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Hi,

I'm trying to incorporate moods into a web-app that I'm working on, and I'm trying to find out some more information about how these moods are created within the EchoNest API. When limiting my search to songs within the 7digital-US library and searching for a specific mood, the results that I get seem to be smaller than I would expect.

For example, searching for the mood "Sexy" yields only 47 results (http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/song/search?api_key=N6E4NIOVYMTHNDM8J&bucket=id:7digital-US&limit=true&results=100&mood=sexy). Other moods that one would expect to yield a lot of results (e.g. Sad, Happy, Trippy) are also returning under 100-200 results.

How are moods for artists decided upon? Is this something that is going to be more functional in the future? With the kind of results that I'm getting now, I'm not going to be able to integrate it into my webapp, which makes me sad (so I'm really hoping that what I'm seeing is a bug of sorts).

Best, and thanks as always for reading my posts,
Sami

Hi Sami - this is a bug. The engineers have a fix ready to go live once it makes it through the Q/A guantlet. -- Paul

Hi Sami,

We've pushed a fix on our end and you should be getting the correct number of results for song searches by description now. Thanks for the heads up.

Tyler

Thanks guys! Any chance one of you can clear up how moods are attributed to different artists? I'd like to have a brief explanation on my site about how the tags come into being.

Sami - we crawl the web looking for everything that has been written about an artist. We do some math on these words to surface up the most descriptive words and phrases ('Third wave ska' is more descriptive than 'alternative' for example). When then filter these descriptive terms against a large set of mood terms to populate the set of mood terms for each artist. -- Paul

Sweet thank you. Does the EchoNest have some kind of official brief description for each parameter related to a song/artist that I could use when describing how it is that you guys evaluate the various values, or should I filter down my understanding of your system into a sentence or two on my own? I'd rather not do it myself if you guys want to have your work described in a specific way.

Regarding closer information about moods - is it possible to get a mood value based on a song name in API request?