FolkTuneFinder on Joe's Blog

Performance of folktunefinder.com and Cloudflare

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Long story short

I put Cloudflare and a CAPTCHA on Folk Tune Finder. It’s a pragmatic decision, which ensures that the limited resources of the site are used for the people it’s intended for. It’s an uneasy trade-off that doesn’t align with all of my principles. It does, though, align with the fundamental principle of folk tune finder: helping people to find tunes.

A decade of Folk Tune Finder, an open manifesto for the decade to come

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the release of the Digital Folk report, a study into the way that folk music is being played and shared in the digital age. The report opens with a timeline of some of the tools available and their history. It reminded me that Folk Tune Finder is ten years old this year - the folktunefinder.com domain was registered at half past nine in the morning on the 27th of January 2008. This seems like a good time to look back at the last decade and think about the future.

Login and favourites are being removed from FolkTuneFinder

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 22:00:00 +0000

On November 30th 2016, the login feature of FolkTuneFinder.com will be removed, and you will no longer be able to use favourites and group tunelists.

One month ago I wrote the a blog post about sign-in on FolkTuneFinder and placed a message on the site. I also put word out on the FolkTuneFinder Facebook page. Since then I have recieved only two messages. There are 5,367 accounts on FolkTuneFinder. Some of them are spam, but some of them are real users who log in and use favourites.

Removing Favourites from FolkTuneFinder?

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

I want to remove the ‘favourites’ / ‘bookmarks’ feature (and then the ability to log in altogether). I would make sure that no-one lost their ‘favourites’ lists and could transfer them elsewhere. What do you think? Email me at joe@folktunefinder.com , but preferably read the whole piece first!

FolkTuneFinder is used by up to 10,000 people per month. It’s enough to make me feel like it’s worth running keeping it going, and I hope I always will.

New Year, new Folk Tune Finder!

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 11:10:03 +0000

Happy new year! Happy new Folk Tune Finder! Why not try it out?

Those of you following along at home will know that this is version 7, and that I release approximately one new version per year. This one’s a big one, with lots of changes. I’ll concentrate on four.

Effectiveness of interval histogram Euclidean distance for predicting tune similarity

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 20:02:14 +0000

In an attempt to quickly find almost exact melodic duplicates (give or take a note or two) in the folktunefinder.com algorithm I tried comparing the Euclidean distance between their interval histograms.

Unit Testing in Go, talk at London Go Users Group

Wed, 29 May 2013 10:47:14 +0000

A quick talk, the same content as given at Oxford Geek Nights in November 2012.

Unit Testing in Go at GLUG : handout version

Visualising folk tune structures

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:43:30 +0000

Traditional tunes have a particular shape to them. Many, especially northern European, have two parts, each repeated, possibly with first and second time bars. Within this arching structure that spans the tune in a few leaps, there are smaller repeated phrases, callbacks and variations. I remembered a visualisation I saw a long time ago which took a MIDI file and visualised the structure. I wanted to do something for the tunes in FolkTuneFinder.

Unit Testing in Go: talk at Oxford Geek Night

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 22:25:49 +0000

Download the slides for the ‘Unit Testing in Go’, a microslot (exactly 5 minutes!) at Oxford Geek Nights 29 on the 21st November.

Sound file Plotter in Go using gosndfile / libsndfile

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:27:46 +0000

It’s no secret that golang is my new favourite language. I’ve used it to implement the latest folktunefinder search engine and really enjoyed it.

On an unrelated note, whilst looking at what libraries are available I came across the gosndfile library written by Matt Kane / @nynexrepublic. It’s a wrapper for libsndfile, a C library for reading and writing sound files.

From La Mantovana to the Moldau. Musical similarity in the absence of rhythm and what it means to FolkTuneFinder

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:24:54 +0000

Má Vlast is a set of pieces written by the composer Smetana in the late 1800s about his homeland, Czechoslovakia. One of the pieces in the set, The Moldau (Vltava in Czech) is one of my favourite symphonies of all time ever. It could be something in my partially Czech blood, it could be the fact that I’m soppy about Romantic-period orchestral music, whatever it is, I love this piece of music and know it intimately.

FolkTuneFinder version 4 out now

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:48:15 +0000

On Monday 9th January 2011, version 4 of FolkTuneFinder.com went public. It was a bit of a journey getting to this point.

I run FolkTuneFinder in my spare time. Mostly it runs itself without intervention. I keep an eye on things, monitor spam (except for a recent occasion when it got out of hand) and answer mail. There is a fair amount of programming behind it, and I’ve re-written the search engine a few times over the years. The melody search is the main point of the site and the bulk of the programming, but recently the extra bits, such as comments, favourites, blogs etc have become more significant.

FolkTuneFinder: Why are the search results so different to what I typed?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:44:58 +0000

When searching FolkTuneFinder, you may find search results that you don’t agree with or can’t understand. You may think tune has nothing to do with your query, or the highlighted notes bear no relevance to what you typed. Here’s why.

The thing about folk tunes is that they’ve survived in the aural tradition, in many cases for quite a long time. A good tune spreads because people like it, and different parts of a tune may appeal to different people. We all hear and experience tunes slightly differently, and we can interpret and remember them differently too.

FolkTuneFinder index building used to be expensive

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:44:01 +0000

The first version of FolkTuneFinder was written in a combination of Java and PHP. I was still working out the best way to do melodic indexing, and the index build process was parallelised. The job ran across 14 Apple Xserves, made available to me by my university. That was back in 2008. These days it runs in a single virtual machine … somewhere.

Recent downtime on FolkTuneFinder.com

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:54:26 +0000

I started FolkTuneFinder as a student project back in 2008. I’d done websites for a few years before, but this was the first serious one with any kind of heavy lifting or interesting behaviour. Over the years I added features that allowed people to interact, such as the commenting and FolkTuneFinder blogs, which has been surprisingly popular.

I have always had a very small problem with spam: I received perhaps a small handful of blog posts a month, which was fine to deal with. It wasn’t a problem, and the most time-effective way of dealing with it was to delete the posts when they arose. There has always been a battle with spare time, and various interesting things have happened to me since 2008 meaning that I haven’t quite had as much time as I’d like.