[HN Gopher] Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from i...
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       Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes
        
       Hey HN!  I just shipped a project I've been working on called
       Maroofy: https://maroofy.com  You can search for any song, and
       it'll use the song's audio to find other similar-sounding music.
       Demo: https://twitter.com/subby_tech/status/1621293770779287554
       How does it work?  I've indexed ~120M+ songs from the iTunes
       catalog with a custom AI audio model that I built for understanding
       music.  My model analyzes raw music audio as input and produces
       embedding vectors as output.  I then store the embedding vectors
       for all songs into a vector database, and use semantic search to
       find similar music!  Here are some examples you can try:  Fetish
       (Selena Gomez feat. Gucci Mane) --
       https://maroofy.com/songs/1563859943 The Medallion Calls (Pirates
       of the Caribbean) -- https://maroofy.com/songs/1440649752  Hope you
       like it, and would love to hear any questions/feedback/comments! :D
        
       Author : subtech
       Score  : 686 points
       Date   : 2023-02-03 00:20 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (maroofy.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (maroofy.com)
        
       | alexmolas wrote:
       | How did you extract the embeddings from the songs? Did you use a
       | pre-trained model? Or have you trained you own model (using
       | autoencoders or something similar)?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | I had to train my own model :)
        
       | yborg wrote:
       | Laughably bad for "Here's Where The Story Ends" by The Sundays, I
       | can't even begin to see how some of these recommendations relate.
       | Did discover that Finnish rockabilly is a thing, though.
        
       | youssefabdelm wrote:
       | If you could somehow filter the beginner bedroom producers the
       | results might be even more compelling...but great job so far!
        
       | mattfrommars wrote:
       | What part of AI is this? Is it something related to how Shazam
       | worked, as per their White paper. The idea is to create a visual
       | image of the song, it's representation and run a model to
       | identify things similar to it.
       | 
       | Is this AI or machine learning?
        
       | vintermann wrote:
       | I entered "Spiro - The Vapourer", a brilliant dance music
       | inspired instrumental folk piece with intense, layered melodies.
       | 
       | It recommended "Buzz Cazon - Sentimental Attitude".
       | 
       | I have trouble putting into words how bad that recommendation
       | was. Seriously, just compare those two pieces, do they have
       | ANYTHING in common besides maybe vaguely the tempo?
        
         | vintermann wrote:
         | OK, but I'll concede it does SOMETHING pretty wild. Just not
         | necessarily something good for recommendations.
         | 
         | Because I tried another song: "Sam Sweeney - The King of
         | Prussia's March", and the second recommendation was "Polsk Nr.
         | 48" by Rasmus Storm.
         | 
         | The wild thing? Well, first of all, Rasmus Storm isn't strictly
         | speaking the artist. He was the composer. He was a 17th century
         | Danish fiddler, who - rarely for his time and social standing -
         | knew music notation, and wrote down his tunes in a book.
         | 
         | The crazy thing is that in that same book, "Murchy nr. 14" is
         | the tune better known in England as "The King of Prussia's
         | March"!
         | 
         | The odds of that happening by chance has to be absolutely tiny.
         | "Obscure" doesn't even begin to describe it when it comes to
         | Rasmus Storm's notebook.
        
         | cousin_it wrote:
         | Wait, you really don't hear the similarity? To me the two
         | pieces sound uncanny close. The tempo sure, but also the rhythm
         | guitar does almost the same thing, and the higher pitched
         | instruments in both have similar timbre and do similar things.
         | You could probably mix the two pieces together and it'd sound
         | alright.
         | 
         | This happened to me before, I'd point out that for example
         | Reckoning Song and Counting Stars are the same song, but people
         | would swear they have nothing in common. Or Sail vs Believer,
         | why was the second one even made. Is it that people focus
         | mostly on the manner/vibe of a song, and don't notice what it
         | actually sounds like?
        
           | vintermann wrote:
           | I think maybe you can argue that from the 30 second excerpt
           | from the middle of the song (which I guess the model is
           | trained on). The Vapourer briefly drops into the "Arches"
           | theme there, an original tune from one of Spiro's earlier
           | albums which is one of the overlapping tunes in the piece.
           | But I still don't think the similarity is great!
        
       | poutrathor wrote:
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/724345280 That's just the same song
       | always 6 times in a row. you probably already know, one would
       | prefer to have removed versions of the same song by the same
       | artist at the very least.
        
       | subtech wrote:
       | I just wanted to quickly THANK EVERYONE for taking the time to
       | check this project out and give your feedback!
       | 
       | I honestly didn't expect this project to get this much traffic --
       | I really can't express my emotions via text rn lol.
       | 
       | I'm working on an improved AI model that should address a lot of
       | the shortcomings of the current one, along with a lot of other
       | features people have mentioned (playlists, deduplicating results,
       | volume control, better search UX, etc.).
       | 
       | Got a lot of updates coming, time to ship! :D
        
         | LunarAurora wrote:
         | You should add an option to donate.
        
         | bmlzootown wrote:
         | Volume control is a must. I had my headphones on, at normal
         | volume, and... let's just say I didn't realize just how loud it
         | would be.
         | 
         | Other than that, however, this seems neat. I've been trying to
         | listen to new music lately, so this'll definitely come in
         | handy.
        
       | gattis wrote:
       | It's quite good. Tried a couple house/electro/ebm tracks and it
       | gave a good mix of stuff you'd expect and novel stuff you
       | wouldn't. It finds a lot of songs that sample a given song, for
       | obvious reasons. Glad someone gave this a go without any
       | collaborative filtering or user ratings, just digging through
       | waveforms alone.
        
       | kingkawn wrote:
       | My roofy?
        
       | RERER666 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | toomanyrichies wrote:
       | I'm teaching myself deep learning at the moment, and learning
       | about embedding vectors was the first "holy shit!" moment I had.
       | 
       | To me, it's fascinating that not only can you:
       | 
       | -represent things like words as vectors,
       | 
       | -map them in a multi-dimensional space, and
       | 
       | -use that space to find the "closest" neighbors (i.e. the most
       | similar words)...
       | 
       | ...but you can actually perform "mathematical" operations on
       | them.
       | 
       | The canonical example is that, if you represent "king", "queen",
       | "man", and "woman" as vectors in your embedding space, then you
       | can ask your model "What is king - man + woman?" and (provided
       | it's trained appropriately) it will return "queen".
       | 
       | I look forward to the day when we can ask something like "What is
       | 'Bohemian Rhapsody' - 'Queen' + 'Velvet Underground'?". Which, if
       | OP's model were to be trained on whole songs instead of previews,
       | would probably be a reality!
        
       | peepee1982 wrote:
       | Fun. I entered one of my own songs and the fifth result was "Love
       | will tear us apart" by performed live by New Order.
        
       | LunarAurora wrote:
       | "similar-sounding music" is indeed a good way to put it. 120
       | millions ! This is awesome! Reminds me of https://cyanite.ai/
       | (Search by audio). I will have to give it more time, but so far,
       | I like your results better. Well done!
        
       | kugutsumen wrote:
       | I wish it worked the results are horrible!!!
        
       | Knucklebones wrote:
       | This is amazing. I actually really like that it gives you songs
       | across completely different genres and moods (while keeping the
       | beat). One piece of feedback - it'd be nice if the search box
       | didn't clear if you click out of it to e.g. look at another tab
       | while it loads.
       | 
       | If you ever write a blog post about the process of making this,
       | I'd love to read it.
        
       | RERER666 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | omnibrain wrote:
       | It's a great idea and I like it a lot. Especially the execution.
       | It loads nearly instantly and has everything I want there.
       | 
       | But of course I tried it with 2 very difficult songs I never
       | could find anything like it: Desert Rose by Sting and Zoolook by
       | Jarre. For Desert Rose it found some similarish things (but of
       | course failed to capture the essence, what makes Desert Rose so
       | unique) but for Zoolook it completely fell apart.
        
       | DrNosferatu wrote:
       | - How about an aggregate function and year/decade result filters?
       | 
       | Say, to figure out what are The Pixies ('measured') musical
       | references (y)
        
       | JasonFruit wrote:
       | I'm sure this has a lot of value, and it's cool to see. I
       | immediately am interested! One thing came up in the first search
       | that's frequently overlooked in music, though: unless the prompt
       | is Christmas music, the response should probably not be Christmas
       | music.
        
       | superasn wrote:
       | Nice idea. Not sure how good the recommendations are just yet,
       | but I really wish there was a Spotify button on there.
       | 
       | Also if it's not a trade secret can you expand "My model analyzes
       | raw music audio as input and produces embedding vectors as
       | output." What kind of analysis are you doing? What is the
       | criteria for picking recommendations? I always find this area of
       | music analysis intersting.
        
       | shusaku wrote:
       | Great work, this is very fun! Alas, I tried "Werewolves of
       | London" and it didn't spit out "Sweet Home Alabama", so it still
       | has room to grow
        
       | tippysdemise wrote:
       | Well done!
       | 
       | A comment: for classical music, it would be necessary to see the
       | name of the composer. Currently, it's only the performing artist
       | that's displayed in the interface.
        
       | rcme wrote:
       | The results do sound very similar, which is interesting from a
       | philosophical point of view: after searching all my favorite
       | songs, I liked not one similar sounding result. What makes one
       | enjoy art vs. not? There's clearly more to it than how something
       | "sounds."
        
       | kennyloginz wrote:
       | This is great! So handy for the dj! Please keep up the good work,
       | very appreciated!
        
       | nightkall wrote:
       | Fantastic tool, thanks for making it!
       | 
       | As others said, it would be a nice option to export it as a
       | playlist for Spotify/Apple/Youtube or a .txt file with "Artist -
       | Track name" in each line. Then you can import the txt file into a
       | playlist converter tool like www.tunemymusic.com and play it in
       | your favorite music service. Mine is discoverquickly.com where
       | you can listen Spotify playlists fast with mouseover, and
       | discover related songs/artists.
       | 
       | An autoplay x seconds of every track, where you can choose the
       | number of seconds, would be a nice addition too. This way you can
       | discover music while doing other things.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Playlist + some sort of auto-playing mechanic is coming!
        
       | bloodyplonker22 wrote:
       | I clicked one of the "recommended" songs on the front page, Du
       | Hast - Rammstein. I got this:
       | 
       | Rhythm Is Gonna Get You Gloria Estefan
        
       | jb3689 wrote:
       | Fun, but unfortunately it is pretty off for me compared to
       | Spotify and Apple Music. I wouldn't listen to any of the recs
       | personally. I do appreciate how out there the recommendations are
       | though! They're just amateurish for my tastes.
        
       | llagerlof wrote:
       | Beautiful. Definetely could replace spotify "recommended" for me.
       | 
       | Please, add some filters:
       | 
       | - By language
       | 
       | - By year (between, above, below)
       | 
       | - By fame (so the user can filter out famous musics or unknown
       | ones)
       | 
       | Thank you!
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Yup, working on it!
        
       | pbhjpbhj wrote:
       | They'll either be sued into the ground or bought out for a multi-
       | million figure by the Summer!
       | 
       | Good luck!
        
       | lanza wrote:
       | Neat, but I'm convinced after giving it a try that this is
       | absolutely not the way to do music recommendation. The
       | recommendations were complete misses for me.
        
       | gticala wrote:
       | I find the list of similar songs to be bang on for a couple of
       | songs I queried for. Great job!
        
       | nuker wrote:
       | Loading ... Beef it up before posting on HN?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | sorry mate, 100% didn't expect this much HN traffic.
        
         | sitkack wrote:
         | It chokes if you have any adblocker or anti-tracking.
        
           | sitkack wrote:
           | And search only works in Chrome.
        
           | no_butterscotch wrote:
           | It chokes on everything: Brave or Chrome, incognito with
           | Brave Shield disabled or uBlock disabled also don't work,
           | same with Safari, ...
           | 
           | I'm glad it includes the examples at the bottom so I can see
           | what it does though.
        
             | sitkack wrote:
             | I was _only_ able to get search to work on Chrome in
             | incognito on a mac.
             | 
             | It basically overfits on the similarity, which is kinda
             | neat in a way. It could be extremely useful in scoring
             | video, you want something "like" this song, it gives you
             | lots of things to choose from. Or if I wanted to make a set
             | list on a theme.
        
       | gticala wrote:
       | I found the recommended songs to be bang on similar to the ones I
       | queried. Great job!
        
       | gpjanik wrote:
       | The similarities between songs are quite literal (e.g. songs are
       | similar in some technical sense), but their mood, cultural
       | meaning, etc., is completely different. I got some pretty festive
       | pop as recommendations for similar songs to Enjoy the Silence
       | from Depeche Mode - but the chord progressions and amount of
       | syllables in choirs were similar. No idea how this works and
       | whether that's by chance or on purpose.
        
       | phendrenad2 wrote:
       | Very cool, the results look great. Looking forward to throwing
       | random songs in here going forward.
        
       | dcl wrote:
       | Would love to know more about how you produced the embeddings!
        
       | tanelpoder wrote:
       | Curious, did you just get the album/song lists from iTunes and
       | get the corresponding raw music audio from other sources or does
       | iTunes really allow one user account to download the raw audio of
       | 120M songs?
        
       | tastysandwich wrote:
       | Personally for me the best way of finding new music is friends
       | whose opinions I trust. I find going by similarity will pull up a
       | lot of derivative artists that suck (eg Last.Fm/Pandora). I want
       | something good, and if it's radically different, even better!
       | 
       | One awesome use-case I can see for this though is finding
       | alternatives to copyrighted songs. Let's say you make a sports
       | video, and you have this fantastic song in your head, but you
       | can't secure permission. It would be cool if this could find
       | something similar to that song. Same style, tempo, etc. Even
       | better if it's royalty free.
        
