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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A quick talk, the same content as given at Oxford Geek Nights in November 2012.
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.
Download the slides for the ‘Unit Testing in Go’, a microslot (exactly 5 minutes!) at Oxford Geek Nights 29 on the 21st November.
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.