Q: What are known limitations?
A: Currently it doesn't work with classic music.
Classic music is typically chosen by composer, not by performing artist.
So a comparison by artist does not make sense here.
A workaround would be to swap artist and composer for all music in the "classical" genre when calculating the vector, but then often the genre is not properly set for many files.
Equally problematic are samplers where the artist name fields contains the dredged "Various Artists" string instead of the artists real name.
This is a result of CD track infos wrongly defined at lookup databases like www.freedb.org and www.cddb.com.
A similar issue are different variations of artist names, such as
- "Beatles" versus "The Beatles"
- "Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers" versus "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers"
- "X feat. Y" versus "X featuring Y" etc.
- typos such as "Eurithmics" instead of "Eurythmics"
I have filters to counter some of these problems, but not all.
Q: Does the service support other MP3 players ?
A: No, currently not. If enough people request it, I may add other devices as well in the future.
Q: Why do I have to own a portable MP3 player? Why can't I just upload a playlist ?
A: I do not want to allow users to upload playlists, which are more likely to contain assorted junk (hunter & gatherer phenomenon) than a portable device with limited storage capacity.
These lists would not truly reflect their musical tastes, but rather a collection of the contents on their hard drive.
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