         | foysauce wrote:
         | I believe a very similar use case was the original primary
         | function of Richard's compression algorithm in the show Silicon
         | Valley. Which of course was entirely underutilizing the
         | technology but that was the joke.
        
       | gaske-p wrote:
       | Are you taking bug reports here? This song seems to get no
       | recommendations:
       | 
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1634824510
       | 
       | Server error is:
       | 
       | Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0
        
       | mxkopy wrote:
       | O.o you beat me to it I was thinking of building something
       | similar
       | 
       | I don't think I could've done the UI as clean, though, very nice!
       | 
       | I hope the mainstream platforms start implementing stuff like
       | this soon
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! :D
         | 
         | I personally think I need to improve the UI a lot, but maybe
         | that's because I've spent way too many hours staring at it
         | lmao.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | How did you download that many songs? Wouldn't that be something
       | on the order of 360 terabytes?
        
         | youssefabdelm wrote:
         | Also curious about this... where did you get the dataset?
        
         | LunarAurora wrote:
         | I guess he is working with the 30s low rez previews, I know you
         | can download them with the Spotify API. Apple Music should be
         | similar.
        
           | ComplexSystems wrote:
           | Wouldn't this still be about 36 terabytes of data?
        
             | charcircuit wrote:
             | You would only need to store the embeddings and not the
             | file audio itself.
        
             | winrid wrote:
             | Meh, you can store that on a single d3en.2xlarge for $780.
        
       | losteric wrote:
       | How did you get the 120MM songs?
        
       | ranting-moth wrote:
       | Brilliant. Would be nice also to see what's playing. When I've
       | scrolled and clicked a lot of songs and realize I like it, I have
       | no idea what I clicked!
        
       | Quarrelsome wrote:
       | genuinely stoked it found a track that sounds like Cicatraz ESP
       | by Mars Volta in Addiction by Tripp Berlin (which is new to me,
       | so thanks for that!) but as others have said in other cases it
       | fails to understand the pull of a given song but you can always
       | understand why it recommended a given track.
       | 
       | One outcome I found interesting is that I gave it Ante Bijou Up
       | but it didn't find any of the original versions of Ante Up based
       | off of it and its first recommendation was some hideous pop song.
       | 
       | However, based off the success of the Cicatraz ESP recommendation
       | I am a massive fan of your work! <3
        
       | raffraffraff wrote:
       | Seems to work well on some stuff, not on others. I get that AI is
       | able to correlate things that we can't really detect because we
       | don't experience music as a raw waveform. But the emotion and
       | sentiment in the vocals regardless of music genre is something
       | that can link sings together in a playlist, and I don't see how
       | this could do the same unless it's also considering mood tags (if
       | you can get access to decent quality tags) and lyrics.
        
       | adamsmith143 wrote:
       | It's almost too good in that it finds a lot of song remixes which
       | I don't necessarily want. So it's clearly targeting the right
       | things in songs but I don't necessarily want to have a remixes.
       | Might think of a way to adjust for that?
        
       | neilk wrote:
       | Quite impressive given you're working with tiny snippets of
       | songs. Kudos.
       | 
       | This is so interesting out of the gate that criticisms seem
       | rather foolish. But I'll just say what I tried.
       | 
       | I tried pop songs, jazz tunes, and even rather strange, unique
       | recordings like "One Step Beyond" by Madness. And every time I
       | got something with similar aspects.
       | 
       | I also like that all cultures were represented.
       | 
       | Would I use this to find music? Maybe? It kind of underscores
       | that we don't always listen just for a particular sound, but for
       | what that artist represents to us. I may really like a band and
       | absolutely hate a band that's pretty much a copy of them (maybe
       | done a few decades later) precisely because they are too much a
       | copy.
       | 
       | I don't think I could build playlists (in this current offering)
       | because the songs are _too_ similar. Maybe if I want an exercise
       | playlist with a particular bpm and vibe?
       | 
       | I think if I were looking for music for TV or advertising this
       | would be an absolute winner. If I feel like I want a song like
       | Daft Punk here, but I can't afford to license it, I can use your
       | tool to find a lot of tracks with similar vibes that I can afford
       | or that I haven't heard of.
        
       | amatecha wrote:
       | Super sick, thanks for sharing this. I found some really
       | interesting songs and artists to check out later. It's very time-
       | consuming to listen through all the "matches" as many of them are
       | not close to what made the "source" track appealing to me, but
       | that's difficult to quantify for each song. Still, tons of stuff
       | bookmarked and added to my Bandcamp wishlist :)
        
       | huhtenberg wrote:
       | Search doesn't work in a recent Firefox on Windows - typing
       | anything in the search box shows the "Loading..." dropout below
       | it and then nothing happens. This generates no network activity
       | and the console shows:                   Cross-Origin Request
       | Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote
       | resource at https://cdn.segment.com/v1/projects/F4GFNelOpRsgUJc6i
       | wTuiXr2t6AH5LCY/settings.         (Reason: CORS request did not
       | succeed). Status code: (null).              NetworkError when
       | attempting to fetch resource  --
       | _app-f73fb5ecceb5fc1e.js:1:82295
       | 
       | PS. It looks like your code has some hard dependency on
       | segment.com and/or panelbear.com tracking services. These are
       | blocked by default by uBlock. Turning uBlock off seems to resolve
       | the issue.
        
         | addandsubtract wrote:
         | Weird, I'm using Firefox with uBO and it's working fine.
        
         | Toutouxc wrote:
         | Getting the same error on macOS, both Safari and Firefox.
        
         | MrGilbert wrote:
         | Same goes for Vivaldi... I thought it might have received the
         | famous "hn-hug-of-death".
         | 
         | //Edit: Just read the edit regarding ublock origin. So this
         | website definitely needs a Privacy Policy then.
        
         | iopq wrote:
         | Turned off uBlock, still the same issue
        
         | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
         | I've tried in both Firefox and Chrome and getting the same
         | issue. I assume settings holds that magic that makes the
         | network requests because right now none are being made.
         | 
         | Edit: Turned off privacy badger and then it started making
         | requests on Firefox.
        
       | giancarlostoro wrote:
       | Interesting, I tried a few songs and artist combinations:
       | 
       | I picked a Three 6 Mafia song I used to listen to in my younger
       | years, the particular song I chose has everything in the
       | soundtrack from high hats, to trumpets, several rappers with
       | varying styles of exerting their voices, and a lot of the
       | resultant songs have either high hats or similar sounding
       | trumpets, or similar sounding drums, and in other cases,
       | something about how the artists rap reminds me slightly of Three
       | 6 Mafia's own style. I don't recognize any of the artists
       | suggested, which is a good thing, it basically did what it was
       | supposed to.
       | 
       | Next I picked a song by Bullet For My Valentine, not all the
       | songs are quite nu-metal but that's because the song I chose
       | isn't typical nu-metal (or whatever genre they were...) unlike
       | some other metal bands they dont spend the whole song screaming,
       | they actually do normal singing, so it picked up what to me sound
       | like old school metal bands like Dio, Iron Maiden and so on... So
       | it picks up on how some parts of the song are, which can get you
       | mixed results, so if you want to find a similar artist down to
       | the musical style, pick the most "metal" song you can find by
       | them. This isn't an issue for me since I like some of those
       | artists too, but I would rather get more bands that are more like
       | Bullet For My Valentine, though it seemingly did catch one or two
       | I had not heard of before.
       | 
       | Also tried another metal band Killswitch Engage with the song "My
       | Curse" and it recommended another Killswitch Engage song titled
       | "For You" which honestly, is weirdly close in style and I never
       | noticed that before. Again this one's another metal band, I just
       | wanted to see how it would do.
       | 
       | Lastly, I tried a Spanish reggaeton song, and I was not
       | disappointed. You really did a hell of a job on this.
       | 
       | My only wish is that Apple would hire you / buy out your efforts
       | because I wish this was part of Apple Music, their "suggested
       | music" is awful, and the genre discovery type of thing doesn't
       | always yield artists I remotely care for, I feel more inclined to
       | listen to some of the suggested songs but it sucks you can only
       | give samples and link to the song directly, if you could generate
       | playlists from the results it would be good, this isn't a you
       | issue, its moreso an Apple limitation.
        
       | AlecSchueler wrote:
       | This is actually great, one of the most promising recommendation
       | algorithms I've come across.
       | 
       | I love that it's working by sound. So often eg Spotify will
       | insist I check out other bands in the same "scene" or from the
       | same era as other artists I like, and in genres as broad as "70s
       | rock" it can be really tiring.
       | 
       | One of the first tracks I tried was Natural Woman by Carole King.
       | I love that it recommended other slow but rhythmic piano vamps
       | with tender vocals by artists singing in other languages, some
       | modern, some old, as well as some sung by men. It even
       | recommended me more Carole King which is I guess shows it's
       | picking up on something constant in her music.
       | 
       | What impressed me was that it recommended quite a lot of numbers
       | in the same key! It was funny clicking through them and the tonal
       | centre being unchanged. It was like they really were different
       | but the same.
       | 
       | It definitely doesn't understand everything about tonality
       | though! I tried some atonal music next, Naama for solo
       | harpsichord by Iannis Xenakis, expecting to get more atonality
       | back. Nope, first result was very firmly tonal: "Suite in E flat
       | major" by Bach for solo harpsichord. It definitely got some
       | essential aspects of the pieces down but completely missed the
       | central concepts underpinning their musicality.
       | 
       | Very promising like I say, can't wait to try more things out!
        
         | agentwiggles wrote:
         | I'm enjoying it a lot too, I've always been a bit frustrated by
         | what you describe with Spotify. It's like it's keying more on
         | genre than sound, which has both pros and cons, but ends up
         | giving me a lot of music that is nominally in the same genre
         | but missing the qualities I like about a certain song.
         | 
         | Probably my favorite song of all time is Close to the Edge, by
         | Yes. Spotify will happily provide me with tons of
         | recommendations for 70s prog - much of which I love too, but
         | some of it leaves me cold.
         | 
         | Maroofy came up with "Good Day" by Leigh Ashford, a song I had
         | never heard of. It's very interesting to compare it to CttE -
         | it's not a very similar song in most respects, but has a
         | similarly prominent bouncy bassline. I like the song, and I
         | don't think I'd have found it via spotify or any of my other
         | usual music discovery sources.
         | 
         | Overall this is very cool, great project.
        
           | subtech wrote:
           | Thank you so much! With an improved model, things should get
           | a lot better! :D
        
       | mmahemoff wrote:
       | Exciting to see AI used this way. My main feedback is I'd look at
       | incorporating other factors to rank results, not _purely_ how
       | similar it sounds. Audiophiles might prefer a pure similarity
       | ranking, but that could be offered as a non-default setting if
       | anything.
       | 
       | e.g. I'm sometimes seeing several essentially identical tracks at
       | the top of recommendations (also mentioned in a comment by
       | rayshan). You probably want to penalise tracks like that so
       | they're pushed well down the list, i.e. penalise matches by
       | metadata similarity (artist, title, etc).
       | 
       | OTOH I think it should boost results from more popular
       | songs/artists, so the top result is less likely to be an obscure
       | result that happens to sound similar. Some might argue it's a
       | good thing to discover/highlight obscure artists, but for most
       | users, it's more practical to recommend results that are already
       | "proven" to be appealing. More obscure results could still be
       | blended in if highlighting them is seen as a goal of the project.
        
         | emodendroket wrote:
         | If the point was to surface popular recommendations why would I
         | go to a different Web site instead of just using what Apple
         | Music already gives me? It has to do something different to be
         | interesting.
        
           | mmahemoff wrote:
           | Not everyone is using Apple Music (or its competition).
           | 
           | Even for those who are using a music platform, this project
           | still has its unique algorithm that's likely to surface
           | distinct results. Partly because the developer can do their
           | own innovation and partly because the platforms influence the
           | algorithm in ways that aren't necessarily aligned with users'
           | interests. e.g. promoting artists they have favorable
           | relationships with.
           | 
           | The developer can also offer features that Apple et al aren't
           | offering, perhaps because it would complicate their app too
           | much or isn't high priority, but makes sense for a
           | specialized tool like this. e.g. fine grained settings to
           | filter and sort results.
        
             | emodendroket wrote:
             | No, but the tool already features heavy integration with
             | Apple Music, so I assumed that was the target demographic.
        
         | knaik94 wrote:
         | I think popularity based ranking should absolutely be optional
         | and a toggle. I think it's reasonable to have default rank be
         | popularity, but in my opinion, the value of a model like this
         | is finding obscure tracks. I also would definitely like seeing
         | an exposed toggle, and maybe automatically toggle it off when
         | someone presses refresh?
        
           | mmahemoff wrote:
           | Sure, a toggle is one option. The main point is to introduce
           | popularity as a factor and ultimately the best UI and
           | defaults are best decided through A-B testing.
           | 
           | I'd also add that it's usually a good idea to incorporate
           | this setting into the URL, regardless of the UI, so that a
           | specific order can be bookmarked and shared.
        
       | youssefabdelm wrote:
       | What model/architecture did you use? Also curious about the
       | process with that. Did you use an off the shelf model (like
       | Jukebox) to embed the tracks?
        
       | silisili wrote:
       | I love the idea, but the results were far off the mark. Perhaps
       | they should be weighted according to some vectors, including
       | language.
       | 
       | I chose 'Let it be me' by the Everly Brothers. 8 or so of the top
       | 10 were foreign songs, and sounded much older even.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks for your feedback!! Yup, model can definitely be
         | improved (and perhaps I should also add a language filter)!
         | Noted! :)
        
       | s390qdio wrote:
       | Reminds of last.fm and their scrobbler.
        
