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Hi, are you planning on putting in genre detection in the API?

Hi Nick - as far as I know, we don't have any plans to expose a genre classifier as part of the API (but I'm the new guy here, so I could be wrong. I'll check with guys this morning to see how wrong I really am). The features that remix calculates are good inputs to a genre classifier though, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already built one.

Paul

Nick, for "genre" classification, you can also use the top-terms query directly from the artist API (get_top_terms). The results are already in there and can save you some time. You can even make up your own genre dictionary and run the results against it.

Nick, I did check, and indeed, there's no plan to expose a genre classifier as part of the API. Also, note that the get_top_terms method that tristan mentioned is not currently enabled on the developer site yet, but stay tuned...

Paul

Any updates on that get_top_terms method yet? :)

If not when it will be available, maybe some information about what to expect (ie. how it might compare to the analogous last.fm method)?

brianmcfee:

The Echo Nest top terms are derived from a comprehensive crawl of the music web. When we find some text that is about a particular artist we associate the text with the artist. To derive the top terms for an artist, we weight the terms to give more prominence to words that are more descriptive. For instance in the music world, the word 'rock' is less descriptive than the phrase 'brutal death metal'. The top terms are the most descriptive words and phrases for a particular artist. These differ from Last.fm social tags which are manually applied by Last.fm users. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

Our knowledge team have completed some significant improvements to top terms algorithms. Hopefully we should see these pushed out to the web services very soon. We should know more about the plan by the end of the week.

Paul

Hi, are there any news about the get_top_terms method? Will it be reactivate soon? Clemens