Jan 29 Site Update

Hey everyone,

We've just put a site update live. If you spot any new bugs in it, please report them as usual over in the support forum. To discuss the changes, you can use this thread or make a new one in the feedback forum.

So what's new? Here's the list:

• Artist + track name auto-correction, powered by audio fingerprints (and you!)
  
  Yes, the day has finally arrived. Read Erik's blog post for the full lowdown on how we got here and where we're going. A quick summary of what this update means: incorrect artist and track links will automatically redirect to the correct ones, and more pages will have streamable music on them (even if the music was supplied to Last.fm with incorrect metadata). Incorrect entries in your recent tracks, library, and charts will also be autocorrected and their playcounts merged (unless you'd rather leave them as-is, in which case we have a new setting for you). Finally, you can flag existing corrections if they're wrong or could be improved, and suggest new/different corrections for any artist or track. We're just starting out with this new system, and we'll need your help (and a bit of time) to get it just right.
  
• Exact tag matches in music search
  Roughly 5% of the searches typed into the "music search" bar in our header aren't the names of artists / albums / tracks, but tags (or genres) instead. We now catch these searches, and do our best when the name is shared.
• Other improvements and bugfixes include...
  New subscribers have the option of automatic monthly payments (handy for those of us that hate remembering to renew), fixes to tagger stats and tag playability, a fix for the flash player scrobbling "Undefined" albums, improvements to journal text inputs and BBCode, and some IE6 rendering fixes. And plenty more!

Many more updates and fixes are coming in February, see you here. :)

Although the final goal of what you're trying to do by unifying tags seems very ideal, it's not quite perfect. I believe people have their certain ways of tagging their music and, from what I saw, this auto-correction feature has very incorrect information for some artists and songs. For somebody who just created an account this might be a good thing, but for others who already have their charts filled with music tagged in their own way this new feature is actually a step back. It's a good thing you added option to disable auto-correction of scrobbles because I'm pretty sure that most of Last.fm population would be extremely furious right now.

I scrobble a track under tag Brothersport (which is now incorrect, because the band finally changed it to Brother Sport) will all my scrobbles turn into correct tag?

Since I know I have some wrongly tagged songs, will I be able to manually change them? That's the only 100% safe way, from my point of view and regarding my library.

Audiophil85 said:
Will this finaly help to seperate artists with the same name?
This is just one more step along the moderation road, "different artist same name" will be fixed in a future step!

Audiophil85 said:
I have to say I like the new feature for the most part but I dislike that many Japanese songs get now translated into roman letters.
Mark them as wrong then, they probably SHOULD be in the Japanese characters.

--jonty

I'm going to re-post a question from the blog, because I'm not sure who reads there

One question: is this only for badly-spelled artists, or will it also include artists with name variations? The reason I ask is because I have lots of tracks scrobbled for Goo Goo Dolls, and also lots for The Goo Goo Dolls, but these still aren't merged. (MusicBrainz lists Goo Goo Dolls as the correct name, with the alternative listed as an alias.)

does this mean you will start merging all the asian artist accounts? such as the korean charactered tags with their english/romanized counterparts? and example

dbsk
tvxq
동방신기
東方神起

all of those are the same artist :| and i'm sure there are more names than that, as well. i'm not sure what you'd direct it to though, because this band gets a lot of war as far as 東方神起 vs. 동방신기 goes.

um, also, a problem i've noticed with the new system: under this band (동방신기/東方神起), several of the members have SOLO songs, and they are redirecting to 東方神起 instead of staying under the individual's name. however, i don't want to turn off the auto correct settings, because i like them :s i just don't like the auto-direct of the solos to their band name. is there any way you guys can fix this? D:

I still don't understand why the songs by The Streets I'm listening to right now are added to my library now when they didn't have wrong tags. at all. the names of the tracks are all the same. same with the album I've listened to before.. I don't get it.

:eek:



none thing that wasn't made clear (at least to me :o)... FINALLY, after all these years Smells Like Teens Spirit doesn't exist anymore (a.k.a. redirects to the correct one)...sooooo... will the properly named track received all the scrobbles from the misstagged song?
since, in that case, the misstagged song had almost 1 million of scrobbles. i saw that the entries in our charts/library/recent tracks will be fixed but there was no mention about the tracks themselves...

eagerly waiting for a reply

WichitaQ said:
FINALLY, after all these years Smells Like Teens Spirit doesn't exist anymore (a.k.a. redirects to the correct one)...sooooo... will the properly named track received all the scrobbles from the misstagged song?

From the blog:
We are still not merging data for spelling corrections on artist and other catalogue pages. Spelling variations there will still have their individual playcounts and charts for now. We’ll be working on this in the next phase of our metadata-cleanup operation, after we’ve listened to your feedback about the current changes.

hmm...so it's going to happen eventually? enough for me, you really got me now :takes_out_his_credit_card:

Oh wow! The way that this integrates into the Recently Played section is amazing. I just purposely tried scrobbling a misspelled track, and this is how it appeared:



You can't ask for it to be any clearer than that. Top job, guys.

Great, Ive really been looking forward to this for quite some time!
So just two questions for now: What about auto-correction for album-names? Is it going to come as well?
And also, is there going to be the possibility to flag artists that arent being redirected yet? (For example, Im scrobbling James Dean Bradfield as Manic Street Preachers right now and there is no rediretction in place)
But thanks already lastfm! :)