Ideas never come alone: we don´t believe in the lonely genius myth. Radio Jaba was started in 2004, and along with the project we were discovering many parallel attempts to achieve the same goal. We don´t see them as competitors, and we are willing to share our ideas and discuss with anyone involved in any project (in fact we do participate - or lurk) in many of those mailing lists. Open source spirit is that any peer has the right to participate and innovate in any project, so this is what we are doing: participating with our opinion, contributing with our ideas.
iRate
Irate is often considered one of the pioneers of the genre, being released almost simultaneously as GnomoRadio. iRate is free software, written in java which allows it to be up to date in every Operating system, but gives him more instability. The new stable release has a more nifty interface, but the usability stills the same. New artists are added manually by the developers which makes the database artists a little biased to australian/new Zealand music as the creator himself, Anthony Jones, is kiwi. One of the main problems with iRate is that it lacks P2P technology, and thus musics comes very slowly, and overloads some popular servers. They do accept bitTorrent protocols, but that´s not very practical as this forces the providers of musical sites to seed torrents, which for a variety of reasons, they don´t. They have a button for having info on the artist you listen to, but that´s basically a google search on his name. Their strong point is that, being free software, they are open to discussions and new ideas such as this one.
Gnomoradio
Gnomoradio was announced almost simultaneously as iRate, but never gained any momentum, probably because it´s restricted to the Gnome platform on Linux computers (it might run in a mac computer, but only some with some outside scripts and a lot of command line use). In a few aspects they are superior to iRate, basically because they have P2P (only with songs licensed creative commons) and they have a direct from web submission of new artists. They have some creative features: for example instead of actively rating each song, the application watches how many songs have been skipped. Although this is a unobtrusive way of guessing users preferences this makes songs that are often played being even more often played, thus making it harder to the user to change his preferences. Also the name is not creative at all: 90% of gnome applications are called gnomosomething, which makes this application seems very platform specific. As it´s open source software programmed on the popular C++ language, gnomoradio might be some day used as a the basis for other projects.
Indy
Indy is a proprietary program very similar to iRate. In fact it has exactly the same functionalities but with less user control. The interface was created by a talented graphic designer, but without much worries for usability. The most important functions are only available through right-click (that´s basically what Apple calls lazy programing, and that´s why they don´t ship computers with two-buttons mouse). The only option the user has for deciding which music will play is forward and back, and, as with iRate, he has to wait for a set of predetermined music to be downloaded in his computer before the program starts being functional. The name, although short, relates the program for a specific genre of music: Indie Rock.
iTunes
Apple´s music player software is as well designed as it´s physical partner, the iPod, and probably has helped on the white brother´s ubiquitous success. Without it´s simplicity to organize and find music inside a universe of thousands of songs, few users would feel that they could manage (or need) 40 gigabytes of music in their pockets. iTunes import music form cd´s, syncs with your iPod, burn CD-Rs, play Internet radio stations and has a built-in music store. You can easily find whatever you want to hear? But what if you don´t know what you want to? We won´t make any criticism on this or any multi-purpose mp3 player, no criticism other than state that our program has other goals: to help the user discover new music, explore the free music universe and make unexpected connections among the music he already has.
AudioScrobbler
Audioscrobbler is a plug in for WinAmp and iTunes that uses collaborative filtering to recommend music to the user. It doesn´t downloads anything. It´s noteworthy to mention that unlike the other applications, audioscrobbler´s database is all released under a creative commons tag. Anthony Jones, from iRate has promised that if someone shall be interested, he could do the same with iRate database.
Weedshare
Weedshare is the most creative DRM system out there. Weed music files can be downloaded for free, but you may only hear them a limited amount of time before paying. The interesting part is that if you decide to pay for the file, 30% of this price will be divided among the users from who you copied the music. That means that once you buy a music, you might actually receive a fee for convincing peers to copy it from you.
We are, personally, suspicious of any DRM file, as it leads (and already lead) to some monopoly over licenses and operating systems (Weedshare only works with Microsoft´s DRM. iPod only accepts music bought with apple´s DRM and so on..). But if any DRM ever succeeds, we hope it´s weedshare.
MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz is the open source version of CDDB (which was built through collaborative production, but all users found out that all their efforts could be privately taken over) It has a tracking system that identifies a single music file and tags it correctly. Might be very useful to clean all the messy files you find in P2P networking, and may serve to identify copyrighted music wrongly tagged with a free license
Up To 11
A website recommendation system that uses collaborative filtering. It is only mentioned here because we stumbled upon them after Radio Jaba was quite mature, and found some interesting coincidences. That only proves that no sole idea belongs to a single person.
Further Reading
If you want to know more about collaborative filtering, and things related, we recommend you those:
- Information Tapestry. The first collaborative filtering, at Xerox parc in 1992.
- Pointing the way. An interesting historical explanation of the aforementioned project.
- Ringo. The first use of collaborative filtering on music was by two MIT graduates, in 1994
- Eigentaste. An evolution on the ringo algorithm, with scalability in mind. All users must have the same starting point (bad)
- Collaborative filtering with privacy. A visionary paper explaining how to build a database for collaborative filtering while preserving the final users privacy and control over the information.
- Programme driven radio. An interesting essay on a streaming automated radio station.
- Penguin´s coase. It doesn´t have much to do with collaborative filtering nor music, but a interesting paper on peer production nowadays. Worth a read : )
