We’re ecstatic to announce the release of Echoprint, a fully free and open source music fingerprint and identification service powered by The Echo Nest. We’ve partnered with our dear friends at Musicbrainz and 7digital to bring developers a music fingerprint for free so they can build the future of music. Read the press release for more details!

The Echo Nest has been focusing on a crucial component of the oncoming music cloud for some time: we spend a lot of time and engineering resources on music resolving. This extends from mapping a query for a band name to its ID, to uncovering mentions of songs on blogs, to identifying the song in an audio stream without any metadata – otherwise known as fingerprinting. The Echo Nest’s existing fingerprint technology, “The Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint” aka ENMFP, has been in wide use privately and via our API for 18 months. Today we are unveiling a new fingerprint technology called “Echoprint,” whose main feature is its complete openness – everything from the program to analyze the audio to the server and data to make the match are available for anyone to use, under a permissive open source license, for free.

Music resolvers such as Shazam, Soundhound, Gracenote and Audible Magic work by “listening” to the music and then searching for features in the audio in a large database of content. They find a match in a canonical song ID, and return that to the user. Some, like the mobile apps of Shazam and Soundhound work “over the air” – where audio can be identified in noisy settings over a microphone. And others work only on files, by computing hashes on mp3s stored on a hard drive. All of them share three components:

• the “code generator” – the piece of software that takes an audio signal and computes features or “codes” to look up,
• the server – the hardware and software that can quickly look up codes in large database of reference songs and find the answer, and
• the reference data – the database of millions of songs that can be resolved.

Echoprint includes all three. And, for the first time, all three are being released under open source or permissive licenses. The code generator is open source and free to download and build into apps for any platform – Mac, Windows, Linux or mobile (Android, iOS or Windows Mobile). The server is open source and available for anyone that wants to host their own resolving service. And the data, at first provided by our content partners at 7digital, is available for free download provided that any new additions are shared back. This data sharing approach ensures that over time, the Echoprint data commons will grow to every song fingerprinted by all users, and that data will be openly available to any developer. The Echo Nest will run and maintain the first Echoprint resolving server but we expect others to host their own.

Why an Open Source Fingerprint

We believe that resolving music should be something that belongs to the community. It should be a high-quality, relied-upon internet service, like DNS or email.

The catalog of current commercial music resolvers is unnecessarily limited – you cannot submit your band’s music to Shazam, for example – and we consider this to be a fault correctable by opening all parts of music resolving and recognition.

Today, application developers are forced to spend more time than they want to on song identification and basic metadata issues. We hope by opening up this resource, developers can focus their time and effort building creative new music experience for fans, not cleaning up metadata.

We think the potential of music experiences can be vastly improved with free and open access to music resolving and recognition. Allowing listeners the freedom to identify any song they hear out in the world or to clean up their collection or sync it with cloud services opens up a new class of music apps. This will become even more important during the upcoming period of the ‘big move’, when millions of fans will be moving music (often with messy metadata) from a collection of hard drives kicking around their house to cloud and locker services.

Using Echoprint alongside other Echo Nest APIs such as Rosetta Stone and Taste Profiles allows developers to build apps that can “convert” a local catalog of music into any streaming or music service. For example, Echoprint can take any audio source – a phone’s microphone or a file on a laptop – and identify the artist’s Facebook page, Rd.io ID or build a playlist on 7digital.

What we hope people will build

Any developer can now build music recognition into any app for free, with no licensing fees and no need to host their own server or collect their own data. We include sample fingerprint app source code for iOS. Just by including the provided open source projects into any app, a developer can now make their music experiences “resolving aware.”

• a social music app could scan a users’ local music collection
• a music game could detect the song playing in the room and show metadata from other Echo Nest APIs.
• a hardware box could go inbetween your turntable and your stereo to “scrobble” your vinyl on last.fm or Facebook
• your phone can figure out which movies or television is playing automatically from the soundtrack

Features

Like Shazam or Soundhound, Echoprint works on files or “over the air” in noisy environments.

The code generator can scan audio at roughly 250x real time, i.e. an entire song can be scanned in half a second on a single processor. Enough audio to make a query can be scanned in less than a tenth of a second.

The identifier needs only 20 seconds of audio to make a match, from anywhere in the song. Our reference database contains full songs and the queries can be much smaller and from anywhere in the song.

The server component is fast and scalable. A single server-class hardware box can support 60 queries a second and can horizontally scale.

Where to get it

• Echoprint.me home page
• echoprint-codegen on GitHub
• echoprint-server on GitHub
• song/identify API

– Brian, Dan, Alastair and the rest of the Echo Nest

We’re proud to announce the launch of exfm for iPhone! And guess what? It’s free! You’ll now be able to discover, listen to and share an endless feed of the best music on the web wherever you go.

We’ve worked hard to give you the best mobile experience possible by combining all your favorite exfm web features, plus a few extra bonuses only on the iPhone app:

- Note tracks to favorite them and post to your exfm profile.
- Listen to ALL your friends and followers noted tracks, too.
- One-click sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
- Seamless purchases from iTunes .
- Account set-up and management right from your iPhone.

The exfm iPhone app has some great exclusive features as well like our new Tastemakers section – a dedicated music feed from the top music bloggers in the world delivered directly to the palm of your hand. There’s more. You can access all your local music files with complete iPod controls baked right in, scrobble to Last.fm in real-time, and automatically switch to iPod-only offline mode if you lose connection.

Use this link to download the app from iTunes and take it for a spin!

(Android users: we have an app on the way for you very soon. We promise.)

having exfm and tumblr communicate may have been the best thing I have done.

So here’s the run down. From memory. Cliff notes style.

