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Popular, Public, "Free" Multimedia Databases

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So what is the best course of action given the definite lack of any marketable and multi-purpose audio research engine? This is not my proposed solution to the general problem, but rather a brief list of some major (legal) online databases available at no immediate direct cost to United States users. As standalone entities, each has its own benefits and disadvantages, yet when grouped together as a whole they provide a fairly comprehensive set of recommendation, playback, and research functions. This is far from scholastically appealing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is scholastically useful as well.

Pandora: Pandora is an Internet-based radio station that runs its famous automated recommendation feature on hired, worker-defined, text-based tagging. Tags represent certain categories that define “similarities” and “differences” to a computer filtering system using 400 individual musical attributes grouped multiple ways into 2000 different focus traits. It is available for free with limited advertisements through a web browser or Smartphone application.

Last.fm: Last.fm is another Internet-based, user-defined radio station as well as a social networking website. It runs on user-defined, text-based tagging. Additionally, it also logs and stores all song play information and makes note of relationships between multiple artists and their listeners. In other words, Last.fm categorizes specific similarities—but not differences—for both the individual member and the site as a whole. A basic membership is free and allows the website’s “Scrobbler” application to sync with playback data in iTunes and on your iPod and log it on your personal profile.

Spotify: Spotify is application-based online music streaming database. Premium access allows users some offline listening options, but as far as a generic free download and membership are concerned, Internet access is required. Interestingly, there is an open-source program written to access Spotify directly known as Despotify. Spotify allows Despotify to access its contents only under a premium account, though Despotify’s anonymous creators vow to change this status quo.

Shazam: Shazam is an Internet-based, Smartphone application that utilizes a phone’s microphone to sample audio and creates a spectrogram for the signal based on frequency, amplitude, and time. Using this spectrogram, the music is delineated into a single algorithm based on the highest points of the graph. Basically, the loudest frequency at any given point is used to identify the piece. When you tag something with Shazam, the microphone on your telephone sends the sound clip to Shazam for it to process your clip and then send the spectrogram-delineated binary information through their database searching for a match.

YouTube: YouTube is a video-sharing website that runs its queries mainly on user-defined, text-based tagging as well as keyword and advertisement-based search results. Though its intention was originally to host video content, YouTube’s scope has expanded to include free listening for virtually every song you can imagine, although generally with a fairly poor MP3 quality. YouTube’s major and obvious drawback is its lack of any advanced search engine and an overwhelming amount of multimedia information that is several tiers below useless for the general human experience, let alone any academic pursuits.

Jango: Jango is an Internet-based radio station similar to Pandora in that it offers customizable personal listening and free automated recommendations. Like Pandora, it also offers the option to like or dislike music as well as specify how frequently Jango should play a specific song or artist.

Wikipedia: Although it is not a truly multimedia database, the famous user-generated online encyclopedia provides overwhelming amounts of data and history pertaining to music, imagery, and the written word. In addition, it is encoded with pictures and instances of audio samples or songs.

Grooveshark: Grooveshark, though somewhat limited in its advanced categorization, is a fairly unique site in that it allows its free users to create profiles to search, stream, and upload music. Because of this, it is probably the highest quality on-demand audio streaming website besides the Internet application Spotify. One advantage Grooveshark has over Spotify (and YouTube) is that it retains your personalized on-demand listening specifications from any computer from which you choose to log in to the website.

Obviously, these are only a handful of dozens of currently popular, online file-sharing and medias-streaming websites, yet they form a remarkably thorough network for music research if each is used in accord with the others. It occurs to me that the state of any academic audio research is akin to baking a cake from scratch, whereas vendor databases such as jstor truly embody the packaged batters of many a supermarket aisle.