In our ongoing effort to make Last.fm the best place for music data, we’ve been using audio fingerprint tech since 2007 to match metadata information (i.e. artist and track names) by analyzing the audio.
This helped us automate the process of spelling correction, and as by-product we released an open source library and a client which can be used to identify the correct metadata for mp3s.
We have recently reached the milestone of 90 million fingerprint entries and all this information is now fully accessible via a new track.getFingerprintMetadata call in our official API, with musicbrainz ids and full UTF-8 support.
If you are a developer you might want to look into the library module (which generates the fingerprint) available on github (and it’s LGPL!). If you just want to play with it, you can use our sample client (available for Windows, OS X and Linux), which query the fingerprint service for an id, then pokes the API for the metadata.
Running the fingerprint client is a piece of cake. Just type
lastfmfpclient mysterious.mp3
and it will generate the following xml output (which is taken from the API):
<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“utf-8”?> <lfm status=“ok“> <tracks> <track rank=“1“> <name>One Summer’s Day</name> <mbid></mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2/_/One+Summer%27s+Day</url> <streamable fulltrack=“0“>0</streamable> <artist> <name>久石譲</name> <mbid>44c64a30-1d58-49c5-b314-6e02fba49526</mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2</url> </artist> <image size=“small“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/34s/3737553.jpg</image> <image size=“medium“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/64s/3737553.jpg</image> <image size=“large“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/126/3737553.jpg</image> <image size=“extralarge“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/300×300/3737553.jpg</image> </track> <track rank=“0.404785“> <name>Ano Natsu he</name> <mbid></mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2/_/Ano+Natsu+he</url> <streamable fulltrack=“0“>0</streamable> <artist> <name>久石譲</name> <mbid>44c64a30-1d58-49c5-b314-6e02fba49526</mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2</url> </artist> </track> <track rank=“0.144543“> <name>あの夏へ</name> <mbid></mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2/_/%E3%81%82%E3%81%AE%E5%A4%8F%E3%81%B8</url> <streamable fulltrack=“0“>0</streamable> <artist> <name>久石譲</name> <mbid>44c64a30-1d58-49c5-b314-6e02fba49526</mbid> <url>http://www.last.fm/music/%E4%B9%85%E7%9F%B3%E8%AD%B2</url> </artist> <image size=“small“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/34s/6624395.jpg</image> <image size=“medium“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/64s/6624395.jpg</image> <image size=“large“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/126/6624395.jpg</image> <image size=“extralarge“>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/300×300/6624395.jpg</image> </track> … </tracks> </lfm>