Virgin America:
We flew Virgin America for the first time. I was stoked as I heard a ton of great things about them. Since I’m smack dab in the middle of my 30-day no complaining experiment, I will just say we flew Virgin, they got us there and back, and leave it at that.

Hotel Palomar Union Square:
We stayed here for three nights. Nice, simple, friendly hotel. Good location to see the bulk of San Fran. I love the Palomar in Philly. This one didn’t match the caliber of the one in Philly. It was a great room, at a good price, in a good location. You wouldn’t be disappointed if you stayed there.

San Fran First Impressions:
A Californian city. Chill people and seriously chilly weather. Like November here in New York. Granted they were experiencing a bit of a cold snap when we were there. The architecture is eclectic. I prefer New Yorks. Overall though, very clean and very easy to get a feel for the layout.

Around San Fran:
It’s hilly. I mean really hilly. I knew it was hilly though I was seriously surprised by the severity of some of the slopes. Running up Hyde Street was a challenge of epic proportion. I survived. Some of the views of San Fran are simply stunning. Incredibly iconic city. Very true to the impressions you see on TV and in pictures. Standout neighborhood for me was the Marina district. Just liked the feel, shops, eateries over there. Low point the financial district. Empty and sad.

Eating in San Fran:
I wanted to write up each place. Frankly, I don’t have the time or energy. The food was good, nothing we ate was a-maz-ing though, except for Blue Bottle Coffee. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Blue Bottle Coffee - maybe the best Gibraltar I’ve ever had. Superb.
• Quince - Super fancy (i.e. pricey) Italian. Soulless environment. Meh food.
• Delarosa - Great Italian spot in Marina. Really good Tuscan comfort food.
• El Balazo - Decent Cali-Mex food on Haight-Ashbury. Fun place.
• L'Ardoise - Quaint french spot. Solid food. Super cute Castro neighborhood.

San Fran Highlights:
Morning jogs through empty streets
Seeing the Golden Gate with my own eyes
Seeing Alcatraz and saying, “That’s not too far I could swim it.”
The views
Just walking around with Paraguay

Sonoma:
Stunning. Stunning. Stunning countryside. Muir woods was impressive, beautiful, and well run. The drive up the 101 was really nice. Sonoma tops Napa in my opinion (Route 29 in Napa is crass and cheesy.) We preferred the smaller, family run wineries. We visited two. We couldn’t drink a ton since Paraguay is pregnant. Details below. Sonoma is just majestic. It reminded me a ton of Tuscany. I can understand why the wine is so amazing there. The micro-climate is ideal. I picture God having a house there it’s so nice.

The Farmhouse Inn - Forestville, CA:
We stayed here. Beautiful updated inn with a brand new barn out back that houses just four rooms. Calling it a barn seems like a major disservice. This might have been the nicest room I’ve ever stayed in. Homey, warm, inviting, and just absolutely perfect to lounge in. It felt like a home. A finely appointed home. Can’t say enough great things about our room. If you stay at The Farmhouse Inn stay in the barn. No questions asked.

Farmhouse Spa:
Wonderful. When is a spa not a wonderful thing?

Around Sonoma:
We drove a lot. Well, I drove a lot. Paraguay was an awesome navigator. We took it a ton of Sonoma in a very short time. It was an absolute joy to drive there. Spectacular winding roads through some of the most amazing country I’ve even seen. We almost ran out of gas late one nigh in the middle of nowhere. That would not have been fun. You feel small in Sonoma, small in the most terrific way though.

Eating in Sonoma and Napa:
Again we found the food to be very good with only one OMG dish (the gnocchi at Bottega). We really, really wanted to eat at French Laundry. Couldn’t get a spot though. We did get a photo of the front door. Does that count?

• Farmhouse Inn - pre-fix. Solid 6 or 7. Nothing remarkable for the price.
• Ad Hoc - hit or miss as there is no menu. We got BBQ our night. It was meh.
• Bottega - Tacky-city. However, the food was killer. Seriously the best gnocchi I’ve ever had. Solid 10. I never give anything a 10. These might have been an 11. I’ve dreamt about them since eating them. Yeah, they are that good.

Wineries:
We got private tours of two little wineries. Sounds fancy, right? It kind of was. Really enjoyed that part of our trip.

Freeman’s Winery: Ken Freeman is an east coaster who married a Japanese woman got bit by the winemaking bug, bought a winery and learned how to make wine. Nice gig if you can get it and have the dough. They make a Pinot Noir that is the bomb. Seriously amazing and I don’t even go gaga over Pinot Noir. They also make a French Chardonnay. Tasty-city.

Lancaster Estate: Possibly the most beautiful swath of earth I’ve seen. It looked like a post card come to life. Really great tour here. Amazing cave cellar to boot. They make Cabernets. Now we were talking. This was like drinking heaven if heaven bottled itself. There was no spitting here folks. Wine was consumed. Copious amounts. We even joined their wine guild (fancy, I know) since you can’t buy it in stores. A really, really, great selection of Cabs. They have a sister label Roth. That you can get in stores. It’s not as good though very tasty.

California Cost:
Woah. What a view. We drove up to Sonoma State Park. The cliffs. Oh man those cliffs with the surf smashing against them. And being able to drive right up to the edge. Unforgettable stuff. True highlight for me. We also hit Bodega Bay. Cute little town. The filmed the Hitchcock movie The Birds there. Didn’t know that. Now I do. Driving down US 1 was always a dream of mine. Some day maybe I’ll do it from tip to tip. That would be fun.

Summary:
I feel like I’m missing some stuff. This is what I remember and what sticks out in my mind. Felt good to see some new in my life. To unplug. To talk with Lili. To laugh and lounge and love. Isn’t that what life is all about? Good times.

Alright there you have San Fran & Sonoma in a nutshell.