       | IYasha wrote:
       | Umm... is it just me or there's no "Search" button? Linux,
       | Firefocks 50.1.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | I definitely have to improve the UI, but for now, as you type
         | in a song in the search bar, it should load some auto-complete
         | suggestions that you can choose from.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | Semaphor wrote:
       | I think I either found some kind of bug or Apple Music is really
       | weird.
       | 
       | The similar songs for Anaal Nathrakh - Endarkenment [0] have
       | Annal Nathrakh with endakenmento at the top. So a misspelling of
       | the band, and apparently (according to google translate) a
       | Japanese transliteration of the song title (Endakenmento,
       | enderkenment). The song itself is literally the same one, others
       | listed are their other songs, or more Japanese transliterations
       | of their songs. The weird versions can be played, but the linked
       | page does not exist on Apple Music [1]
       | 
       | [0]: https://maroofy.com/songs/1522388463
       | 
       | [1]:
       | https://music.apple.com/album/%E3%82%A8%E3%83%B3%E3%83%80%E3...
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Ya Apple Music can have some interesting duplicates in their
         | catalog lol :/
        
       | twalichiewicz wrote:
       | Nice work on this! As people have commented already, seems to
       | provide more "very similar sounding sounds" versus
       | recommendations.
       | 
       | I tried Glass Animals - Heat Waves, and after clicking through
       | the recommended songs it's eerie how similar they sound to each
       | other. As I would let the preview play and start the next song I
       | sometimes thought my click didn't register because of just how
       | similar one song would be to the last
       | (https://maroofy.com/songs/1508562516 for those who want to see
       | for themselves).
        
       | winrid wrote:
       | How did you scrape the audio of 120M songs? That sounds
       | expensive?
        
         | gigel82 wrote:
         | Probably just used the previews (makes sense, songs tend to
         | keep their rhythm throughout).
        
           | winrid wrote:
           | Lots of industrial metal has a drawn out start before the
           | actual song lol
        
             | kristiandupont wrote:
             | Previews don't start at 0:00 but at a place selected by the
             | artist give the best quick impression possible. Of course,
             | I don't know what they've done with the "old" catalog.
        
         | cactusplant7374 wrote:
         | Also curious about this... It seems impossible.
        
           | sometimeshuman wrote:
           | I wonder this too. I tried scraping iOS App reviews from
           | Apple's server and I didn't get far before my IP was blocked.
        
       | shog_hn wrote:
       | It doesn't appear to work in Firefox. Looks like CORS is blocking
       | a call to segment.
        
         | iopq wrote:
         | Same issue in Firefox
        
       | muzani wrote:
       | It seems to be finding snippets of songs similar to snippets. I
       | tried on Metallica - Unforgiven III, which starts off with a slow
       | piano composition, and then enters a riff and cuts out.
       | 
       | It ends up recommending piano songs, many Korean ones.
       | 
       | There's some interesting ones like Ghost - Cirice, where it finds
       | other songs with similar riffs. I like Ghost's music in general,
       | just not the Satanic themes, so this is a great tool for finding
       | similar music.
       | 
       | I'm somewhat amused that it doesn't match Under Pressure with Ice
       | Ice Baby.
        
         | yayr wrote:
         | good point, probably a final version should have a pipeline
         | like 1. cluster song segments into styles and 2. search for
         | each cluster or only the main cluster.
         | 
         | What would be a good NN architecture for the first step?
        
       | jodacola wrote:
       | Something I've dreamed about but haven't found: a
       | tool/service/etc. that can take my tastes from an era, say my
       | eclectic early 2000s mix of jazz, electronic, and tango, and find
       | me a similar set of music I might be interested in from the 2020s
       | or the 1990s. I would love to explore my own taste in music in
       | different eras. Interesting work. Reminded me of my little dream.
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | Solid work, but this only reinforces my belief that music
       | recommendations is an area that is not (yet) cracked by AI. You
       | can find similar songs with great accuracy, sure, but even if two
       | songs are close to each other by all calculable metrics they can
       | still vary drastically in subjective quality.
       | 
       | And a quick suggestion - all my top results when searching for
       | popular songs were songs that were either different versions of
       | it or those that had heavily sampled the original. While the
       | algorithm is spot on, that isn't exactly what I am looking for.
       | Maybe have a filter to exclude results that are too close a
       | match?
        
         | popinman322 wrote:
         | Have you tried Gnoosic[0] yet? It's a more standard recommender
         | system, I think. Some of the recommendations are really on
         | point.
         | 
         | [0]: https://www.gnoosic.com/
        
       | brutus1213 wrote:
       | How did you get the samples for the song? iTunes allows scraping?
       | 
       | Your project is extremely motivational .. how long did it take
       | you? What did you train on? I do DL for work and just play with
       | things like cifar. This is so inspired.
        
         | nanidin wrote:
         | Apple Music subscription is $12/month and it allows full
         | downloads of songs.
        
           | helsinkiandrew wrote:
           | Hmmm. I would have thought that Apple would detect and block
           | you if you try to download their entire catalog without some
           | kind of permission. If they're the same size as the files in
           | my Apple Music it would take in the order of a petabyte to
           | store (compression would obviously reduce that).
           | 
           | 120M songs would take approximately 1000 years to listen to
           | in normal time and is way beyond normal usage.
        
           | netrus wrote:
           | ... but certainly not ALL songs? I would think they notice if
           | you download more then one minute of audio per minute over a
           | long time.
        
           | piyush_soni wrote:
           | But aren't they DRMed? Or does it let you download in mp3 or
           | related formats directly (I'm not on Apple music)?
        
             | manv1 wrote:
             | Analog hole.
        
             | s3p wrote:
             | You're correct, it's DRM only
        
         | albertTJames wrote:
         | most relevant
        
       | noja wrote:
       | Playlist button please!
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | So many people have asked me the same thing lol. Shipping soon!
        
       | chx wrote:
       | Thank you. This is really great. Of course not everything is a
       | hit but it did find some beautiful tunes for me.
       | 
       | One little problem: if you press play and wander off after it
       | stopped playing it can be rather hard to find what you played.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks a lot for your feedback! You're right, I should probably
         | add a better song player UI element.
         | 
         | Also, as I improve the model & add user accounts,
         | recommendations should hopefully get much better and more
         | personalized!
        
       | practice9 wrote:
       | Could you please also add a "Compare" tab? So we can select two
       | or more songs and see how similar they are?
        
       | emperorcj wrote:
       | Needs an auto playlist generator! :) I would FUCKING KILL for
       | that
        
       | qikInNdOutReply wrote:
       | Can it do endless mashups?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | I think I can technically use the underlying model to do it,
         | but never really tried it. Interesting...
        
       | rlt wrote:
       | This looks great.
       | 
       | Does anything similar exist that lists possible genres for a
       | given track?
       | 
       | I'm a big fan of things like Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
       | and everynoise.com. It would be cool to be able to list out the
       | genre(s) and show similar tracks.
        
       | freetime2 wrote:
       | I searched for "Poinciana" by Keith Jarrett[1] (one of my all-
       | time favorites).
       | 
       | The top three responses were "La Raya" by Los Islenos [2], "Days
       | of Our Love" by Deepa Dremata [3], and "Flying Home" by Michelle
       | Mack [4].
       | 
       | While I didn't hate any of them, and they all featured a piano, I
       | wouldn't say any of them sound like Keith Jarrett, either.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://music.apple.com/us/album/poinciana/1446740946?i=1446...
       | 
       | [2] https://music.apple.com/us/album/la-raya-feat-ben-
       | murphy/154...
       | 
       | [3] https://music.apple.com/us/album/days-of-our-
       | love/1608767255...
       | 
       | [4] https://music.apple.com/us/album/flying-
       | home/1577716851?i=15...
        
         | anentropic wrote:
         | I had similar experience
         | 
         | it doesn't seem to understand anything about the style of the
         | music
         | 
         | seems to find stuff which is sonically similar rather than
         | musically similar, and even then I'm being generous
         | 
         | no useful recommendations
        
       | hui-zheng wrote:
       | I tried it, I think the vibe match looks great, but the match
       | lacks the culture context. It would be great to use song's meta
       | data and lyrics to to improve that
        
       | paulproteus wrote:
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1651341589 is one of my favorite songs,
       | but it says, "Hmm, something went wrong," and shows no similar
       | songs.
       | 
       | When I was a teenager, I thought no band was as cool as Rainer
       | Maria.
       | 
       | Does this mean I was right?
       | 
       | :D
       | 
       | Nice app! I tried it for another fave
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1578598760 and will give those a
       | listen.
        
       | ecmascript wrote:
       | Seems cool and I understand you're getting hugged to death by HN
       | right now but I could not use it because the search was too slow
       | and as soon as I change focus to another window for example, it
       | removes whatever I wrote in the search bar so unfortunately
       | completely useless due to this bug.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | my bad, that can be annoying. will ship an update for this!
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | Tried Erreur 404 by L'Imperatrice[1], and I noticed the beat of
       | the other recommended songs were eerily similar!! I'd argue your
       | project is actually _too_ good.
       | 
       | Where Spotify's Discover Weekly tried to connect you to music
       | other people listen to {B, C, D, ...} because you've listened to
       | a particular song {A} {B...->A}, your model quite literally tried
       | to find other music {A2} that sounds like what you're looking for
       | {A1} {A2->A1}.
       | 
       | Edit: OK, some of these are actually pretty dope...
       | 
       | [1]: https://maroofy.com/songs/1458902217
        
         | japanman425 wrote:
         | ... what?
        
           | wayeq wrote:
           | {W1} {H2->A1}*T?
        
             | japanman425 wrote:
             | My thoughts exactly.
             | 
             | r/iamverysmart vibes... someone who has watched one Lex
             | whatever his name was video on the maths of neural
             | networks...
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | Probably just BS by GPT3.
        
               | andrewmcwatters wrote:
               | Could you not shitpost like the parent, please?
        
           | popinman322 wrote:
           | IIUC: Spotify seems to use something similar to collaborative
           | filtering. People rate songs based on more than similarity,
           | which is what this model seems to provide.
        
             | phist_mcgee wrote:
             | >IIUC
             | 
             | What?
        
               | popinman322 wrote:
               | IIUC -> If I understand correctly
        
         | bobsil1 wrote:
         | This approach is better for remix beat-matching than as new
         | song recs, IMO.
        
       | registeredcorn wrote:
       | The search feature is great from what I can tell!
       | 
       | I tried an obscure(?) Japanese rock band "9 Ball" and they were
       | extremely high on the search results. I can't even _find_ the
       | album by using Apple Music.
       | 
       | Searching for 9 Ball in Maroofy shows them in spots 2-6, easily:
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/185487468
       | 
       | When I try to search for the same band in Apple Music, I get this
       | jumbled mess of results:
       | https://music.apple.com/us/search?term=9%20ball
       | 
       | Even searching for a specific song of the band, the correct
       | artist is 5th on the list:
       | https://music.apple.com/us/search?term=9%20ball%2024%20hours
       | _and_ doesn 't even link to any of their songs:
       | https://music.apple.com/us/artist/9-ball/28599994
       | 
       | I literally cannot use Apple Music search to get to the page to
       | buy Sound Seeds by 9 Ball, without going through Maroofy first. I
       | had thought Apple removed that album years ago due to some kind
       | of licensing issue. Strangley enough, even though there is an
       | option to "Buy for $7.99" clicking on the button in Apple Music
       | doesn't seem to initate any kind of prompt. Maybe this is old
       | data, but the previews are still available? Who knows. Either
       | way, the search _for_ that information was excellent.
        
       | ojo-rojo wrote:
       | I've never commented on HN before, but I feel compelled.
       | Congrats, you get my first.
       | 
       | I've been using your site for 10 minutes and already added song
       | after song to my library. I'm sure you'll improve the matching
       | algorithm over time. This is a great first step; I'm being
       | exposed to songs I've never come across before.
       | 
       | Good job!
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks a lot, definitely have a lot of work to do with
         | improving the model!
        
         | kjhnstartip wrote:
         | Same for me, I don't comment often, but this is great! I like
         | having instrumental music for when I'm working (with no
         | vocals), so if the model could classify vocals vs no vocals
         | that would make it even more useful for me.
        
       | ZeroCooly wrote:
       | There is nothing like "Crimson and Clover"?
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/59412471
        
         | JKCalhoun wrote:
         | Yeah, typed in Ultravox's _Just For a Moment_. After the 4th or
         | 5th suggested rap song I clicked I just gave up.
         | 
         | It's true though, there is nothing else quite like _Crimson and
         | Clover_. I 'm pretty sure when I was 5 years old and first
         | heard that song it caused me to trip. _Strawberry Fields
         | Forever_ is like that too, you get high just listening to it.
         | ;-)
        
           | ZeroCooly wrote:
           | Haha, true
        
       | CamperBob2 wrote:
       | Pretty cool. I think I broke it with Enya's _Pax Deorum_ ,
       | though... can't get it to work at all now ("Hmm, something went
       | wrong.")
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Sorry! The service is sometimes bugging out due to the recent
         | surge in traffic, which is causing some songs to consistently
         | fail.
         | 
         | Things should become much more reliable and better soon!
         | 
         | Also, sometimes there's a delay between when a song is
         | available in the text search bar, and when it has been indexed
         | with my AI model (which can also cause this error).
         | 
         | This will also be fixed!
        
       | Madmallard wrote:
       | Dream Theater Space Dye Vest
       | 
       | -> returns christmas music
       | 
       | yeah I think your model missed the mark lol
       | 
       | It needs to go off the bulk of the song, not the first 20 second
       | preview of the song...
        
       | throwaway892238 wrote:
       | Searched for both "portishead" and "wandering star" and it just
       | showed me songs or artists with those words in them, even if the
       | music wasn't even remotely close ("lucero - wandering star" is
       | very very different than "portishead - wandering star")
        
       | sitkack wrote:
       | Please remove the trackers so I can use search w/o using
       | incognito mode.
        
