Audioscrobbler matching tolerance (1 Viewer)

dezed

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Hello.. I've just started using the audioscrobbler plugin.. I find it's great for a lot of different types of music, but for some artists, I have difficulty getting very many matches to show up in my playlist (using the similar mode). I think that maybe increasing the tolerance for what's considered a matching artist would be helpful. For example, a song from the battlestar galactica soundtrack, with artist Bear McCreary only returns one track by artist Richard Gibbs. Looking at the similar artists page for Bear McCreary on LastFM, i see: http://www.last.fm/music/Bear+McCreary/+similar , which has Richard Gibbs as a 100 match, with next highest artist as a 25 match. It seems that a 25 match isn't high enough? Is there any way to change the tolerance for a match? I've tried changing the randomness setting in the audioscrobbler configuration to as high as 100%, yet it doesn't make a difference.

I have many other songs that don't return any matches, but do seem to at least show some similar artists in the 80 range.
 

rtv

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    You're right. The Artist matching percentage could only be set for the lookups from configuration.exe.
    In MP itself it was hardcoded to "ignore" all results with less than 50% match. The next SVN build will contain a fix which takes the randomness slider into account. Just tweaking the settings a little for optimum results.
     

    dezed

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    Alright thanks! This seems to help a lot, as now the log generally shows 'removed 0 songs which were not exact enough'. Right now my only problem is that songs with japanese artists are not matched; at least, those whose entries on Last.FM use japanese characters. For example, http://www.last.fm/music/宇多田ヒカル/+similar
    There's an option in every last.fm profile to translate foreign language artists to English where possible, so I've checked that, but I'm guessing the results you get back from last.fm aren't translated? Any chance you could look into that? Though I'm probably the only mediaportal user with a j-pop guilty pleasure :D
     

    rtv

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    Right now my only problem is that songs with japanese artists are not matched; at least, those whose entries on Last.FM use japanese characters. For example, http://www.last.fm/music/宇多田ヒカル/+similar

    Any chance you could look into that? Though I'm probably the only mediaportal user with a j-pop guilty pleasure :D
    Hehe, she's looking cute :)

    On my system I only see http://www.last.fm/music/??????/+similar but the link was working so I could try the first step MP would do to lookup such artists:
    http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/宇多田ヒカル/similar.xml
    Could you please give me a screenshot of how this XML looks when your system has support for Japanese character sets?
    In theory it "should" work with .NET's functions I use but maybe I have to specify the codepage somewhere explicitly.
     

    dezed

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    Sure. See attached. Thanks so much for looking at it :D

    Also, just in case it wasn't clear, my tracks are not tagged with japanese characters, they are in the latin alphabet. It's just that when you look up say, Utada Hikaru, last.fm gives the name in japanese. I'm thinking that there must be a way to get last.fm to give you the translated name in the xml. That is possible to do when logging into last.fm - there's a preference for it.
     

    rtv

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    Sure. See attached. Thanks so much for looking at it :D

    Also, just in case it wasn't clear, my tracks are not tagged with japanese characters, they are in the latin alphabet. It's just that when you look up say, Utada Hikaru, last.fm gives the name in japanese. I'm thinking that there must be a way to get last.fm to give you the translated name in the xml. That is possible to do when logging into last.fm - there's a preference for it.

    I've checked the code - everything is done in UTF8 and does work out of the box. Unfortunately I guess your system cannot handle the Japanese artists. Therefore I asked the last.fm staff and got the answer that they already plan to add a login mechanism for the webrequests.
    The disadvantage: they could track the requests by username then - like user "xyz" does similar artist lookups for "Utada Hikaru".
    The advantage: the user profile's settings can be used including artist name translation. In addition it might be possible to query geographical data, get personalized recommendations, etc.

    Finally I've prepared the code to translate the results from UTF8 into e.g. the System's ANSI-Codepage. This however is not a lossless step and therefore not activated by default as only systems supporting Japanese could parse the XML-Data correct then.
     

    dezed

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    Thanks for looking into it. I'll try retagging my japanese artists in japanese characters for now, but I do look forward to the login mechanism for web requests.. I don't think many people would consider last.fm tracking your preferences to be a disadvantage - it's pretty much the basis for the entire site.

    EDIT: yep I can confirm that if I tag the artists with the japanese characters, the scrobbling works fine. Now the trouble is to get those japanese characters to show up in mediaportal. Probably not worth the effort, plus I can't read it anyway, so I'm gonna tag them in both the latin alphabet and japanese
     

    rtv

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    Thanks for looking into it.
    No problem - now we know for sure it's fully UTF8 compliant and should work well for all languages - even those I cannot test like cyrillic, japanese, etc.

    I don't think many people would consider last.fm tracking your preferences to be a disadvantage - it's pretty much the basis for the entire site.
    You're absolutely right about this - just mentioning it as MP users are the most critical crowd in the world and like to discuss such things first ;)
     

    dezed

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    Hello again, sorry to be a pest.. But I'm not really feeling the randomness feature, so I think there might be a bug. I've set the randomness to 100%, but I always find that the most similar artists are selected, and in that order. For example, I play a Radiohead song, the top 5 similar artists are Coldplay, Muse, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, and the White Stripes. I've set the plugin to match 4 songs.. and every time, i get songs from Coldplay, Muse,Beck, and the White Stripes in that order (there's no Smashing Pumpkins because I don't have any of their albums, for some reason). I would think that with 100% randomness the desired functionality would have it randomly pick any similar artist, ignoring the degree of similarity. I've tried lowering the randomness, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.
     

    rtv

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    I would think that with 100% randomness the desired functionality would have it randomly pick any similar artist, ignoring the degree of similarity.
    The formula is quite simple: ArtistMatchPercent = 100 - (int)(0.9 * _randomNessPercent)

    So for a 100% slider the minimum match has to be 10.

    Do you never get songs from e.g. Audioslave when listening to Radiohead?
    Please post a log as well.
     

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