There are several tools to help people discover new music. Two off the top of my head are iTune’s Genius and Beatport’s BeatBot. I have not tried Genius, but I have tried BeatBot. It is a hit or miss feature, with greater emphasis on the miss. Understandably advising on something as complex as musical tastes is no easy task – and probably dangerous.

Genres in particular are very fluid. Even though we have hundreds of genres and sub-genres, it is not uncommon for there to be ambiguities and mixes of several types of genres. It took me a while to discover the difference between trance and house music, and even today it puzzles me. A lot of the blame is due to mislabelling or generalizing of artists and albums but that is another topic.

Musical preferences is also very different between people who like even the same genre of music, because the genre itself has changed and evolved. If you listen to early dubstep (Girl from Codeine City by L-Wiz) and more recent dubstep (Game Time by Zomboy) tracks, they are two different sounds. Though, I’m fairly sure each classifies as their own sub-genre by now.

When you try to mix these two algorithmically, the results do not hold great promise. At least, in my case. If you ever listen to tsubaki, his sound is pretty unique. Beatbot will return some reggae (getting warmer), hip hop (colder), and dubstep (colder). Nothing of which sounds comparable.

Recently though, I found tsubaki on soundcloud. More importantly, soundcloud lets you see what other artists that artist is following. And I now found another artist that makes similar music – dubsalon. So here we have the artist recommending (or at least, listening) to another artist.

This is something that I think we should take advantage of, if not already (which I think we do not). This information is a bit more difficult to harvest, but might be more useful.

Beatport has recently unveiled their HTML version of their website. They then proceeded to launch a quasi job recruitment video explaining the benefits of the new website. Some of the points are valid (the site load time has really improved), but other points are really stretched or moot or misleading. For example they made a point of the new website containing the BPM of a track. That’s just silly because their API has that information, so there is no technical reason why they cannot have it on their flash website. Interestingly, the BPM only appears on the JSON version of the API and not the XML version and that’s just terrible. I expected more from people sporting impressive facial hair.

Overall I do like their new website. It is fast, clean, hackable. I thought they were using the audio tag and doing some neat stuff to get the waveform but it turned out that was an image and they are still using flash. Which is probably the wisest thing to do but not very HTML5ish

Having a HTML version of the website was also something I thought would be an interesting project (back when they only had a flash-only site). A few weeks ago, I decided to do one anyways, and launched beatport5 – a HTML5 version of the website (I may end up renaming it). It has a few caveats:

• It’s pretty much not optimized for screens with a resolution under 1920×1080 oops
• It works best in Gecko browsers, needs improvement for webkit, and pretty terrible under trident browsers. Don’t even ask about anything under IE8
• The playlist is not working yet
• The search functionality is very simple. You can search for tracks, releases, artists or a global search. But you are not able to search for x track by y artist.
• The landing page needs improvements
• I am not working on this full-time

Some interesting stuff:

• We both use DOM local storage. They seems to use it for their playlist queue. Neat!

Some wishlist that I need to put on their mailing list:

1. I would like to avoid hitting my server, so it would be great if their website enabled HTTP access controls for their API and mp3 files
2. Maybe a way to add stuff to their shopping cart?
3. There’s more but I’m drawing a blank…

I haven’t really worked in what value I would add that isn’t already in the beatport site. I would like to incorporate the beatport flac converter somehow. Likely anything meaningful I want to do would have to stored on my server. One experiment I would like to attempt is a way to discover music, much like the beatbot, but maybe less like it, and more awesome.

Why release this now? Release early, release often! It’s not complete, but I hope to spend time on it and be useful to me and others as well. My main concern right now is making this work cross-browser. Next is screen resolution fix, and an appropriate landing page.

A while ago, I began purchasing music off of beatport. Unfortunately they do not offer FLAC downloads, so I pay the extra dollar to download wav files. The downside is that I have to manually enter metadata. This is painful, so I created a quick python script using their almost invisible api that does it all for me (the wav files must have kept their original filenames, because the numbers in front represent the track id).

I’ve been listening to a few music podcasts, mainly TATW and ASOT, and am really enjoying some tracks (were have you been all my life Bart Classen? Oh. In the Netherlands…). And I really want to have some in my iPod Cowon iAudio 9.

This was not easy.

I really do wish to support artists, I really do. I purchased a ton of CDs (400+ songs, and yeah it cost me >$400) because I can’t always go to their concerts. I want to avoid having to illegally acquire this stuff. But it feels that I can only do it on their terms, for crappy technical boner-inducing-big-brother reasons, and I have to sacrifice my requirements.

What are my requirements? High bitrate MP3/WAV/FLAC. No DRM. I vote with my wallet a lot, and this is something I can get behind.

Really, I want to pay you. I was even willing to pay trackitdown.net a premiuum of $2.50USD for a WAV (for something I probably can’t hear the difference between). Oh, until I found this little gem :

All of the tracks downloaded through our website are ‘watermarked’ with a special form of copy protection that uniquely identifies the owner of each track.

– trackitdown.net HowTo (How to suck apparently)

I know I’m a little bit of a niche. Forgive me for going against the status quo and not buying on iTunes and wanting it under a free (as in speech) lossless codec. But honestly, anyone who wants your music for free gets it for free. I’m going out of my way to try to pay you and be fair to both of us about it.

Luckily, I have found BeatPort, which almost fits my needs. I dislike their flash-only website, having manually to convert wav to flac and fill in metadata, and the unfortunate restricted tracks for some songs. But they seem to be the most fair – to me at least.