       | no1groyp wrote:
       | Not even loading
        
       | AndyKelley wrote:
       | This is so sweet. It's finding gems that when I look them up on
       | YouTube, are 10+ years old and sub-200 views. Total sleepers, but
       | I can discover them through this service. I love it. Great work.
        
       | KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
       | How does your approach compare to
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34445585
        
       | 317070 wrote:
       | Lot me try this with Lotuk by Arsenal. Every other service will
       | only recommend other songs from Belgium, disregarding any other
       | form of similarity (to my dispair).
       | 
       | Currently, the website seems down though?
       | 
       | EDIT: the results are ... not what I expected. They are similar
       | in some sense, but I wouldn't consider them "musically" similar.
       | It's like each of the recommendations has something similar,
       | whether the drums, the baseline or the voice. But none of them
       | feel similar in the whole.
       | 
       | It's as if similarity is measured with an L2-norm in a high-
       | dimensional embedding space, instead of cosine similarity? Did
       | you experiment with different scoring metrics in semantic search?
       | I would recommend cosine similarity, if this is an embedding
       | space trained with neural networks, whether with a contrastive
       | loss or with a gaussian prior.
        
       | mikerg87 wrote:
       | Very cool. Need a get a playlist from this. Seems like Spotify
       | for us Apple Music peasants
        
       | politelemon wrote:
       | The search seems to be down? I'm not getting any results back in
       | the dropdown.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Oof, honestly didn't expect the surge in traffic lol. It should
         | work, as auto-scaling kicks in, etc. Sorry about that!
        
           | politelemon wrote:
           | Ah just realized it doesn't work in Firefox. I think the
           | autoscaling has kicked in, just results aren't appearing in
           | Firefox.
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | How the hell do you even get access to the entire iTunes catalog?
        
         | fallingmeat wrote:
         | i think that would be an even more interest post.
        
           | hgsgm wrote:
           | "Apple Music doesn't have rate-limiting. The end."
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | um, isn't that just the Apple Music paid subscription service,
         | their Spotify competitor? They only advertise ("over") 100M
         | songs though, I'm not sure where the extra 20M come from.
         | 
         | https://music.apple.com/subscribe
        
           | paxys wrote:
           | Sure, but it really can't be as simple as paying $10 for the
           | month and looping through the entire catalog and downloading
           | it...right? Did nothing in their system catch millions of
           | simultaneous track requests and a petabyte+ data transfer for
           | a single user?
        
             | fragmede wrote:
             | Why would that be against the TOS?
        
       | franky47 wrote:
       | Interesting that you linked Hans Zimmer, as he's known for
       | "reusing" material across OSTs. A particular example that comes
       | to mind (and where the AI did not find a match) is The Battle
       | (5:52) from the Gladiator OST vs the Pirates of the Carribean
       | OST.
        
       | rohith2506 wrote:
       | Tried few recommendations and can definitely use an alternative
       | for Spotify radio.
       | 
       | Seems like you are dodging the question of data access and I am
       | not sure why. Even running an intelligent scraper to download
       | 120M song previews sounds too complex and might take days to
       | months as you have to rotate IPs and not bombard the server all
       | the time. If you manage to do that, kudos. That itself is a great
       | achievement. If not, can you let us know how did you get the data
       | access? You might help other devs who want to try something
       | similar
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | He's not obligated to tell us if he knows it's an edge he wants
         | to keep
        
           | rohith2506 wrote:
           | I don't think I agree with that. If he is scraping, all he
           | can say is yes. The details of the scraper is proprietary and
           | that's his edge for sure.
           | 
           | If not and he found an unauthorized source of retrieving
           | information, this reveals a serious security breach in iTunes
           | API and it's my valid concern as a paid customer.
           | 
           | 120M is a huge number and it's not even text. It's media
        
             | yunwal wrote:
             | I'm pretty sure the model is trained on the 30 second
             | previews. If you type in a song with a lot of different
             | sections, the suggestions match the preview and not the
             | rest of the song. Bohemian rhapsody, for example
        
       | jrd259 wrote:
       | It did well on ""Eyes of the World" Grateful Dead finding some
       | artists with similar vibe I never heard from. It did poorly in
       | "Heart of the Sunrise" by Yes and "Nautilus" by COVET
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1084458728.
       | 
       | One thing that stuck out for me is that for some genres (not
       | jazz, not classic) the singing really matters. Covet, for
       | example, is instrumental music, no singer at all. I wonder if
       | you'd get better results by separately training on the vocals and
       | the rest. (I think I've read that vocal extraction works these
       | days, though I confess it's a lot more work.)
        
       | vivegi wrote:
       | This is a very music recommendation engine. The best feature I
       | guess would be the serendipitous finding of unknown artists we
       | might not hear otherwise. Great job!
        
       | bfung wrote:
       | Good idea - can use work on data cleaning though; got a lot of
       | duplicate listings for some songs searched.
       | 
       | It's like feeding Apple Music through Shazam - wonder why Shazam
       | doesn't do what you've done here
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | 100% agree with data cleaning. Got ship some updates for this!
        
       | homeless_engi wrote:
       | Really cool! From my understanding, it looks like this is doing
       | something like word embeddings and searching for nearby points in
       | the embedding space.
       | 
       | Crazy idea: what if you used a dimensionality reduction like
       | t-SNE instead of learning a vector representation? Would you
       | expect similar results?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! Yup, this is basically custom music embeddings +
         | nearest-neighbor vector search.
         | 
         | I personally found that vector representations performed
         | significantly better than other approaches.
         | 
         | And the results will actually be a lot better once I ship a
         | better model (the current one can definitely be improved upon).
        
       | QuinnyPig wrote:
       | Awesome! You should name the model "Stealy Dan."
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | lool
        
       | iopq wrote:
       | One of the files doesn't load right now
       | 
       | https://cdn.segment.com/v1/projects/F4GFNelOpRsgUJc6iwTuiXr2...
       | 
       | Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
        
       | ZeroCooly wrote:
       | I've found probably the most egregious example of what knaik94's
       | comment is talking about: https://maroofy.com/songs/214977681
       | ("Being Alive" from Company)
       | 
       | All the AI model seems to understand is the opening 5 seconds
       | piano. Listen to the actual song it just opens like that because
       | it's from a play.
       | 
       | I think this will struggle with any song that has build up, it's
       | very promising, though you need a sample of entire songs not the
       | sample Itunes gives you.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Definitely understand the current model's shortcomings that
         | people have mentioned.
         | 
         | I actually think this is largely in part due to how the current
         | model + training process is designed.
         | 
         | I have some ideas for improving things on this front, will give
         | it a try and push an update soon! :)
        
       | goodgoblin wrote:
       | Just wanted to say nice job!
        
       | jspann wrote:
       | That is a great idea! Measuring distance between embeddings has
       | always been a cool concept (ex. If I have a vector that
       | represents the word "king" and from it subtract the vector that
       | represents "man" then add the vector that represents "woman" it
       | will approximately equal the vector for "queen") and it's awesome
       | to see the same concept applied to music.
       | 
       | Most other services try to find matches by seeing what other
       | songs the people who like the searched song like, and finding
       | trends amongst those. This site finds songs with similar sounds
       | and rhythms by looking in the vector space. Awesome! Congrats on
       | the finished site!
        
       | raffraffraff wrote:
       | Lots of duplicate tracks! Is that costing you more to train?
       | Like, if I type a song I find the same recording on the original
       | album, single, greatest hits and a compilation album.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Working on some fixes for the duplicate track issue! Sorry
         | about that!
        
       | yayr wrote:
       | it is not the typical "song radio" approach that would provide
       | more a popularity / artist similarity based playlist but a real
       | "similar song" google like search. I think that is valuable to
       | discover new music, especially to find unknown artists. But if
       | someone were to embed it into streaming clients that would need
       | to be a different feature too, probably more search related.
        
       | lawrencechen wrote:
       | Wow, I love this! Can you make clicking play change the url so
       | that songs are added to our browser history? Perhaps make
       | "refreshed" pages idempotent via a hash in the url?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! Gonna add user accounts with play/like history!!
        
       | hasbot wrote:
       | If I'm listening to a song, I don't want the next song to sound
       | similar, and the next, and the next. For example, my playlist
       | just played "I touch myself", "Whiskey in the Jar," and now
       | "Somebody that I used to know." All of which sound entirely
       | different. But, maybe I'm an outlier. Have fun!
        
       | sthatipamala wrote:
       | Can you do some deduping? A lot of the matches are just the same
       | song appearing on multiple albums or single vs. album version.
        
         | squidbot wrote:
         | Came with the same feedback, I'm having fun playing with it,
         | but it's amusing to search for "Comfortably Numb" and the first
         | match is "Comfortably Numb" :D
         | 
         | https://maroofy.com/songs/1065976170
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Yup sorry about this bug! Need to do some additional post-
         | processing to prevent dupes in the catalog from showing up in
         | the results.
        
       | hooande wrote:
       | Seems like the recommendations are somewhat hit or miss so far. I
       | would suggest finding a way to say _why_ it recommended a
       | particular song. I know that this is already common, but maybe
       | you could come up with a new spin on it.
       | 
       | Also, other comments have suggested that this was trained on
       | 120MM of the audio previews instead of the full songs. That might
       | explain why the recommendations seem a little off for some
       | people.
        
         | vogt wrote:
         | I'm totally going out on a limb and guessing here - I'm more on
         | the UI/UX side of things so I know nothing low-level about what
         | goes into a building recommendation engine, algorithm, or
         | whatever. But I do know music pretty well, and this feels like
         | it's matching too closely to the technical aspects of the music
         | and not the overall theme/je-ne-sais-quoi that makes a song
         | something you _feel_.
         | 
         | I tried two of my all-time favorite songs:
         | 
         | The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten
         | 
         | Thrice - The Artist in the Ambulance
         | 
         | On the first, I would say it was a total swing and miss - the
         | recommendations had similar elements to Handwritten like
         | strummed power chords, but the vibe was completely off. With
         | Thrice, same thing. The first match was a remaster of the song
         | itself by the band, so of course despite being a "different"
         | track it was the closest possible match. The rest of the
         | recommendations had a similar tempo and more heavy metal riffs
         | (as are common in Thrice's songs), but none of them were songs
         | I would voluntarily listen to.
         | 
         | This is a cool idea and I hope OP if you read this you take the
         | criticsm as it's intended - I'm not trashing the implementation
         | or anything. This just feels like it _truly is_ a robot that
         | can 't feel the emotion of a song making me recommendations.
        
       | Uptrenda wrote:
       | I have no idea what metric the AI is using for 'similarity' but
       | this just sounds like random results to me. None of the vocals,
       | style, genre, and so on are in any way similar. When you look at
       | recommendation engines on Spotify and YouTube music they do a
       | much better job at this than this engine. I think maybe if you
       | had access to data that users enjoy you could cross reference
       | them to find patterns and use that to order your results.
        
       | majikandy wrote:
       | Wow. The songs it suggests have such a similar tempo and vibe
       | that when I try it with songs I don't know I can't really
       | remember which is which.
       | 
       | I wonder if this app has more potential for the record companies
       | and songwriters in terms of finding copyright infringement than
       | it does for the consumer finding new music they like?
        
       | jeffhuys wrote:
       | Tried LSDREAM - Oblivion, and I get meditation music. Completely
       | different and makes it hard to believe it "analyzes raw music
       | audio as input"...
        
       | orange8 wrote:
       | The homepage is an empty page with just one search box in the
       | middle. It does not work in firefox.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Hmm I actually use Firefox myself, but tbh, it can be a bit
         | flaky atm due to the sudden surge in traffic. Should become
         | more reliable soon!
        
           | orange8 wrote:
           | It may be a firefox specific bug, as when I switched to
           | chrome it worked well consistently. Maybe a network error due
           | to origin policies?
        
           | macrolime wrote:
           | It works great, but I couldn't get it to work on Safari on
           | iOS, have to click the "Listen on Apple Music" button to get
           | any sound at all.
        
       | bogwog wrote:
       | I wonder why it doesn't find Weird Al songs. If you search for
       | Michael Jackson's "Bad", I'd expect to see Weird Al's "Fat", but
       | neither one appears in the other's results. Instead, the actual
       | results are interesting, because you can hear some similarities
       | if you listen closely. But they're not what I'd consider
       | "similar"
       | 
       | Still, this is a really cool project and I'm sure there's a lot
       | of potential for building stuff with it.
        
       | RayVR wrote:
       | I think it's an interesting idea and look forward to future work,
       | but I don't think the current results are much better than
       | random.
       | 
       | I don't really understand the features your model has learned but
       | I'd start by trying to understand those features.
       | 
       | Music is highly structured and reasonably well organized already.
       | Understanding if your model learned any features that map to
       | metrics used by humans is an important question. If the answer is
       | "no" then I'd wonder if it's actually achieving anything beyond
       | random number generation.
       | 
       | ---edit--- I went back and tried modern pop. Which I believe it
       | has learned better, although all of the music there sounds so
       | similar maybe that is just a result of the small sample I tried.
        
       | arjvik wrote:
       | Can you share more details about the "custom AI audio model" used
       | to generate the embeddings?
       | 
       | Curious what sort of metrics are taken into account, and if any
       | supervision is provided.
        
       | polskibus wrote:
       | How much does it cost to access this dataset at Apple?
        
       | dankle wrote:
       | Very cool, well done ! Are model code & weights open source?
        
       | pollux01 wrote:
       | this is great! can you turn this into a playlist or something?
       | 
       | like, i'll select couple of the songs and then it gets converted
       | into a spotify playlist.
       | 
       | I need spotify btw, not apple music.
        
