Free Candy For Everyone

I buy a lot of music. I can never quite get enough, and walking into a music store can be a dangerous proposition - I’ll frequently leave with a giant stack of music and a lighter wallet. With all that music buying, I tend to listen to them all a time or two, and if they don’t grab me, they quickly become forgotten. This results in a very large music collection with a lot of music that I haven’t really listened to - not enough to really know, at least.

My brother recently pointed me at an application that can help me to find new music in my own library. It’s called MusicIP Mixer. The basic idea is that it has a profile for every song, built by doing some sort of crazy mathematical analysis. Unlike other music services out there that I’ve tried that require users or experts to hand create profiles of each song, this is based purely on an analysis of the music itself.

With this cool data, it makes mixes for you. And it’s so nifty. You can make a mix based on one song, an artist, a collection of songs - it tries to find other songs in your own library that are like the songs you selected (based on crazy mathy formulas, I’m sure), and there you go. You can create “moods”, which you define by selecting some songs. For example, I made an exercise mood with fast paced songs, and then told it to make me a mix based on it. And voila! Lots of upbeat, energetic music to workout to.

I made some mixes to workout to, and some mixes based on my favorite songs to find other songs like them. It pulled up lots of music that I don’t usually listen to, and I got to hear some new-to-me stuff. Very neat.

My second method of finding “new” music was way simpler. It was to just make a smart playlist in iTunes. The rules? Select songs that I hadn’t listened to in the last two months, with a rating greater than 1 star. It’s been a pretty great way to listen to the less fortunate songs that haven’t been getting my attention.

I haven’t “discovered” anything really unexpected, but have found some old songs that haven’t made it into rotation recently, and got to hear some songs that might just earn a place on my faves list someday.

Wow, this is so cool. iConcertCal is a plugin for iTunes that automagically finds upcoming local concerts for musicians in your library. It displays them all in a calender, using the visualizer. That’s so awesome!

Here’s what I got for the month of February:

Of course, it shows all concerts from everyone in your library. So maybe I have a couple random songs here or there that will now show up on this calendar. But it’s still way better than most event calendars where you really have no interest in 90% of the things on it. This is way more awesome!

I’ve talked about different music discovery sites, but somehow I neglected to mention Pandora. I first heard about it when it was in beta in August of 2005. At the time I was much enamored of Last.fm/Audioscrobbler (which I still like for it’s music tracking capabilities, I love being able to see charts of my most listened to songs, artists, etc.) and wasn’t as into Pandora. Both offer streaming music stations, but I wanted more control over what I was listening to than Pandora provided. You could make a music station and specify a few artists or songs that you wanted to hear more like, then it would stream you songs. I found it didn’t do a very good job of providing me with music I actually wanted to listen to.

While, I was catching up on my backlog of blog reading today and there was a post about Pandora at Zatz Not Funny so I decided to go see how it’s changed in the year+ since I last looked. I started up a radio station I’d created last year and to my surprise, I liked almost everything it played. I knew maybe a third of the songs they were playing, but of the rest I found many pleasant surprises of people I’d never heard of but where quite excellent.

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EEP! Say it ain’t so! NY Times

Thoughts later…

Last week my brother sent me an invite to try out MusicStrands which is yet another music website like Last.fm. I’ve been playing with it, because I love these sorts of things.

Like last.fm, you download something that can hook into iTunes (or Windows Media Player) and watch what you’re listening to. Unlike last.fm, this something is a standalone application that must be launched independently of iTunes. Well, hmm. That’s not as convenient. Though when you launch it, it will launch iTunes for you, so it’s still only one click to open. But still…

So amusingly, I had been tossing the idea of writing a program like MusicStrands for the last few months. Of course, I don’t really tend to program in my spare time, so nothing came of it. But there you go, someone did it for me. The main thing I was interested in doing was letting you tag your music collection (and let you do it locally, not on someone else’s website like last.fm does) and view a tag cloud of the whole thing. I wanted to bake it into iTunes so you could somehow just attach those tags to your existing collection.

MusicStrands lets you do this. Like I said, it is a second window open while running iTunes. Here’s a shot of the thing.

Those tags are all tags given by anyone to the song (I only tagged about 3 songs as a test. It’s a lot of work). You can see the complete set of tags for you collection (in a sadly un-resizeable window, so I wasn’t able to see all my tags at once). Here’s the tags that other people have given songs in my collection.

That’s kinda neat. So the goal of MusicStrands seems to be to suggest music to you. Unlike last.fm, it isn’t a radio station. You can’t stream music from their site, you can only listen to your own music. Their idea seems to be to suggest other songs you might like based on what you have and are listening to (you can see suggestions in the first screenshot above) and provide an easy link to purchase it. Eh. That’s ok, but I’m not gonna use it. Oh, and right in the recommendation window there’s a play button to hear a sample of the song. If you hit it, they pause your current song, play the clip, and restart your music when the clip is done. That is very smooth. But still not gonna necessarily make me go out and buy stuff through their links.

A bit more useful to me is their playlist builder. You can use their app to make a playlist and specify things like: give me a playlist with songs like this track, like this artist, with similar tags, tracks released before or after a year… It’s very cool. I’m not sure how they’re defining what “similar tracks” are right now, I’m thinking it might have something to do with their playlist feature. You can upload a playlist and even see on their website what playlists a song appears with, here’s an example. I’m guessing they use this to determine similar tracks, because I have some songs that it tells me it doesn’t have any info on yet (really new or esoteric songs that no one else has, I guess).

Overall, it’s another nifty toy I’ll poke at for a while. It let’s me do neat things like embed charts on my website if I want. But do I really want you all to know what I’m listening to? We all have our dirty little secrets. I don’t need everyone to know that I secretly like Kelly Clarkson! Oops. The secrets out. But darn, Breakaway is a fun album, ok? Turns out the chart is lines and lines of code which can’t be stuck into a post, so that won’t be happening right here. Maybe you’ll see it in the sidebar soon. I just might give it a go.