If you want a new-release-finding power-tool, or a complete semi-cryptic music interface, everynoise.com/nrbg.html and everynoise.com/curio.html both now work without any extra pre-configuration.

everynoise.com/canonicalpat... now has a few modes: "live" gets current top songs for 50 artists, "spotify" uses Spotify's idea of the 20 nearest artists, "original" is the full long list as of the end of 2023. The two * versions pick songs more randomly.

If you have bookmarked anything on everynoise.com ending in .cgi and it just stopped working, update your bookmark to .html and it should work again and you should tell me if it doesn't.

Me, on stage, modeling an everynoise hoodie! Natalia Anderson, interviewing me in English English! Earnest, if varyingly satisfying, answers to reasonable questions! The video of my appearance at the recent m4music conference in Zurich is now online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA7e...

Spotify has 59 artists named Fiona. The catalogs of the top 6 map via ISRCs to 6, 3, 5, 0, 1 and 3 different Apple Music artists. AM has 22 Fionas. One of them maps via ISRCs to 30 different Spotify artists, another to 9, and 6 more to multiple. USUM72010080 open.spotify.com/track/1iCvpI...

Hmm, what about a query that traverses music services?

If you were using NRbG with a free Spotify account, you probably just got cut off. See the bottom of the NRbG page for a link to join the group for more info.

Data navigation. (dactal.org/curiam.html – you'll need Apple Music for this one, and tolerance for a deliberately unadorned state.)

If you use NRbG with a Development Mode API key, things are supposedly about to get bad for that. If you're interested in alternatives, see the bottom of the page for a group you could join to discuss such things.

If you're in Zurich on March 20th, you could come see me talk about algorithms and music discovery and human creativity and machines and power. How many of the Swiss metal bands I personally like will I find excuses to mention? www.m4music.ch/events/en/20...

Presumably NRbG and Curio are now broken for newly created Spotify API keys. Due to the same petty new restrictions to the API I can't create a new API key myself, and thus can't even try them that way. But other people report hitting 429s and getting locked out almost immediately.

If you've read my book, thanks, that was awesome of you! If you haven't, but not as a matter of principle, you could read the beginning and see if that makes you feel like reading more. www.book2look.com/book/RVopHiZ...

If you have hit issues with the Listening History views in Curio showing zero counts for things, do this:

If your information software doesn't make you want a bigger monitor, what good is it?

Planning ahead for the end of the year, which is STILL A MONTH AWAY: a thing for comparing a genre capsule for your year in music to a friend's. (And yes, in my test case, my "friend" is myself from another year.)

I talked to PJ Wehry on the Chasing Leviathan podcast, and now you can hear us: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCTd...

The genre system we created at the Echo Nest and expanded for a subsequent decade at Spotify had, by its unnecessary demise, over 6500 genres, every one of them picked and guided by humans. The automated ML system that replaced it has 708 tags.

Sometimes I come across a very long playlist and I want a quick sense of how my own listening intersects with it. There are lots of ways to quantify this, but here's one of them in Curio query form (you can copy and paste the query from the alt-text):

If you're curious about how different streaming-royalty allocation schemes would affect you and your artists, or could be tempted into curiosity if you thought there was a way to see this, there's a way to see this: furia.com/log/517

People complain about Spotify's shuffle mode, and I never listen on shuffle so I don't care, but if you do, you can make your own in Curio: tracks....shuffle/artist;.1:@<=100 Run that on the query page, and then save the results as a playlist.

Do not let the world's deluge of grievous wrongs numb you to your own tiny useless delightful errors.

If you want to scrutinize algorithmic playlists Spotify makes for you, you can copy their tracks into normal playlists and then use Curio to run queries on those. E.g.: playlists:~<[DW 2025-06-27].other playlists .tracks.(.artists:@1).other artists /label=(.artist catalogs.catalog.label)#count

Here, for example, is ?? in a Curio query that gets a playlist and some albums, annotates the track, album and artist overlaps between them (in that order of priority), and flags the tracks in each album that were previously released (by that artist) before their album appearances.

DACTAL changes that might affect you if you're doing Curio queries: filter negation was :! now :- reverse index-number filtering was :@- now :@@ repeat was ?? now !