       | infradig wrote:
       | I tried "norwegian wood" and got a lot of acoustic guitar with
       | strong down/up strokes but nothing musically similar. Beatles
       | they weren't.
        
       | tony69 wrote:
       | I've already discovered some cool bands with this. Much better
       | than the big platform's music recommendations. Love it!
        
       | stephc_int13 wrote:
       | I tried it with a few tracks I really like, but no luck with the
       | results.
       | 
       | They had some similarities in the tonal range, but not in style
       | or quality and were sometimes completely different musical genre.
       | 
       | I can see some value in this kind of recommendation system, but
       | this is a lot of work and it should probably be flexible enough
       | to learn from the user, not with a single track but a complete
       | collection.
       | 
       | I also think that automatic playlist management is rarely well
       | done.
       | 
       | In practice I am often disappointed by simple shuffle algorithms,
       | the critical part, again, is that we all have different taste a
       | good software should be able to somewhat match those.
        
       | jcq3 wrote:
       | Saw this project tons of times what's your added value
        
         | smcin wrote:
         | Two previous posts:
         | 
         | 1/2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051909
         | 
         | 8/2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233993
        
       | chrgy wrote:
       | Interesting job, How big are the vectors and did you use GPUs to
       | trained? What models did you use?
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | Looks like a cool project. As long as it is free and not being
       | monetized, then it might keep Apple from unleashing their
       | lawyers.
       | 
       | Apple might as well buy your project for iTunes since they are
       | extremely behind in anything AI.
        
       | jpeter wrote:
       | Wow great project. I tried it with a song and I kind of get what
       | I expected. The results are more unique compared to other song
       | search sites
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Hey thanks for your feedback! :D
        
       | tunesmith wrote:
       | I tried one of my own songs... I suppose it picked up that my
       | stuff is a bit jazz-influenced, but it otherwise doesn't seem
       | very similar. It tickles me that it thinks I'm similar to both
       | Johnny Mathis and Willie Nelson, though. :)
       | 
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/899061474
        
       | johnx123-up wrote:
       | Interesting. Some feedback
       | 
       | 1. Please add match score
       | 
       | 2. Group and fold duplicates
       | 
       | 3. Add the year with the sort feature - to identify rip offs
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Noted! got a lot of updates shipping soon.
        
       | larryfreeman wrote:
       | Possible bug: I keep getting an error when I try to find similar
       | songs to any song by Neutral Milk Hotel. (For example: O Comely,
       | King of Carrot Flowers Part I) https://maroofy.com/songs/5611590
       | 
       | Love your application! Great job. Found some very surprising
       | similarities to many songs that I tested.
        
       | can_center_divs wrote:
       | Hi! The website looks awesome! I have a problem with searching
       | though. I can see the recommended songs below the search bar, but
       | as I type to search something, it is just loading infinitely. I
       | checked the network tab in DevTools and there is no requests made
       | when typing or after typing and pressing enter.
       | 
       | I used Chrome. Cheers!
       | 
       | Edit: also, clicking away from the text input field shouldn't
       | clear the value, in my opinion. The element which displays the
       | results can still be hidden though. It would also be nice to
       | control the volume of the played song.
        
       | Ensorceled wrote:
       | Interesting, I put in a bunch of my favourite songs and found
       | nothing I liked. The songs seem to be over matching on drum beat
       | and tempo so there is a similarity to the song I suggested and
       | the matches but it's often superficial.
       | 
       | For instance I picked a song with a very strong snare drum line.
       | All the suggestions also had a strong snare drum line but wildly
       | different melodies, genre's, tone, etc.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Yea, this is due to a shortcoming in the current model's
         | design.
         | 
         | Got some stuff in the works for an improved model, hopefully
         | will be able to ship it soon!
        
           | ttctciyf wrote:
           | It would be great to be able to interrogate the model. For
           | example, I'd love to know what it found to be similar between
           | Sound Chaser[1] and Mellotree Park[2] !
           | 
           | 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eks6KcV2ufg
           | 
           | 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYPfbX0DmrE
        
       | pbronez wrote:
       | There might be an interesting open source / self hosting angle to
       | this. Some folks have a large library of music stored locally.
       | Platforms like Roon can give you recommendations on top of this,
       | but are expensive and include a lot of other features.
       | 
       | You could provide discovery services to these users in exchange
       | for model updates and feedback. Couple thoughts on this:
       | 
       | - there are modern techniques to update an ML model at many edge
       | locations, then combine the learnings without violating user
       | privacy. One common application is type-ahead models.
       | 
       | - People who have large local music collections tend to care
       | about music, and would take the time to provide high quality
       | labels for you.
       | 
       | - computers used as media servers often have unused compute
       | cycles because music playback is not that intense and most folks
       | don't have music on 24/7. You could harness these to reduce
       | training costs for your model
       | 
       | - These libraries would give you access to the long tail of the
       | music catalog, including many things that aren't on iTunes or
       | other streaming services
       | 
       | - This would also put you in a position to run an open music
       | catalog. Your embedding index would be a key differentiator from
       | existing options.
        
       | rafaelmelhem wrote:
       | Tested with my own music production and the first similar result
       | was quite impressive!
       | 
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1452423952
        
       | hackernewds wrote:
       | It produces similar _sounding_ music. but that 's not really what
       | one is looking for when discovering music. Example is when I put
       | a Bollywood song, it produces for me similar sounding Latin music
       | which isn't going to fall into a good queue.
       | 
       | how Spotify does this is matching songs that have been human
       | added to the same playlists - hence matching tastes.
        
       | joshu wrote:
       | this is pretty awesome.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | <3
        
       | aryamaan wrote:
       | It's fast.
       | 
       | But not sure if the song I input and the songs I get back are
       | similar. Going to try them out further.
       | 
       | What things are they supposed to be similar at? beats? melody?
        
       | hackertoday2023 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | thom wrote:
       | Nice snappy UI. I found a couple of times on iOS that after I'd
       | clicked through to Apple Music, if I returned, the app had
       | somehow stopped being able to play again but this is very well
       | done. I think I would give a boost to song names over
       | bands/albums in the search as I think a fuzzy song match is
       | probably more likely what a user wants than an exact album/band
       | match on something they've not heard of. I'd definitely use a
       | playlist feature that just queues up the top 20 matches in Apple
       | Music, but I don't know what the API looks like. Anyway, only
       | feeding back because it's great.
       | 
       | I can certainly see what the model is getting at each time, and
       | I've not hated any of its suggestions so far, but I've also not
       | stumbled over any new favourites yet. I don't know what kind of
       | features the model is able to learn, I think it might miss one of
       | the things I like most in music, which is not just dynamics, but
       | something that builds tension over time and then blows up. If
       | there are no longer range features like that I'd certainly
       | experiment with them.
       | 
       | I've had a lot of success with Apple's own suggestions (which are
       | admittedly extremely hit or miss), and I've probably grown my
       | collection 1000% in my 30s and 40s after letting music drift away
       | from me in my 20s. There's nothing better than the feeling of a
       | new suggestion and you click through, and there's no artist
       | profile because they're unknown, and they've got like 300 Twitter
       | followers but you love them like a 15 year old. At least once on
       | here I clicked through and found that I was listening to the only
       | song ever recorded by someone, which seemed quite special.
        
       | zombiwoof wrote:
       | interesting but it seems to just sound sonically similar songs.
        
       | machiaweliczny wrote:
       | I often want to search also by semantics of lyrics not only beat.
       | I think there should be option for both.
       | 
       | EDIT: doesn't work for https://maroofy.com/songs/1640070887
        
       | dangwhy wrote:
       | I tried some songs but recommendations were tracks that sampled
       | that song and songs with same name.
       | 
       | I am not sure if thats quite what i am looking for.
        
         | pandemicsoul wrote:
         | Yes, came here to say something similar. I searched for a song
         | that was playing on at the moment, and what I got back were six
         | other versions of the same song, at the top of the list, from
         | the same artist from different albums.
         | 
         | Covers of this song would be great! But probably worthwhile to
         | exclude anything with the same name by the same artist.
        
       | NateEag wrote:
       | I tried a few of my favorites and the results were...
       | predictable, I guess.
       | 
       | It kind of matches genre, but has no grasp of musicianship or
       | _why_ I might like a track.
       | 
       | And this is a fundamental problem. See Avery Pennarun's brilliant
       | explanation of tracking users, data analysis, and recommendation
       | systems to understand why:
       | 
       | https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201902
        
       | kennyloginz wrote:
       | I'm not able to paste into the song field, a little frustrating.
       | Otherwise, this has caused me to sign up for Apple Music.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Will 100% improve the UI!
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | very cool OP!
       | 
       | could you make an "auto playlist mode" that blends one song into
       | another seamlessly?
       | 
       | usecase - party where we just want to set and forget one "vibe"
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | haha that would be fun
        
       | kilianinbox wrote:
       | Good work! I tried some house tunes. I guess the results were
       | similar but expected something more direct.. a suggestion; since
       | some listens only includes the intro - it would be a good idea to
       | match the first 5-10 seconds in harmonics; probably in the span
       | of 90-180 hz. But I guess that would take a whole lot of new
       | work.. So, anyways - if there's a way to jump in a bit into the
       | song I think it might be beneficial. But after trying a bit more
       | I realized simply that the quality of good productions was more
       | of an issue. Great work anyways!
        
       | pointlessone wrote:
       | This is great! Found a few good songs I've never heard before.
       | 
       | Now, it would be awesome is it could generate playlists I could
       | play directly in Apple Music.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Playlists coming very soon!
        
       | dingosity wrote:
       | Don't tell me, let me guess. All songs sound like English-
       | language American pop songs.
       | 
       | (Sorry... I'm being a jerk here. This is a cool thing that you
       | built. I only wish iTunes had a greater variety of music.)
        
       | mightytravels wrote:
       | Really great tool. I found a lot of similar songs for less well
       | known songs of mine where Spotify and Youtube Music both have
       | stopped delivering any relevant recommendations!
        
       | cydmax wrote:
       | I've just tried `Simon and Garfunkel - Mrs. Robinson` as the
       | search input and the results are really compelling and
       | interesting! Keep on the good work. I might use it to find new
       | tracks for my daily playlist and dj sets!
        
       | jchook wrote:
       | I quickly found some incredible music from this.
       | 
       | For example, by searching Gold Panda I found Major Dynamic
       | https://majordynamic.bandcamp.com/
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | <3
        
       | jacky2wong wrote:
       | Just tried it - I Walk Up by Luke Christopher and Memories is not
       | too bad! Admittedly - encountered quite a few problems as part of
       | this though - with a few random pop songs in the list.
        
       | raffraffraff wrote:
       | I'm wondering if anyone has done something similar, but instead
       | of trying to find similarities in the raw audio, they use tags
       | available from sources like Last.FM, Musicbrainz, Discogs etc?
       | And the ultimate answer to that is probably "those sources kinda
       | suck". Discogs is like a trainspotter on the spectrum, fascinated
       | by release IDs. Musicbrainz is kinda similar (each song will have
       | a dozen matches of wildly different quality). Last.FM tags are
       | used-generated which make some of them amazingly useful, and
       | others amazingly detrimental.
       | 
       | I have a human-powered recommendation service that uses my own
       | tags that I've added to my mp3 library over 25 years. I add
       | instruments (not all, just the ones that stands out, like synth,
       | flute, distortion, violin, piano), vocals (male/female, falsetto,
       | spoken, rap), moods (happy, sad, angry, mellow, dramatic,
       | chillout) and genre (I don't go too deep here, because I hate
       | getting recommendations stuck within some obscure sub-genre). And
       | that's it. I get it to play a random highly rated track with a
       | keyword or two, and then use the tags from the first 10 songs to
       | generate the next. But since, for me, music is a somewhat
       | interactive experience, every 10 songs or so, I'll think of
       | something that I want on the list (maybe reminded of it by
       | another one that just played).
       | 
       | Other things I think might be useful for recommendation is
       | Last.FM histories. Think about it, the are hundreds of thousands
       | of active listeners "scrobbling" their listening history. You
       | could easily parse that and group songs together that have been
       | played within 5 songs of each other as long as they're not by the
       | same artist and the time between the songs is around zero (ie:
       | listened to in order, no pauses). Similarity is higher for songs
       | that were next to each other and score drops.
        
         | alastairp wrote:
         | In fact, ListenBrainz (partner project to MusicBrainz) is doing
         | some stuff similar to what you mention about listening
         | histories. We're using the data to generate similarity based on
         | when songs are listened to each other in "listening sessions"
         | along with other songs.
         | 
         | Follow the troi-bot user with a ListenBrainz account, and we'll
         | generate you a daily playlist:
         | https://listenbrainz.org/user/troi-bot
         | 
         | This is still very much work-in-progress, but we're doing as
         | much as possible out in the open to solicit feedback from
         | people.
        
         | nxpnsv wrote:
         | Discogs is great, it just doesn't concern it self with how the
         | music sounds...
        
           | raffraffraff wrote:
           | Which is unfortunate because it has (on a tiny number of
           | releases) instruments and vocal tags. It's just so
           | unreliable. AllMusic is another decent source for tags, but
           | not instruments. It's the age-old problem with ML/AI: data
           | quality. Garbage in, garbage out. If only we could crowd-
           | sourcev listeners and get them to tag music from a list of
           | available moods, instruments etc. Oh wait .. that's exactly
           | the feature that recommendations services have been
           | _removing_ for the last 10 years.
        
