The Echo Nest

Quick Links

• Register for our APIs.
• Explore the API documentation.
• Read the company blog.
• Enjoy the informal tumblelog.
• Learn about the company.
• Follow @echonest on Twitter.

About the APIs

Our web services, described in detail at developer.echonest.com, include:

recommend - the recommend API powers music recommendations. It provides artist similarity web services, as well as supplying much of the context surrounding an artist, including news, reviews, blog posts, audio and video The Echo Nest recommendations are informed by many data sources including online cultural data, text analysis, audio analysis and user activity. More context means better recommendations.

analyze - the analyze API is an audio analysis tool. It takes an MP3 as input and provides a detailed analysis of the track, including the track's structure and musical content (including rhythm, pitch, and timbre). The analyze API incorporates principles of psychoacoustics, music perception, and adaptive learning to model both the physical and cognitive processes of human hearing. Analyze allows you to create applications that are directly related to the way people hear and interact with music.

remix - remix is an open source SDK for Python that allows you to manipulate audio files with ease. Remix is a sophisticated tool to allow you to quickly, expressively, and intuitively chop up existing audio content and create new content based on the old. It allows you to reach inside the music, and let the music’s own musical qualities be your — or your computer’s — guide in finding something new in the old. By using Remix’s knowledge of a given song’s structure, you can render the familiar strange, or the strange slightly more familiar-sounding. You can create countless parameterized variations of a given song — or one of near-limitless length — that respect or desecrate the original, or land on any of countless steps in between.

feeds - the Echo Nest supplies a set of feeds for every music artists online. The feeds API provides artist information including news, reviews, blog posts, audio and video. The feeds are updated every minute to ensure that the latest content is always available. The feeds are powered by a crawl of the entire Internet.

Hack ideas

Here are some things that have already been done with the APIs:

• Put a Donk on it - Automatically remix any music to bouncy hardcore, inspired by The Blackout Crew from Bolton.
• SyncStep - iPhone app that automatically creates a playlist to match your running speed.
• Many Different Visualisations - With the Analysis API's rich and precise data, there's no end of ways you can programmatically visualise music.
• Artist Recommendation Bots - Given one or many artists' names, the Artist API is able to come up with many similar artists, and different developers have exposed this via different channels, like Twitter or instant messaging.

We have dozens more ideas that we could hand out, but we think the real reward with these APIs is in the ideas that they inspire in you!