abzexport

A Beatunes plugin to export AcousticBrainz audio data to disk.

The AcousticBrainz software generates a large amount of juicy numerical data about your music collection which might be fun or even useful to play with, if you are suitably inclined towards machine learning. The AcousticBrainzSubmit plugin submits this data to the AcousticBrainz server, but does not keep it around for local use. This plugin writes the data to a tab-separated file in a format which is straightforward to read in the like of R or Pandas for further analysis and visualization.

Status

August 11 2018. This should be functional, but it's incredibly crude (you can't choose what to export, the location of the output file or even what the filename should be called).

Plugin JAR

If you just want to get hold of the plugin jar without building it, download a release, unzip it and look in the dist directory, where you should see a abzexport-<version>.jar.

Deploying the plugin

Copy the abzexport-<version>.jar file into your plugins directory. On my Windows 10 installation, it's in the user's AppData\Local\tagtraum industries\beaTunes\plugins directory, rather than where Beatunes itself is installed. If you can find a directory containing the sameartistdifferentgrouping-1.0.2.jar file, that's where it should go.

If the plugin was installed correctly, inside Beatunes, go to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, and on the Installed tab should be a plugin called 'AcousticBrainz Export'.

Building From Source

I use Gradle to build the plugin, because I don't have much experience with Maven. This required a trivial change to plugin.xml (see the keytocomment-gradle repo for more details).

Windows:

gradlew.bat build

Linux:

./gradlew build

You can find the built JAR file as build/libs/abzexport-<version>.jar. It should be the same as the one in the dist file. The gradle dist task simply copies that into the dist directory.

Running

When you Analyze songs, there should now be a new option when the Analysis Options window opens, called 'AcousticBrainz Export'. It has no adjustable parameters. You can just select it and let it go.

Output

The output of the analysis is a file called out.tsv that will be created in your home directory. If the file already exists, it appends to it. It's a tab-separated file that contains the fixed-length numerical data created for AcousticBrainz, along with the name of each song, the artist, and the album.

The first line is a header giving the names of the features being exported. The metadata and beats_position data are not kept because these are variable length.

Here's how to import the data into R and Python:

# base reader
music_data <- read.delim("/path/to/out.tsv")
# you might prefer to install the readr package
library(readr)
music_data <- read_delim("/path/to/out.tsv", 
    "\t", escape_double = FALSE, trim_ws = TRUE)

Python:

import pandas as pd
music_data = pd.read_csv("/path/to/out.tsv", sep='\t')

You should be able to import these into spreadsheets too, except that there are a large number of columns (> 2,500) which may exceed the maximum number of columns for some software.

Limitations

Here are some things that you ought to be able to do, but can't:

Change the location and name of the output file.
Change the separator.
Select the data to be exported.

I would welcome any help, pull requests and so on to make this happen.

License

AGPL-3, in keeping with that of AcousticBrainzSubmit. Note that the repo README says that it's CC0, but the plugin information displayed inside Beatunes says it's AGPL-3, so I've gone with the more restrictive license.

jlmelville / abzexport