             | vintermann wrote:
             | User tagging isn't a panacea either, because people tag
             | inconsistently, and people who tag a lot are probably not
             | very representative.
             | 
             | For an extreme example of that, see the boorus. Some
             | machine learning people have become interested in those,
             | since they are huge dataset of extensively tagged material
             | ... or maybe it's the booru people who have become more
             | interested in machine learning. Either way, I'm sure
             | they're great, if you're into waifu anime, porn, or waifu
             | anime porn. Both types, country AND western, as they said
             | in the Blues Brothers movie. Any tag remotely subjective
             | (such as "beautiful", God help you) is going to be
             | extremely coloured by the tastes of an extreme fringe.
             | 
             | At least, relying on fanatics to do the work for them, I
             | assume they've got a handle on simple spam on the boorus.
             | Commercial recommender service tagging systems don't have
             | that luxury, and that's probably why they end up eventually
             | removing them.
        
               | raffraffraff wrote:
               | This is very true. I'd pay for a metadata-only / playlist
               | service that works with Spotify/Tidal/Apple/local music.
               | 
               | And don't allow free-text tags. Instead you give a list
               | of available tags - the lowest number needed to describe
               | most tracks. I mean, let people add their own if they
               | want, but you should ignore those while training the
               | model.
               | 
               | I actually think that instead of trying to tag some
               | specific mood (eg "happy") some sounds be a sliding scale
               | between two opposites:
               | 
               | happy<-------|--->sad
               | 
               | Instrument tags are easier to understand. Give a list of
               | instruments (or instrument types, because the user might
               | not know precisely which woodwind or percussion
               | instrument it is) with checkboxes beside each.
               | 
               | Some users will be experts because they play woodwind.
               | Let those users apply to become experts, pass a test,
               | "identify the instrument", and if they pass, give them
               | half price subscription as long as they moderate X tunes
               | per week.
        
             | class4behavior wrote:
             | rateyourmusic.com is an alternative to allmusic.com while
             | chosic.com focuses on finding music.
             | 
             | The later has generated more similar music for me so far.
             | But I welcome every additional project improving the search
             | for music which has been so neglected by most services.
        
         | macrolime wrote:
         | I've tried with Discogs and found it to work pretty well. Kinda
         | similar to what OP did just the "embedding" vectors was created
         | by the Genre/Styles on Discogs. I didn't have a Vector database
         | though, so it was kinda very slow. On Discogs those tags are
         | per album and not per track. To create a playlist of say 10
         | songs similar to a song, I'd find the ten closest albums, then
         | search for them on last.fm and pick the most popular track on
         | each to add to the playlist.
        
           | alastairp wrote:
           | A similar embeddings model based on Discogs genre/style data
           | is the Effnet-Discogs model made at the Music Technology
           | Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra:
           | https://replicate.com/mtg/effnet-discogs
        
           | raffraffraff wrote:
           | Per-album metadata is useless for a lot of stuff that I like.
           | It's even useless for a lot of The Beatles stuff because they
           | tend to have a range of styles on an album and tended to
           | bring in weird instruments on individual tracks.
        
       | majikandy wrote:
       | If would be amazing if it kept playing when you press "search
       | similar" on the one you are playing.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Working on a better music player UI that should also fix this!
        
       | mikeponders wrote:
       | Good work! I'm trying this out. It seems it tries somehow to
       | match keys tempos and percussion characteristics.
       | 
       | Some suggestions:
       | 
       | - Have a relevant/irrelevant button, so users can tag useful
       | music and suggestions that were irrelevant. Save that data and
       | use it to make your model better, either in realtime or
       | incrementally.
       | 
       | - Allow some other options for sorting tracks also. Have the most
       | relevant but also the most popular (as in charting) on top. Or
       | maybe sort by the user rankings (how relevant they think a track
       | is).
        
       | moremetadata wrote:
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/500162235
       | 
       | Your AI is processing the tempo and beat of the music, its not
       | looking at the lyrics and what the lyrics mean, its not
       | processing any accompanying music videos and its not really
       | factoring in emotion, the mood and events of the day in the
       | locale it comes from.
       | 
       | Another factor, is its not taking into account the limitation
       | instruments had on music before the introduction of the
       | synthesizer and the tech we have available today in order to make
       | music.
       | 
       | There are other websites which also make suggestions and doesn't
       | factor in the above points, so your website is not alone in not
       | really grasping the mood of the song. I'm sure its a limitation
       | of the AI models available to people like yourself today, along
       | with time constraints and other factors including access to data.
       | Just how far do you read into things?
       | 
       | When you see an AI suggest the likes of the Sex Pistol's God Save
       | the Queen with this song, you are then looking at an AI which is
       | intelligent. Quantify the mood of the music, the mood of the
       | country or region during that period of time. Thats a very hard
       | thing to do, and masters of that would be the BBC, simply because
       | as national broadcasters, an extension of the British Military
       | aka MI7, arguably global broadcasters with their world service,
       | you'll realise there are songs which just wont be played when
       | certain events are happening on the ground in regions which would
       | be featured in the news and thus considered inciteful. Its very
       | subtle how manipulation at a national or global level takes
       | place, but it takes place.
       | 
       | However it is also a very difficult song to quantify, as this
       | youtube reaction video sums up nicely.
       | https://youtu.be/5vK1FZO1ybE?t=296
       | 
       | If you know anything about the band, they span many genres, and
       | yet they also their own genre. Truly Prodigious.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | > Your AI is processing the tempo and beat of the music,
         | 
         | I don't know about that, I tried a number of songs with 3/4 and
         | 6/8 measure, and none of the suggestions were, so it doesn't
         | seem to pick up on that.
        
       | lngnmn2 wrote:
       | Did you pay for the songs?
       | 
       | There is also something to read
       | 
       | https://schiptsov.github.io/GPT-bullshit.html
        
       | sAbakumoff wrote:
       | "I wrote AI to detect 4 chords songs"
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I
        
       | intelVISA wrote:
       | Really cool, quite surprising that this hasn't been done (well)
       | before afaik.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | motoxpro wrote:
         | This is the Spotify Radio feature. i.e. find a song and start a
         | radio from that song/album/artist
        
       | cirrus3 wrote:
       | I searched for "Hot Chip" and all the recommendations were other
       | Hot Chip songs... is that normal? I was expecting different
       | artists, and honestly not expecting any songs by the same artist.
        
         | nereus wrote:
         | Pop in a specific Hot Chip song and it'll work better I reckon
        
       | kriro wrote:
       | Nice and very responsive, well done. I searched for "Imeprial
       | March" (the John Williams Wiener Philharmoniker version) and this
       | was one of the highest ranked results: Inauguracion del
       | Ferrocarril (by Nathan Stornetta). I kind of chuckle thinking
       | about what a happy empire this would be with that theme song. And
       | of course it also answers my initial research question...which
       | national anthem is highest ranked for Imperial March. The answer
       | is Taiwan...make of this what you will. Star Spangled Banner is
       | the second one a bit down the results list.
        
       | neurogence wrote:
       | Bro, don't listen to the critics! It is amazing as it is. Much
       | better than my spotify recommendatinos.
        
       | EzraM wrote:
       | This works great! I like the way it finds resonances between
       | genres and am one of the folks that see that as a feature :-)
       | Very well done!
        
       | mightytravels wrote:
       | Oh and this page always bugs out:
       | 
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/56371517
        
       | neurogence wrote:
       | Bro, don't listen to the critics. It is amazing as it is! Don't
       | fix it if it's not broken. This is much better than my spotify
       | recs. Much much better!
        
       | knaik94 wrote:
       | This is very interesting, but unfortunately I haven't had the
       | greatest luck in finding new songs I would enjoy listening to. It
       | absolutely finds similar sounding tracks, but it doesn't
       | distinguish which part of the song made it enjoyable. There's no
       | tempo consistency or genre consistency or even main
       | instrument/vocal timbre consistency between recommendations. I
       | think locking one or more of those dimensions would allow for
       | much better recommendations. I'm not sure what aspect you're
       | using to order the results, but having extra metadata to filter
       | or group the results in some way would help a lot.
       | 
       | Take Raga's Dance by Vanessa-Mae, A R Rahman, ... Royal
       | Philharmonic https://maroofy.com/songs/476841571 . I put in this
       | track expecting other fusion songs to pop up, and arguably some
       | do, but much more often it feels like a 20 second section was
       | used to define the original song and it misses the underlying
       | concept. Like it got, in my subjective description, the epic
       | violin in orchestral music, but it completely ignores the fusion
       | between the distict styles of traditional indian
       | singing/instrumentals and western ochestral and also ignores the
       | call response structure between the violin and carnatic players,
       | which is the what I actually care about. Other songs have the
       | vocals but no epic backing. It feels like it's matching multiple
       | samples from the song instead of the whole song.
       | 
       | This feels very promising since it clearly is picking up the
       | styling of the specific songs across different genres and
       | languages. I look forward to seeing where this goes.
       | 
       | I also think it would be interesting if there was a way to
       | specify two different songs to find either only the common things
       | and/or to find what the fusion of those two tracks produces.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Hey thanks for the feedback! I definitely have a lot of
         | improvement to do on the model, it currently performs better
         | for some styles/genres of music than others.
         | 
         | But the model architecture I'm using is kinda outdated as well,
         | gotta iterate on it more to improve it further!
         | 
         | I'm also thinking of letting users upvote/downvote results,
         | which can also help improve quality on the ranking side.
        
           | runnerup wrote:
           | Honestly it's loads better than current Spotify/YouTube Music
           | suggestions. Mostly they just seem to suggest popular stuff
           | that's heavily marketed...even though I seeded all my "thumbs
           | up" with only eclectic stuff.
           | 
           | Yes, it's hard to find a song I really really like, but
           | 1-in-10 seem to be something I'd add to my eclectic "thumbs
           | up" playlist. And almost none of them are by any artist that
           | I've heard of before.
           | 
           | This is huge for me. Thanks.
        
             | chiefalchemist wrote:
             | You're not alone. For me, Spotify suggestions are "things
             | you won't hate." Most everything is palatable, but
             | forgettable and too usually not all that interesting.
        
               | chiefalchemist wrote:
               | I'd like to add, it's not all the platforms' fault. Too
               | many artists aren't artists at all. The make too little
               | effort to be unique.
        
             | colordrops wrote:
             | I never get any heavily marketed music recommended on
             | Spotify. Almost invariably it's something obscure. But I
             | only ever listen to obscure music. I guess I'm saying I
             | don't think the Algo is weighted for payola.
        
               | RhodesianHunter wrote:
               | I honestly think they try first to make you happy, second
               | to reduce their spend.
        
           | thegabriele wrote:
           | I don't know if someone already said this, but as an amateur
           | music producer i would love to upload my songs and discover
           | similarities. Thanks for this Amazing tool
        
           | anagram666 wrote:
           | Another strange music for your testing that gives complete
           | bonkers recommendations: https://maroofy.com/songs/1486467186
           | 
           | If you need someone to test your model, you will never find
           | one with more eclectic/strange taste than me ;)
        
             | sogen wrote:
             | Another bonkers one:
             | 
             | Nine Inch Nails
             | 
             | https://maroofy.com/songs/1440934933
             | 
             | Recommended Muppets
        
             | gilleain wrote:
             | My contribution :
             | 
             | 1) https://maroofy.com/songs/1443834381
             | 
             | 2) https://maroofy.com/songs/714207207
        
           | defrost wrote:
           | FWiW I had one shot and entered "Tabaran"
           | 
           | Rather than get back anything "acoustically similar" it
           | simply returned a list of other songs on the same album
           | (several of which are far from being acoustically similar).
           | 
           | No drama, you're attempting to cover a lot of ground, but I'm
           | guessing there was no actual fingerprint there for that work
           | and no sense of other songs that sounded similar.
           | 
           | ADDENDUM: Okay, I had to select the song <doh> .. but still
           | "something went wrong" - perhaps hugged to death or not found
           | to process. No matter :-)
        
           | mustacheemperor wrote:
           | I'll note my own experience, that Spotify and Apple Music
           | both struggle to find me latin reggaeton outside a small
           | subset of popular artists, and my first couple searches with
           | this tool have found me _so_ much music I 've never heard
           | before that matches exactly the 'vibe' I want to hear, and is
           | introducing me to different-but-related sounds and artists I
           | couldn't have found on my own.
           | 
           | I agree with the other commenter - this is huge for me.
           | Please, do whatever you need to do to monetize this so it
           | never goes away. I would love to pay you for this.
        
           | turkeygizzard wrote:
           | Wanted to hop on and say this is amazing, thank you for
           | sharing this! Also agree that it seems that it's really good
           | at finding literally similar sounding songs, but not what I
           | would expect a friend to recommend (this is both good and bad
           | I guess). As someone else said, this is already way better
           | than my spotify recs
        
             | subtech wrote:
             | ty for ur kind words! <3
        
         | dbtc wrote:
         | I am enjoying Raga's Dance, which is nothing like what I was
         | just listening to. Thank you for the recommendation ;)
        
         | zuminator wrote:
         | I agree with everyone's criticisms that it seems to identify
         | similar tempo and melodic riff, irrespective of genre. But to
         | me this is a feature, not a bug. I could see this or something
         | like it opening my eyes to music I would never possibly have
         | found on my own. I really like it!
         | 
         | Spotify on the other hand seems to want to send me to the same
         | group of artists and tracks I've listened to before, following
         | some Collatz conjecture type algorithm that eventually
         | converges on the same tuned playlist for that genre, no matter
         | what the starting parameters may be.
        
           | Dwolb wrote:
           | It's a pretty cool idea and gets to a philosophical question
           | really quick "what do people mean when they say they like
           | similar music?"
           | 
           | Era? Artist? Genre? Sound? Tempo?
           | 
           | Personally I spend my time finding similar-era music because
           | I like to hear how sounds evolved.
        
