Free Candy For Everyone

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.