AcousticBrainz: Making a hard decision to end the project

[alastairp]

@ijabz

The most novel thing about AcousticBrainz was that a dataset was being created of acoustic characteristics of music and this was accessible to users without them requiring them to actually have the music.

This is absolutely true, and was the main motivation for starting AcousticBrainz in the first place. However, if you’re unsure that the BPM is correct, if the key is wrong, and if there are no clear models to identify other musical characteristics such as genre and mood, then what value is this information?

@ijabz

Just because the data is not perfect is does not make it useless, it seems essentially the project is being closed down because the data is not good quite enough and Universitat Pompeu Fabra is not interested in using it anymore. But perhaps the algorithm can be adjusted to improve the situation

To be clear, this was not a decision by UPF, it was made by MetaBrainz. As we mentioned in the blog post, we don’t have the skills within MetaBrainz to make these improvements to the algorithms, these small improvements often take months or years of work by researchers who have years of experience in a small narrow field such as BPM detection.
So for example, in this case we don’t know how to improve BPM detection in general, but we do know that there has been work in the last 5 years that has improved the current state of the art, and we’re thinking about how we can take advantage of this research to get musicbrainz users to help us to build a smaller database of useful information.

@ijabz

On of the problems with AcousticBrainz was that a data download has never been provided, it it had been it would enable users to more easily work with the data and clean up the data.

Yes, you’re right here. I know that many people have asked for dumps and even though we said that we were working on it, it was something that we never managed to get working in a good way, and I’m sorry that we weren’t able to get this to people when they asked. We did spend time getting the bulk API working quickly, and it looks like many people are using this, although I know that this isn’t useful for all possible tasks.

@ijabz

So why not open it up now, of course if you dont want to work on it yourself that is fine but perhaps someone else would like to. Perhaps the data could be moved to a different server if MusicBrainz no longer wants to host it.

This is definitely an option. If a third party wants to host a version of AcousticBrainz then the source code is available, and as we mentioned in the blog post we will make a dump available.