             | zuminator wrote:
             | Ideally one would like an algorithm to be able to
             | realize,"this person prefers to explore new music from the
             | same era," vs "that person prefers to jump around to
             | different countries," vs "the other person prefers to remix
             | their existing playlists," and thus come up with the
             | optimal degree of novelty for each listener. Or at least
             | let the user set a novelty slider to customize their own
             | experience.
        
           | f1refly wrote:
           | > _But to me this is a feature, not a bug. I could see this
           | or something like it opening my eyes to music I would never
           | possibly have found on my own._
           | 
           | What makes it different from a big "play me a random song"
           | button then?
        
             | mejutoco wrote:
             | They have some similarity based on the actual music.
             | 
             | > it seems to identify similar tempo and melodic riff
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | Spotify wants you to listen to the tracks that they are paid
           | to promote.
        
         | brentis wrote:
         | I had the same experience. Could see the element which it
         | matched with, beat, pitch, etc.but missed the riff or nuance
         | that made the source song special to me
        
         | gradascent wrote:
         | I've only tried a few songs but they've mostly been bangers! I
         | did come across a couple examples where the recommended songs
         | just heavily sampled the original but overall very impressed.
        
         | msla wrote:
         | It doesn't seem to find similar-sounding tracks at all for me.
         | 
         | Examples:
         | 
         | The Oblio Joes - "Captain of the Moon"
         | 
         | The Bondage Fairies - "Levenus Supremus"
         | 
         | ... both chosen so "Just shove a bunch of recent pop-rock at
         | the user" won't work.
        
         | anagram666 wrote:
         | If I am not mistaken, it this is only trained on the preview
         | and not on the entire song.
         | 
         | If you listen to a music with a real intro, it gives strange
         | results. For example: "Goodbye Blue Sky - Pink Floyd"
         | (https://maroofy.com/songs/1065976153)
        
           | danieldk wrote:
           | Same for "Station by Station - David Bowie" -- lot's of
           | tracks with ambient noise.
        
         | dmitriid wrote:
         | Categorising music is surprisingly different.
         | 
         | See this paper from https://everynoise.com/ :
         | https://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf
         | 
         | IIRC they try to classify music on 17 different
         | points/features. What you see on the web is an attenpt to
         | visualise (and provide a guide to music based on) some of them
        
           | vintermann wrote:
           | Yes. I think many of those features are based on pre-NN
           | feature detectors (such as BPM), and Danceability, Valence
           | and Energy sound like primary components that have been given
           | names.
           | 
           | Echo nest was great for its time, but if they have kept up,
           | they're not exposing their more modern learned features to
           | users anymore.
        
             | dmitriid wrote:
             | They were acquired by Spotify, and there's been some work
             | done by/for Spotify since then.
             | 
             | I'm not at liberty to say what, sadly, as I work for
             | Spotify.
             | 
             | I think I can say that one of the main challenges is
             | running this analysis for users. It's prohibitively
             | expensive (or was prohibitively expensive) to use this to
             | keep track of and run recommendations for what users are
             | listening for each user.
             | 
             | It can be used on smaller scales, but, well, it's probably
             | NDA :)
        
               | macrolime wrote:
               | Can you say why Spotify's recommendations are so bad?
               | Something like what OP has made should have been
               | relatively simple to make for Spotify for many, many
               | years already, yet that hasn't happen. Is the whole
               | system just rigged to only recommended a few "sponspored"
               | artists?
        
               | dmitriid wrote:
               | Because, as I said above, it's a very complex problem :)
               | 
               | I honestly don't know much about recommendations (and
               | what I know I probably cannot tell). But there's
               | definitely continuous work done on them. But it can also
               | be hampered by extremely conflicting requirements (where
               | "some" both means double-digit procent of users _and_
               | these  "some"s overlap with each other):
               | 
               | - some users want more of the same, some users want a
               | more diverse listening experience. Some of these users
               | are the same user, but on different days
               | 
               | - some users mostly prefer curated suggestions, some
               | users want ranodm stuff. They can also be the same user
               | :)
               | 
               | - some users a heavily weigted to only a few artists,
               | some users listen to evereything and anything. And even
               | this can be the same user :)
               | 
               | - there's probably stuff about licensing, availability,
               | contracts etc. at play as well, because in streaming
               | services it's always there, in very bizarre ways
               | 
               | Basically every single tweak to recommendations will
               | break them. And yeah, Spotify employees will complain
               | about this more than anyone else, all the time :)
        
               | vintermann wrote:
               | I doubt that "why does your product suck" is one of the
               | things a Spotify employee is allowed to talk freely about
               | in public!
               | 
               | But I've been watching them, I will speculate. A few
               | years ago, Spotify had two young interns, Sander Dieleman
               | and Aaron van den Oord. We know a bit of what they worked
               | on, because Dieleman blogged on it, and indeed it was
               | something a lot like what OP has made here - only better,
               | I would say. I asked him, and Dieleman was allowed to say
               | that the thing they built was one of the inputs into the
               | then-new Discover Weekly, which made headlines for how
               | outrageously good it was.
               | 
               | But Dieleman and v.d.Oord did not stay at Spotify. They
               | were headhunted by DeepMind, and have had a VERY
               | impressive track record there over the years.
               | 
               | And I wonder why. Was there a conflict between the old
               | school ML of the Echo Nest people and the new fancy
               | neural net kids? Or was it just, as GP alludes to, that
               | the NN methods were just too computationally expensive
               | and they failed to justify their costs to leadership?
        
               | pbronez wrote:
               | A distributed, local-first architecture much work well
               | for this. I'm happy for my computer to crunch away on my
               | behalf, generating recommendations and indexing stuff.
               | I'm happy to recontribute that work to a common index of
               | some kind.
               | 
               | I def prefer for that common index to have a permissive
               | license though!
        
         | Abecid wrote:
         | Same here
        
       | scotty79 wrote:
       | I see duplicates on recommendations list.
        
       | TuringNYC wrote:
       | Dear @subtech I was curious if you tried other approaches, such
       | as the same thing with lyrics instead of audio?
       | 
       | Also, you note "I've indexed ~120M+ songs from the iTunes
       | catalog" -- could you share some of the libraries/tools you used
       | and which you did or didnt like?
        
       | chrisgd wrote:
       | I find it disheartening that the comments are loaded with people
       | saying how bad it is. The interface is awesome, the ability to
       | have search results pop up and offer suggestions is impressive. I
       | thought the results for a Lana Del Ray song and a song by Carlos
       | Santana were both interesting and suggested new things.
       | 
       | We should do a better job of supporting creators here.
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | _a better job of supporting creators here_
         | 
         | You can do that by commenting on the things you liked about the
         | project! But without the meta because that just begets more
         | meta and ends up detracting from the thing being showhn.
        
           | chrisgd wrote:
           | I did the latter and think the former is necessary. It is
           | like when Dropbox was on here and everyone shit on it. You
           | can offer criticism without being a jerk.
        
             | pvg wrote:
             | _the former is necessary._
             | 
             | It's not because it does the opposite of what you want.
             | Write good comments, downvote or flag the bad ones, email
             | the mods about egregious stuff. Inveighing against the
             | snapshot state of the thread almost always ends up wrong
             | (it's pretty much already wrong about this thread) and
             | generates noise of its own which works directly against
             | your intended goal - people showcasing their work and
             | getting feedback about it.
        
         | retrac98 wrote:
         | Nothing plays for me.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! Definitely welcome all the feedback here.
         | 
         | Gonna ship a better, improved model soon!
        
         | SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
         | I've been wanting a music suggestion service in this category
         | for years. I haven't been able to try it out yet (hugged?), but
         | I don't really care how bad or good it is as long it gets
         | better and sparks more people to do stuff like this.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | fzliu wrote:
         | Agreed 100%. Folks often forget that a great model is only a
         | tiny part of the equation - strong execution and a solid demo
         | are also critical.
         | 
         | Google/DeepMind might have an RL-based chatbot equal to or even
         | better than ChatGPT, but OpenAI has achieved the most due to
         | its ability to ship.
        
       | alokym wrote:
       | Oh no AI replacing DJs.. :D good work, will use that next time I
       | search for similar tracks, thanks!!
        
       | rcarr wrote:
       | Possibly an unpopular opinion (which is ironic), but I think this
       | could do with taking popularity into account. The vast majority
       | of music out there is generic landfill at best, and just outright
       | bad at worst. I think once you've done the first pass and got the
       | sonically similar songs there should be some kind of filter which
       | prioritises tracks with higher listener counts which would inject
       | some 'wisdom of crowds' into the decision making. It would be a
       | pretty cool feature to then be able to have this setting on a
       | slider with obscure at one end and popular at the other.
        
       | jointpdf wrote:
       | Holy cow does this thing have wildly obscure taste in tunes. I
       | plugged in "Work It" -- Marie Davidson, and it returned
       | "Beautiful Weather" -- Blemow. This is an 8-minute opus of a
       | techno jam from the album _Dutch Cow #13_ --the 10th and final
       | _Holy Cow_ album released in 2018, a true _annus mirabilis_ from
       | Blemow.
       | 
       | IMO my idea for making something like this really cool is to give
       | the user more explainability (why are these two songs similar?
       | according to which factors?), and then more control over search
       | results (brainstorming here, but stuff like an obscurity slider,
       | importance of beat similarity slider, etc.). You can try to
       | extract explainable factors from your embeddings with something
       | like NMF.
       | 
       | (PS--I like the esoteric results. This is cool, good job.)
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | Tepix wrote:
       | It seems to be broken as of 08:44 UTC.
       | 
       | When i enter something in the search box i see "Loading..." and
       | nothing happens.
       | 
       | I tried both Firefox and Safari.
        
       | hndamien wrote:
       | This is great! It works quite well. I would love to see something
       | like this with the ability to use license the music for a Youtube
       | video so that you could get good music for a video, and exposure
       | and money to lesser known artists.
        
       | fblp wrote:
       | A good chance OP is going to hear from Apple legal, Apple
       | recruiting, or both =) But cool project!
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | :)
        
       | mguin wrote:
       | It's actually great. I got a ton of good recommendations. The key
       | is to actually use it to search songs of similar beat or tone.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Personally, from using it a lot during development, I found
         | that I kinda developed a sense for which types of songs it'll
         | do really well on, and which types of songs it will sometimes
         | struggle with.
         | 
         | But a lot of this should go away with a better, improved model!
        
       | goldemerald wrote:
       | Wow, these songs were impressively similar to my queries. I would
       | love for a interpolation playlist feature, where I put in 2
       | different songs (from say, classic rock and EDM), and I could get
       | 10-20 songs that slowly change from the start song to the end
       | song.
        
         | jameshart wrote:
         | Yes, this: can you get any interesting insights by playing with
         | the embedding vectors? What happens if you add embeddings
         | together? Weighted average of multiple tracks? Follow the
         | average vector for an artist's work over time?
        
           | subtech wrote:
           | 100% This is definitely worth exploring, and I'm currently
           | trying to figure out the appropriate front-end UI/UX to
           | expose this functionality for users.
        
         | LunarAurora wrote:
         | I second this, somewhat like
         | http://boilthefrog.playlistmachinery.com/
        
       | indigodaddy wrote:
       | I guess my taste is outside the loop. Two songs off the top of my
       | head I guess are not in it's database:
       | 
       | Beautiful Strangers (Kevin Morby) Elephant Woman (Blonde Redhead)
        
       | koreanguy wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | bradhilton wrote:
       | Very cool, just tried it out and seems to work. Great job
        
       | hypefi wrote:
       | You are into something here I am telling you, while spotify does
       | provide recommendations of what you would like to hear, it does
       | not provide similar sounding songs, as a musician I love it.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Haha, thanks! :)
         | 
         | Will definitely work to improve the current model!
        
       | RagnarD wrote:
       | Isn't Apple going to give you a hard time now? Years ago, Apple
       | might have offered to hire you. Given what a jerk is Tim Cook, I
       | imagine he'll have the lawyers send a cease and desist.
        
       | emodendroket wrote:
       | Other people have called out limitations and I don't disagree,
       | but I'll say that I do find the different approach, based
       | entirely on sounding similar, interesting. Recommendation engines
       | in music streaming services often tell me about related things I
       | already know I like. That's not necessarily unwelcome (if I'm
       | listening to one song that appears in Footloose, sure, it's not a
       | bad surmise that I might like to hear another), but this tool
       | surfaces a bunch of stuff I would have never thought to look for
       | or found normally.
        
       | jaimex2 wrote:
       | Pandora?
        
         | Izkata wrote:
         | Yeah, I don't know if they changed it but this sounds similar
         | to how Pandora used to do music recommendations: Models based
         | on various aspects of the song, then find best fits to those
         | aspects. It would even tell you why a given song was suggested.
        
       | kujta1 wrote:
       | Which package/tool you used for semantic search?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | FAISS for nearest neighbor vector search.
        
           | kacperlukawski wrote:
           | Have you considered using a proper vector database, so you
           | can scale it up and run in a cluster? I mean something like
           | Qdrant.
        
       | hsuduebc2 wrote:
       | It works surprisingly well. Good job. It confuses bluegrass and
       | latino music but they share tempo and instruments so I get it.
       | Impressive.
        
       | SnowflakeOnIce wrote:
       | What vector database do you use? Did you run into any scalability
       | challenges there?
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | 100% ran into a ton of scalability challenges lol. Maybe I
         | should write a blog post about it sometime.
         | 
         | But for now, ended up using plain old FAISS.
        
       | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
       | Feedback: "sounds like" for music is more than just rhythm and
       | tone. The search results are all useless for me because two songs
       | with similar sheet music often have wildly different lyrical
       | styles and subjects.
        
         | pbhjpbhj wrote:
         | What would you say was the best music similarity search or
         | recommendation engine you've used?
        
