Sylvain Zimmer

Today I made the tracklist of the upcoming album of my former choir on jamendo. It’s a compilation of public domain songs we recorded over our 3 CDs. So we had to check all the dates of death of all the authors. It’s quite sad some of our best songs were harmonized by third-party authors, thus forbiding the Creative Commons license for them. The weirdest part is that when checking the biography of Gabriel Fauré, and seeing he died in 1924, we celebrated it ! That such a great man had died actually made us happy…

Imagine wishing the death of your favourite rock stars (mines currently being Incubus), to be able to remix their songs on your last 90-year album …. Let’s hope they’ll switch to Creative Commons before :(

My first official composition, an Ave Maria dedicated to my cousin Elisabeth who motivated me to learn piano, is also featured on this album. The recording doesn’t satisfy me at all though, because as it’s the last CD the choir recorded before splitting, it was _very_ rushed (2 sessions of 4 hours for 13+ tracks !), and the mix is horrible as it wasn’t released to the public. Maybe we’ll record it again to include it on my first album.

Anyway, here’s the tracklisting of the album, (don’t expect a release until next week though) :

1. Go down Moses (Negro Spiritual)
2. Soon and Very Soon (Negro Spiritual)
3. Go tell it on the mountain (Negro Spiritual)
4. Let us break bread (Negro Spiritual)
5. Ave Maria (Sylvain Zimmer)
6. Cantate Domino (Johann Cruger)
7. Cantique de Jean Racine (Gabriel Fauré)
8. Jubilemus Exultemus (François Couperin)
9. Nocturnes (W.A. Mozart)
10. Psaume 61 (Joseph Haydn)
11. Cantate Domino (Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni)
12. Messe à 3 voix (Antonio Lotti)
13. O bone Jesu (Carl Gottlieb Reissiger)
14. Alma Redemptoris Mater (G.P. da Palestrina)
15. L’immensité du firmament (Benedetto Marcello)

Tonight I attended a little meeting with guys from Provisoire, Linbox, Maurice Svay, Jérôme Fix and a few others. It was nice to have an open discussion about P2P, Creative Commons/Copyleft, jamendo, and the economics of free culture with local people. Arnaud (CEO of Linbox) was very interested in sponsoring the upcoming jamendofest, so we’re going to meet again :) This USB key thing really does motivate people ! “This is gonna be huge” :)

Today the mighty J.B. Soufron told me about design ideas for jamendo. He basically wants more pin-ups wearing headphones :) Maybe he’s right !

Anyway, if you can, download and watch this amazing demo video called “State of the Art”. I love it ! Moreover it’s very old !!

You’ll understand where do Apple’s ideas for iPod marketing come from ! Would this kind of design will fit jamendo ?

I’ve been working on a new exciting app since yesterday. I called it “ccLive”. It will allow jamendo, and I hope many other commoners all around the world, to record live gigs, and to copy MP3s or Oggs to the audience’s USB keys seconds after the last chord !! Of course files will be automagically properly tagged, named, and so on. I even think we’ll be able to make their CC licenses validate !

Of course, I wrote my first line of python 20 hours ago, so the GUI still looks terrible and the code is quite a mess, but it does work !! I used wxPython & XRCed. I implemented XRC import for the GUI and threads for I/O stuff with the help of Nathan Yergler and of some nice folks on #wxwidgets. The code is in the jamendo tools CVS on sourceforge. It only records on Linux with arecord, but it should be recording on OS X and Win32 in a few days.

How does the app work ? Basically, you fill in metadata, and then you start the recording. you can then push “stop” or “next track”. You have to enter the tracknames while the songs are performed and once a song is finished, its encoding to OGG/MP3/FLAC starts. Handy !

We’re going to test it at a Both rehearsal very soon !!

I’ve always known I could have been a model. Here is the proof :)

Okay, shame on me, it’s a jamendo ad, made by our crazy CEO Laurent…. Whatever..

The french text says “Sylvain isn’t as famous as Bono yet, but he’s on BitTorrent too” :)

Tonight I turned The “similar albums” feature on. You can see it in action here (the music is great too…). It uses my new item-based iRATE recommendation algorithm, grouping recommendations by album. It’s very accurate, am I quite impressed by the results. But we’ll have to wait for more content to really test its unleashed power :)

Maybe I’ll make a “similar artists” thingie, too.

I was complaining about the rest of the team going in the French Alps while I was working hard, well, here is the outrageous shot !

The website isn’t even publicly launched (we hardly appeared on our first press release today :), we are already being flamed by “CC sucks it’s not free” lames. They just can’t stop complaining about the google ads, about jamendo not being W3C compliant yet, … Did they listen to the music at least ?

It’s hard to accept that jamendo won’t be liked by everybody :( Sure, integrists will always hang around, but we don’t have enough content to ignore them yet. It’s the downside of being a company, even if you aren’t evil : you will be criticized more often, and sometimes just because you are a company. Time will help. Maybe we should ask the founders of OSTG (Va Linux ?) what it was like for them, 10 years ago…

Tonight I went to Metz’s most “cultural” place : Les trinitaires. I have plenty of great memories in this place : Bob Mintzer, Damien Prud’homme, Omar sosa, … the best jazz concerts of my life !

Anyway, this time it was for business : I had to meet the managers of a great band called Torpid, and evangelize jamendo. I think I succeeded, they seemed really interested and didn’t see any downsides to putting the music online. Well that’s true, isn’t it ? I told them about things like the Wired CD and Magnatune, and it just went fine. They seemed really impressed when I spoke about the Beastie Boys and Chuck D being featured on jamendo :) Of course it was quite intentional !

I wish I could talk a bit more about numbers, and not stay in the “that’s really gonna be huge” approach ! I explained the traffic of lesfrontaliers.lu (a nice website managed by the same team), and that impressed them even more than the Beastie Boys :) I think when we’ll have some nice stats for jamendo, that’ll ease the things when speaking to artists.

I just found http://www.20q.net/. This is “an experiment in Artificial Intelligence”. What an experiment ! I’m completely astonished… It’s pretty simple. You choose a common object. I played two times. I first chose a tap, and then a table. In 20 questions, the AI has to guess this object. Well .. it just works !! Check it out…

One of the problems I already faced a few times when building up jamendo was ordering by value and weight. I could have solved it when working on lynucs.org, but well, it waited until today.

First let me explain the problem : Users can rate albums. Then, the website have to order them by popularity. How to compute this ? We have 2 parameters : value (The average rating of the album) and weight (the number of users who rated the album). So popularity=f(rating,users);

Most websites use f=rating. So an album rated 10/10 by only one visitor would top another one rated 9/10 by a hundred visitors. Of course, we want to change this behaviour.

I ran into the same issue when redesigning the so-called “sylvinus1″ recommendation algorithm for iRATE this afternoon. So after a quick brainstorming with myselft, I decided to start jamendo with :

f = rating * ( users / (users+1) )^2

For those of you who don’t understand this, it will make the website take full account of the rating only when the album was rated by more than ~20 users. Before that, the website won’t fully “trust” the rating, so you’ll end up seeing 5-stars albums ordered after 4-stars albums sometimes.

Of course the formulae isn’t perfect, but we’ll see in a few months if today I was plainly wrong, or if I was enlightened … :)