HR Geeks

I would like to announce the release of a 757Labs tool, mp3nema.

MP3nema is a tool aimed at analyzing and capturing data that is hidden between frames in an MP3 file or stream, otherwise noted as “out of band” data. This utility also supports adding data between frames, and capturing streaming audio.

This tool is under the GNU GPLv3 license. So have at it!

Thanks to Tele, skhisma, and the rest of the labs!

-Matt (enferex)

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the service, but I’ll give it a brief overview for those who aren’t.

Last.fm is a website (http://www.last.fm), formerly known as Audio Scrobbler, that keeps track of the music you listen to. It works as both a seperate player, and a plugin for Windows MediaPlayer, iTunes and other apps (and runs on Win/OSX/Linux). Every time you listen to a song with your media player (including your iPod!), it logs it to the website, and over time, produces a ‘radio station’ for you, both of the music you have listened to, and songs/artists it thinks you will appreciate based on your listening history. This music is then stream-able over the internet to you, or your friends. Back before MySpace and FaceBook REALLY exploded, it also had a proto-social networking system – people who listened to the same music were grouped into ‘neighborhoods’, that you could browse around and check out. This was based on the usually-correct assumption (in my experience) that people who listened to lots of the same music, tended to enjoy the same stuff all around. In addition, it provides a neat historical overview of what you’re listening to, when you’re listening to it, and what your top tracks / artists are. This service has been going for a little over 2 years now.

Ok, so that’s Last.FM. Today, I ran across a project called ‘LastGraph‘ by Andrew Godwin. It takes your listening history and does this:

Click to Open full size (2992×414)

It’s a Django-based web-app based on what appears to be a school project by Lee Byron. Godwin took Byron’s idea, and webified it, allowing you to create custom ‘wavegraphs’ of your listening history.  The service is, unfortunately, down now due to overwhelming popularity, but Godwin says it should be back up soon.