           | BugsJustFindMe wrote:
           | reddit
        
         | bredren wrote:
         | It's interesting from a musicology POV.
         | 
         | I was looking at Islands in the Stream by Dolly Parton and
         | Kenny Rogers and it had some Latin neighbors that make some
         | sense to me from the synths in IitS.
        
       | haha69 wrote:
       | I have been wanting to do similar things. But, shied away because
       | I wasn't in the mood to find out if this sort of thing was legal
       | or not. Can someone here who knows this space better talk about
       | the legal aspect of doing something like this?
        
         | input_sh wrote:
         | You're just interacting with the API, you're not gonna have any
         | legal issues. I have some experience with Spotify's API (not
         | MusicKit), so I'm gonna try guessing how it works based on
         | that.
         | 
         | There's an API endpoint called audio_features[0] that tells you
         | things about the song (tempo, danceability, acousticness,
         | major/minor key...), so while you can't get full versions of
         | every song, you can approximate how they sound like based on
         | Spotify's audio analysis of them.
         | 
         | So, build a database of audio_features while respecting API
         | limits, find the most similar ones based on about a dozen
         | variables, and you're good to go.
         | 
         | [0] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-
         | api/referenc...
        
         | pbhjpbhj wrote:
         | I doubt T&Cs have included "no training embeddings with our
         | data" yet; so they're probably clear there (and it might be
         | Fair Use in USA??).
         | 
         | On the main question, I think we'll be waiting for Getty v
         | whoever (Dall-E?) lawsuit to see what courts think.
         | 
         | A useful indicator might be have any major corporation's
         | released AIs trained on public data - because they will be the
         | prime targets for people looking to sue and walk away with lots
         | of money. You can get plugins for Photoshop to do AI imagery,
         | but I don't think Adobe sell any?
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | How do you train "vibes" other than with human input, which
       | cannot possibly scale to classify so many combinations
        
       | snow_mac wrote:
       | How did you get access to 120,000,000 songs from iTunes? Not just
       | the listing, but the actual audio.
        
         | fallingmeat wrote:
         | im also curious
        
         | charcircuit wrote:
         | The preview audio is free. It may just be 120,000,000 previews.
        
           | yreg wrote:
           | Even so, how do you get the 120M previews?
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | ... without getting banned?
        
             | from wrote:
             | Apple has a public API with some rate limiting that returns
             | a link to the preview audio file, see:
             | 
             | https://itunes.apple.com/us/lookup?id=1023678453
             | (https://www.chrisjmendez.com/2017/06/19/working-with-
             | itunes-...)
             | 
             | So probably all that is required is a couple threads
             | downloading and a proxy service with a large pool of IP
             | addresses randomly rotating on every request. Maybe OP also
             | found an undocumented API endpoint somewhere that was not
             | rate limited.
        
           | Izkata wrote:
           | Totally explains this part of the current top comment here:
           | 
           | > but much more often it feels like a 20 second section was
           | used to define the original song and it misses the underlying
           | concept
        
             | qiller wrote:
             | Yeah, like the linked The Medallion Calls example catches
             | similarities to the slow starting section of the track and
             | totally misses the main part
        
       | FpUser wrote:
       | I tried "learning to fly" by Pink Floyd. The results did not
       | sound similar at all to me. Maybe I have non conventional idea on
       | what is similar.
        
       | countmora wrote:
       | I've spun up Hitchin' a Ride by Green Day and I think the results
       | are quite interesting. Despite them being completely different
       | from one another, they somehow manage to catch the vibe of
       | certain sections of the song.
       | 
       | Here's the link: https://maroofy.com/songs/1159778217
       | 
       | Really cool project.
        
       | xipho wrote:
       | Tried with a song I knew well- Everything In Its Right Place.
       | 
       | Feels a little bit like fortune telling, I guess it is, in the
       | sense that I am listening closely to what makes the songs
       | similar, not just listening, but actively trying to find the
       | similarities, so even a couple notes in progression, or drum-
       | beats and I'll say oh, yes, that matches.
       | 
       | Finds very different music, not necessarily what I'd listen to in
       | many cases, but kudos for getting me clicking through a decent
       | pile before going wait, that's a nope, you're grasping AI-type-
       | being.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | daguava wrote:
       | Bad lyrics ruin songs for me, so I tend to listen to music in a
       | way where I completely disregard the lyrics if they're bad, which
       | causes me to like songs where the lyrics are hard to
       | understand/hear or in a different language.
       | 
       | This seems to absolutely NAIL my case of listening, I'm loving
       | this. Thank you!
        
       | vacuumcl wrote:
       | I like the idea, but putting in some songs by Aphex Twin I didn't
       | find the matches to be similar at all.
        
       | azubinski wrote:
       | I laughed a lot.
       | 
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1485025897
       | 
       | The one of "similar-sounding" is:
       | 
       | "Smeli Granichari Dimit'r Kolarov & Stoianka Koleva"
       | 
       | or
       | 
       | "The Brave Border Guards"
       | 
       | It's a very Soviet song from such a different world that if you
       | send "Man Man" to it in a time machine, the group will
       | immediately end up in the Gulag.
       | 
       | So, it's all about the "similarity" definition. But it's fun of
       | course.
        
       | ultracakebakery wrote:
       | This site works great for EDM. For example, just lookup some
       | random future house song and it will pump out tons of similar
       | tracks. This is a great tool for people that want to keep music
       | consistent in their content, but don't want it to get boring. I
       | will be using this for as long as possible!
        
       | paulkon wrote:
       | Is this similar to how Shazam operates? I suppose there's more
       | filtering and denoising going on with mic input.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Hmm, not quite. Shazam's approach is more optimized for exact
         | matches. Mine tries to be more optimized for similar matches
         | (if that makes sense lol).
         | 
         | So my approach is intentionally a bit fuzzier than something
         | like Shazam, since apart from exact matches, you also ideally
         | want a continuous representation for music similarity (so you
         | can find songs that are 80-90% similar, for example).
         | 
         | That is hard to do for approaches optimized at exact matches
         | (which usually use something like audio fingerprinting, etc.)
        
       | jasebell wrote:
       | Nice work. Are you going to write a blog post on the process.
       | Would love to read it.
        
       | kloch wrote:
       | This works really well!
       | 
       | Could you add links to play songs on Spotify?
        
       | physPop wrote:
       | Seems like your server is down or overloaded
        
       | robbiemitchell wrote:
       | This is a project I've always dreamed of building! Already pretty
       | excited about some of the recommendations I'm getting in some
       | niche genres.
       | 
       | Feature request: allow me to auth Spotify and click a button next
       | to each track to add a track to a "Maroofy Recs" playlist
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Noted! A lot of people have asked for a playlist support,
         | definitely shipping that soon!
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | jerrygoyal wrote:
       | search is not working for me
        
       | toomanyrichies wrote:
       | Finding sources for input data is something I struggle with when
       | building deep learning models. Out of curiosity, how did you go
       | about programmatically accessing the music files for all 120M+
       | songs, in order to create your embedding vector? I can't imagine
       | iTunes has an API which would let a person do that.
        
         | pbronez wrote:
         | Good reminder of the value of Adversarial Interoperability
         | https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
        
           | scarface74 wrote:
           | If by"adversarial" you mean a publicly documented and freely
           | available API that has been around in some form for two
           | decades.
        
         | lfkdev wrote:
         | Probably scraped them
        
         | from wrote:
         | They do, it's just rate limited. See
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641623
        
         | proc0 wrote:
         | Also would like to know. I can't even listen to the full songs,
         | and assuming I have to pay. I can't imagine buying 120 million
         | songs, so it has to be some collab with iTunes.
        
           | exikyut wrote:
           | Thinking about both processing time and the difficulty of
           | sustaining 120M downloads' worth of programmatic access, I
           | wouldn't be surprised if this is actually trained on the
           | track previews.
        
             | yunwal wrote:
             | I'm almost positive it is. If you put in a song with a
             | bunch of different styles, sections (e.g. bohemian
             | rhapsody) the suggestions match the preview
        
           | latexr wrote:
           | > so it has to be some collab with iTunes.
           | 
           | There's no way today's Apple would allow such a
           | collaboration. They'd just keep the feature and market it as
           | part of Apple Music.
        
       | mustacheemperor wrote:
       | This is incredible! I've gotten really into some niche genres
       | this year and in trying to discover more of it I have been really
       | frustrated by Spotify's limited radio mixes - it seems like I've
       | been "black holed" into the same 100 or so songs with rare
       | exceptions, for any of the albums I autoplay from in a given
       | genre. This really might be the best music discovery tool I've
       | ever used, it reminds me of how magic Pandora felt the first time
       | I used it.
       | 
       | My only request is to please let me multiselect some or all of
       | the songs the algorithm finds and automatically create a playlist
       | from them on Apple Music. The very first search I tried, for a
       | song that Spotify always creates the same limited mix from,
       | brought up a ton of music I want to check out.
       | 
       | Edit: on that note, it would also be neat to request a combined
       | playlist that mixes together multiple searches. This might help
       | provide feedback for the AI as well about what artists/songs
       | people consider 'similar' to each other.
        
       | rayshan wrote:
       | Interesting idea. I think it needs some finetuning to find songs
       | that are similar but not covers. For well-covered songs like
       | Bohemian Rhapsody, this is more like a cover-finder.
       | 
       | Also this song, Shangri-La Is Calling, is bugging out:
       | https://maroofy.com/songs/1632142336
        
       | smcleod wrote:
       | Interesting idea, I get pretty average recommendations though.
       | 
       | The first track I searched for was "Hazmat Modine - Bahamut"
       | (https://maroofy.com/songs/253108933), it seems to recommend
       | things with some similar instruments (e.g. brass and sax) but not
       | really similar taste or style.
        
       | pineapple_guy wrote:
       | This is cool. I'm curious how you managed to access all the music
       | data from apple?
        
       | noam_compsci wrote:
       | Awesome! Curious how you got access to all the songs?! Did you
       | legit pay for them all?
        
       | thrdbndndn wrote:
       | needs a volume control
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | got it
        
       | dbcurtis wrote:
       | Didn't do much for me. But I am an atypical listener -- most of
       | my playlists are different recordings of the same jazz standard
       | by different artists or just same artist different era.
       | 
       | Probe 1: Birdland. First hit was the canonical Weather Report
       | recording. 2nd or third was a popular Man Tran version. Then I
       | saw a Maynard Ferguson track -- ok that was a discovery as I
       | haven't listened to Maynard much for a few years. Didn't like his
       | version much, but still your software gets full points for
       | discovery.
       | 
       | Probe 2: Minor Swing. First hit was obscure, and it linked off to
       | a bunch of totally unrelated stuff. Django nowhere to be found.
        
       | piyush_soni wrote:
       | Great initiative, but if it's sampling only the few seconds
       | previews from the songs, then I doubt it will be useful. Also, a
       | language filter is essential for both training the model and
       | listing the results. I searched for a few Hindi language songs
       | that I know of, and it listed only English, Chinese and Spanish
       | songs as related ones - which is good to explore other music, but
       | at times I'd just want to be in my native language zone and any
       | other language would exercise my brain more than it'd relax it.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | 100% agree with a language filter, working on one (along with a
         | better, improved model!)
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | Keith47 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | sesm wrote:
       | I've tried 'Allan Holdsworth Sand' and 'Allan Holdsworth Non-
       | brewed Condiment' and results were completely unrelated, I would
       | even say random. Then I've tried 'Allan Holdsworth Sixteen Men of
       | Tain' and at least it found some jazz tracks. I guess a track
       | needs to have a simple static rhythm to not throw off the
       | algorithm.
        
       | philipphutterer wrote:
       | The idea is just great. Keep in mind what people expect from this
       | type of website (and clear up any misconceptions), as this may
       | lead to unnecessary churn. I would like to see some degree of
       | customizability, e.g. weighting of features or something like
       | that. (Nitpick: wrap the play svgs in a button tag like the
       | "similar" button)
        
       | smortaz wrote:
       | nice! is this in reference to composer javad maroofy?!
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | haha didn't expect many people to guess this!
        
       | skc wrote:
       | Wonderful idea and well designed interface.
       | 
       | Unfortunately failed quite spectacularly for the song I selected.
       | I chose "Why Hide" by Mark Ronson and it somehow managed to pick
       | the exact music I tend to dislike.
        
       | shtopointo wrote:
       | Small tip: You should let it autoplay. Some recs are better than
       | others and if I let it play in the background a good song will
       | catch my attention.
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Autoplay coming!
        
       | bombela wrote:
       | Everything loads instantly. Plays almost instantly. And it really
       | seems to find very similar style/beat/music. Interface is clean.
       | 
       | I am not sure if intentional, but the loading animation on the
       | play buttons feels like it is in sync with when the music starts
       | playing. Makes for a responsive feedback.
        
         | yellow_lead wrote:
         | Hm, maybe it's the hug of death but I can't search for any
         | songs as of now. (Stuck loading)
         | 
         | EDIT: It's working on my desktop. Above was on mobile
         | Firefox/Chrome.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! :)
         | 
         | Let's just say that setting up the backend systems involved a
         | lot of tears & frustration lmfao
        
           | emehrkay wrote:
           | What tech did you use to pull down all of this data and comb
           | through it?
        
       | madelyn wrote:
       | This is FANTASTIC! There's a ton of naysayers here, but I'm going
       | through songs and having a great time with this.
       | 
       | It seems most forms of EDM work great with this setup! One funny
       | thing is for heavily remixed tracks, all the remixes pop up as
       | suggestions. :)
        
         | subtech wrote:
         | Thanks! <3
         | 
         | The current model does tend to do well with EDM, but got a new
         | model in the works that should hopefully address a lot of the
         | shortcomings of the current one!
        
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