Today's tiny DACTAL tweak that probably affects nobody: in an aggregation, semicolons explicitly identify aggregators. So this query is a count of counts; the first "count" is a property (of groups), the second "count" is the aggregator. tracks/artist...count;count

Made some improvements to playlist comparisons. (Also, did you know Curio does playlist comparisons?)

Here's what you get when your software is built by people who don't live in it. This is Spotify's useful display of what you've recently played, by playlist. But if you tap a song here, it doesn't resume that playlist, it starts playing through THIS view, which is your play-history in reverse.

The Spotify iOS app has adopted the annoying habit of starting my playlists over again, so in defense recent Listmarks in Curio can now be expanded to show your recent play history within them, so you can jump back to where you really were.

Happy NMF. Some notes about a geeky Curio feature. www.furia.com/log/507 NMFinder 2025-04-18 open.spotify.com/playlist/1j4... the new Flight of Icarus song is out (and some others) open.spotify.com/playlist/2hz...

"Best practices" are incurious. Practice is most interesting when you don't predetermine what it is allowed to reveal. You can now annotate playlists in Curio. And do what else with those annotations? Nothing, yet.

Hooked up the DACTAL export function. Particularly useful in Curio for copying Listmarks' recent_history to other browsers.

I wanted some Curio track-flagging features that were too specific to justify adding as general features, but that in itself justified adding a custom-flagging feature.

Curio is mostly intended for desktop use, but I've now made some very basic style tweaks for rudimentary phone-screen support. The only thing specifically tuned FOR phone use is the Listmarks page.

If you create a playlist from a query in Curio, like NMFinder for example, you can now rerun the query to update it from the playlist's Curio page.

Album-cover scan-previewing in Curio is now on Option-hover instead of Command-hover, to eliminate jump-scares if you cycle into a tab or window with your pointer in the wrong place.

If the amount curious you are about my book is $4.99, the ebook version has dropped to your bargaining point. a.co/d/4lUJ1zp

I added a "lookup" connector to Curio so that queries can navigate into any api.spotify.com links the Spotify API returns. E.g. playlists:@1.tracks.href.lookup.results.items:@1.added_by.href.lookup

I spent almost 5 minutes searching the web for liner-notes on this compilation to explain which tracks came from where, and then I remembered that I have a tool for that.

Can we collate our collective knowledge ourselves? Not as much as should be our right, but sometimes, a little bit. open.spotify.com/playlist/2BV...

The first-letter song links in NRbG were originally a placeholder idea, but I became instantly fond of them, and I'm always pleased when they reveal some pattern that is less obvious in full context, like the way this album was maybe not entirely sequenced for artistic effect:

Finding songs by matching playlist-title words is a bad method, but bad methods should at least be easy. In Curio: power ballads.matching playlists.matches /track=tracks:count>=10 #rank=count,(.track.popularity) /artist=(.track.artists:@1).(.of:@1) #rank .track open.spotify.com/playlist/1sH...

In today's big Curio news, I fixed a bug in a feature that I've never explained, and which might be too specific to my own habits to be useful even if I did. But I use it once a week, and I broke it between last week and this week, and now it's fixed again.

My favorite kind of feature development: Last night I added Play buttons to the related-artist page in Curio. This morning I woke up realizing that they would be useful in all the other artist pages, too. And when I went to add them to the others, I discovered that I already had.

I added Play buttons to the related-artist view.

Somebody needs to build a system for collective ongoing maintenance of genre definitions, and probably that somebody will be me, eventually. But in the meantime, as a small token of possibility in a time of loss, I added three missing genres because I needed them. everynoise.com/nrbg.html?ge...

Spotify seems to be quietly removing genres from the API now. I'm going to wait and see where this goes before I change the everynoise.com/research.cgi connections. NRbG is not affected.

It's more Unraveled than Wrapped, but here's a tour of the things you can do with your Spotify extended streaming history if you request it and load it into Curio: www.furia.com/log/498

NOW you can go to www.spotify.com/us/account/p... and request your Extended Streaming History (scroll down to "Download your data", check the box on the right) for data fun in Curio.

Seems like @everynoise.bsky.social ought to resolve to @everynoise.com after I switched the handle. Can I make it do so, @bsky.app?