About your data dumps: you're about to get hammered, so please share them in torrent! This would be much better for the thousands of people wanting to bootstrap.

Also, I understand json is very easy to use, etc. But those big dumps cry for a binary format. Or at least add zlib/lzma compression so people don't waste bandwidth on uuencoded binary data in json.

the dumps are in a format that other code understands (fastingest.py)

The code data is compressed using zlib (and then base64'd.) It's all on s3-- in our experience, big data dumps like this get relatively little traffic after the original hype dies down and a torrent doesn't make sense. We're pretty sure amazon can handle the load :)

S3 has bittorrent support built in, it's trivial to enable. But you probably knew that.

Where do we go and ask questions for setting up a mirror for us (VLC/VideoLAN)? Is there an IRC channel?

there's a google group-- that's probably the easiest for now. you can pester alastairp on the musicbrainz IRC channel too (he's our resident musicbrainz/EN liaison)

What's the relationship (if any) or distinction between Echoprint and Chromaprint/Acoustid? http://acoustid.org/

No relationship. Obviously the intent is the same.

Distinction: we handle small pieces of audio from anywhere in the song (20s), ours works "over the air" via microphone, we have a huge database via our content partners.

I'm curious about the hashing algorithm. I read about the planned whitepaper, but some preliminary info would be cool (e.g refs to academic papers that you build on).

it is similar to our closed source FP ENMFP, which you can read about here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.185....

The codegen is very different (instead of relying on echo nest chroma, it does its own onset detection) but the back end side is almost the same.

Awesome stuff.

We are working on something that will benefit both parties (us and you guys) immensely. Is there a way to contact you? No info on your HN profile

if it's echoprint related, write [email protected] -- otherwise [email protected] (i'm [email protected] but i doubt you want to write just me)