Last.fm Countries

jae_89 said:
great tool !
This band called Ghost (http://www.lastfm.es/music/Ghost) are from Sweden, aren't the Japanese band with same name. There are others bands with this problem. Any solution to differentiate bands with same names? Thanks!
No. If there was, the problem would no longer exist.

The user accounts would be a good idea. I would find it especially useful for those times when a tag such as "french" has been intended as a language tag rather than a country one. It would also be useful for mistakes such as Freddy De Majunga although hopefully my tags will sort that.

I do like this tool and prefer it to the other one but there are still some countries missing including mozambique and kiribati so Eyuphuro for example is still considered to be unknown even though it has the correct country tag.

Sometimes it gets stuck on large libraries. Also, if it gets to "Loading image", the image will get generated even if it doesn't appear (sometimes it can take quite a long time, especially with large libraries!). You'll find your generated images at http://www.quinnsoft.com/lastfm/cache/qualityISgone.png and http://www.quinnsoft.com/lastfm/cache/qualityISgone_small.png

In your case, you have a huge library, and the tool will only check 50 previously unknown artists at a time (this was done to address complaints of the lookups taking too long). Since so many of your artists are unknown to the tool, your unknown percentage is probably much higher than it should be. Every time you run it, 50 more artists will be checked; in your case, though, it may take quite some time.

I wanted to take care of this problem in a more elegant manner, but grad school makes it difficult for me to devote much time to anything other than research right now.

Grazikon said:
The user accounts would be a good idea. I would find it especially useful for those times when a tag such as "french" has been intended as a language tag rather than a country one. It would also be useful for mistakes such as Freddy De Majunga although hopefully my tags will sort that.

It's something I wanted to do, but other obligations have made it nearly impossible for me to make time (and until I'm done with grad school, I probably won't have time). The good news is that tags that can be interpreted as language tags are given weights that are much lower than ones that could only be country tags.


I do like this tool and prefer it to the other one but there are still some countries missing including mozambique and kiribati so Eyuphuro for example is still considered to be unknown even though it has the correct country tag.

I have fixed the entry for Mozambique (it was in the database as Mozabmique) and added Kiribati.

Last.fm is very sloppy with updating tags entered by users so despite adding country tags for most unknown artists, I'm still stuck with more than 3% unknown. Since Musicbrainz has had artist nationality for some time, would it be possible to use the Musicbrainz nationality as a fallback method? Many Last.fm artists have links to their corresponding Musicbrainz page.

I've tagged the three artists. Let's see if they'll be updated now.

Not working for me at all. Is this happening for anyone else?

The page doesn't even seem to be up anymore.

yeah working again (;

Any chance of including the feature in which we can "sort by country," which would let us view which countries we listen to the most

Also, fixing a few unknowns:

Dirty Perfect - United Kingdom
Dejecta - United States
Traditionalists - United States
Count Basie Orchestra - United States
Rabies Caste - Israel
Shaunus B - United Kingdom
Dead Lane Cross - United Kingdom
The Waxing Captors - United Kingdom
Waterproof Blonde - United States
Elimination - United Kingdom
Arcticology - United Kingdom
Liquid Fire - Israel
SkullDrag - United States
Kelli Ali & Ozymandias - United Kingdom
MC Vapour - United Kingdom
Intense Degree - United Kingdom
Jesse Zubot - United States
Towpath - United States
Walter Bishop Jr. - United States
Timecode & MC Codebreaker - United Kingdom
Dead Dred - United Kingdom
Sinai Beach - United States
Rebirth - United Kingdom
This Mourning After - United Kingdom
MC Skibadee - United Kingdom
Transept - United Kingdom

The artists I suggested all say (recently checked), I can provide proof of the artists's nationality if need be? :)

ps how do I get to see one of those pie charts

Hey guys,

You may have noticed that the tool has been going down a lot lately. The reason for that is that the load on the tool has grown and is now in excess of what my inexpensive virtual private server can handle. I actually have lots of interesting algorithmic improvements that can be made (in fact, I've even implemented some cool machine learning techniques locally), but this can't happen under the constrained resources on the virtual server. In fact, with the very simple algorithm I'm currently using, I've been shut down twice in the past couple of months for excessive resource usage. I appreciate the patience of my VPS provider, but I expect that their patience will probably run out sooner or later.

The ads on the page bring in very little money, covering (on average) about half of the $10 a month I'm paying to keep the site up. I would love to upgrade to a better VPS or a dedicated server, but as a lowly grad student on a stipend, that's something I can't afford to do. Furthermore, with the research that I'm doing as part of grad school, downtime can go unnoticed (or just ignored due to pressing deadlines) for hours or even days.

As of right now, over 30,000 unique users have used the tool, and it's used about 1000 times a day. Furthermore, the pie charts are loaded from the server about 14,000 times a day. Of all of these users, over the course of almost 2 years of this tool being active, I have received exactly 2 donations of $5 each (and a couple of donations that were less than 35 cents, resulting in Paypal taking the whole thing).

That said, I'm not asking for donations here, but just your understanding regarding the instability, slowness, and random downtime the tool suffers.

If you see that the tool is down, please email me to let me know so I can take care of it as quickly as possible (except for today, since I'm participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackout--if you're in the U.S., call your Congressmen!).

Nicely updated! I had to run it 3 times, as it got stuck twice, but then it made it to the end.

Also, when it generated the images, the small pie displayed was the one cached in my browser. So I thought the bug was still there at first, haha. Perhaps you can add some caching instructions to browsers in there somewhere.