Here's your chance to win $600 (while helping out science)

Researchers at the Spanish company Telefónica are conducting a study on "online music taste" and are looking for participants. Here's their pitch:

Are you a music listener and last.fm user? Are you interested in helping out research while having the chance to win a $600 Amazon gift card? Please help us understand online music tastes by completing a survey that will only take around 15 minutes of your time and might even be fun!

All you need to do to participate is go to http://musicsurvey.webhop.net/MusicSurvey/ and provide your last.fm username and a valid email. We will check if you meet the requirements (at least 18 y.o. and 5000 scrobbles on last.fm) and we will then send you a link to your personalized survey.

Good luck winning that gift certificate!

Update

Just a short post to mention that beaTunes 2.1.12 is out. The release focuses mainly on maintenance, fixing a number of minor things. As always, details are in the NOTES.

Importing Metadata from Filename

Before there was id3 most people organized their music by using folder and filenames. E.g.:

.../U2/How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb/01 Vertigo.mp3

Unfortunately, iTunes ignores folder structures when importing files, so all the valuable metadata is lost. This plugin offers a first step in recovering this information by allowing you to read the folder names and write them as album, artist, title and tracknumber to the iTunes database (and the id3 tags).

After installation, the plugin will show up in your Analysis Options dialog. It offers a couple of pre-defined patterns you can pick from. These patterns should cover about 80% of the typical cases. If your file/folder naming schema does not fit any of these patterns, don't use this plugin!

As always when mass-processing any files, try it out with just a few files and if you are uncertain of the outcome, don't do it or first create a backup that you know how to restore.

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ISMIR 2010 in Utrecht

Just wanted to mention that I'm at ISMIR 2010 in Utrecht - if you happen to be there, too, come chat with me!

Online Resources Unavailable Today

Due to database maintenance work, the beaTunes functions relying on "Online Resources" will be unavailable for most of today.
This does not affect MusicIP/AmpliFIND services.

Update: 7/28/2010

Due to unforeseen problems, the database is not back up again. I will post a new message as soon as things are normal again. Thanks for your patience.

Update: 7/29/2010

Alright - this clearly doesn't go as planned. Thanks to the insanely slow ALTER TABLE execution in MySQL(innodb), we have to be patient for a little longer. But hopefully we will all be rewarded with a much faster system in the end. Thanks for your understanding - next time this will be done differently.

Update: 8/2/2010

Monitoring the progress of the updates, I get the impression that they will take another couple of days. :-(

Update: 8/7/2010

The update is still running, but at least does not lead to error messages in beaTunes anymore.

Like beaTunes!

If you'd like to show your support for beaTunes, click on the brandnew Facebook Like button on www.beatunes.com.

MusicIP service down for maintenance

Just FYI: The MusicIP/Amplifind service will be down today (6/18/2010) between 1:30am EDT and 4:30am EDT.