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.
5 Responses to “Discovering Music”
I highly recommend WOXY.com. It’s a great indie radio station that only webcasts now. Streaming audio at a pretty decent quality. I hear great music all the time (or I did before my company’s web-blocker grokked them). At any rate I know it isn’t necessarily your taste in music, more of an indie rock/hipster type station, but you might want to give it a try. They also have a great vintage channel (and by vintage I mean indie rock from the 80’s and 90’s). Thanks for the MusicIP mixer though. I haven’t played with it enough, but it looks promising.
that’s really cool! I made a mix from Alter Ego’s ‘Rocker Track’ and it was ace! Had to cut some repeated artists but aside from that it works very well. I love shiny new toys me
Dan - I think you can actually set the preferences on how often it’ll repeat an artist. You set something like the number of songs required between songs of that artist. So if you bump it up to 20 or something, no repeats in a short mix!
I listen to my iPod about 10 hours a week while commuting. Here’s my roadmix. It’s a series of smart playlists. First make a smart playlists with each of the following:
- 20 5 star songs, selected at random
- 15 4 star songs, selected at random
- 10 3 star songs, selected at random
- 5 2 star songs, selected at random
- 20 songs, most recently added
- 20 songs, least recently played
- 20 songs, unrated, selected by least recently played
There are other little touches…you have to make sure you only select music…I have lots of audiobooks on my iPod, but you get the general idea.
Then you make a master playlist by selecting all the above playlists and munging them together. I end up with about 12 hours of music, a nice mix of old favorites and new stuff, and things that I haven’t listened to for a long time.
If something starts coming up too often you just downgrade it a star while you are listening. If you really don’t want to hear something you put it at one star…and then it only comes up when you haven’t listened to it for a LONG time.
Nice! I actually do something like that. I have a playlist for Top Rated - everything with 4 or 5 stars, Most Listened To (gotta hear those songs I’m addicted to over and over), the one I mentioned above for Random Unplayed, and then one other playlist with songs I hand pick (I listen to music from my iPod at work all day, so I need a lot of choice).