The above is one of a series of scans of a delightfully weathered CD sold off by my local library. It’s published over on my personal blog, A Personal Miscellany.
I have a confession. Despite my interest in new ways to interact with music as evidenced by this blog you’re reading, I never managed to get enthused by iTunes’ random and smart playlist capabilities. Two things stopped me: I could never be bothered to rate individual tracks and, more importantly, I’m an old-fashioned album sort of person. I like the cohesion and sense of flow that a collection of music deliberately sequenced by an artist/group/DJ conveys. The few times I’ve tried the various flavours of shuffle facilitated by iTunes or my iPod have resulted in an all too disparate musical experience.
Yet here I am listening to a really good, software generated playlist courtesy of MusicIP Mixer, a freeware smart playlist generator. The seed track I chose for my first playlist was Erik Satie’s Fantaisie-Valse. In next to no time, MusicIP Mixer displayed its recommended playlist based upon my preference for a duration of 40 minutes and a lack of artist repetition within 10 songs. Thus, the Satie piece was succeeded by a gentle Krautrock song by Harmonia, a fragment of Steve Reich’s multimedia opera Three Tales, a soundtrack piece by Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore, Kate Bush’s domestic paean Mrs Bartolozzi, a Ligeti piece, Brian Eno’s Another Green World, one of Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives, a piano-led song by Nuyorican Soul, Bach’s first Brandenburg, (surprisingly) Charley Patton’s Hammer Blues and another Satie piece to finish up. All of this music was accessed from my iTunes library and each piece flowed into the next with admirable ease. I would never in a million years have made such a compilation, but am very happy with what it has provided. I’m a convert.
If you’re ready to grab MusicIP Mixer now just skip to the end of the post for the download link.
Here’s a little more detail for those interested. After downloading, the program asks to analyse your music library and pops up a progress window:
Although it threatened to take 45 hours to complete the analysis of my 44GB library, it in fact finished up in about an hour. As can be seen from the screenshot at the beginning of this post, the interface isn’t very different from iTunes, but nor is it exactly the same. For one thing the music controls are tucked into the bottom right hand corner. This seems to be because MusicIP Mixer is intended to exist as much as an adjunct to iTunes as a standalone player in its own right. Once a new mix has been created, a right-click option allows the user to ‘copy playlist to iTunes’. This feature didn’t initially work, but quitting and restarting iTunes sorted the problem out.
The interface itself isn’t entirely intuitive, especially for a new user, and there are no help files available from the Help menu at the top of the screen. However, after a little experimentation, it becomes clear that it’s necessary to:
Apart from the slightly unintuitive interface, MusicIP Mixer declared 806 of my songs unanalyzable and therefore not to be included in any of its mixes. 8% of my library is a bit of a loss and it would be good to know what the reason for their rejection is. Also, although the majority of the mixes have been excellent, it doesn’t always get it right: selecting Kraftwerk’s proto-Techno anthem, Numbers, as a seed prompted MusicIP Mixer to sequence Serge Gainsbourg’s gentle Couleur Cafe followed by Bill Laswell’s stripped-down electronic funk Work Song. Then again, listening back, there is a strange kind of sense to such a choice…
MusicIP Mixer is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple didn’t repeat its behaviour with the previously separate Coverflow and buy it lock, stock and barrel for integration into iTunes.
Download: MusicIP website
Related: Tangerine: BPM playlist analysis
Via: Jon Stahl’s Squeezebox report
This looks potentially interesting for those of us yet to own an iPhone:
Jax, a customizable iPod plug-in that adds music management features and delivers Internet content to iPod nanos, minis, and full-size iPods. Jax features configurable visualizers and the ability to manage lyrics and search libraries by specific phrases and words. It also manages album art and lets users research artists. Jax can also download information from the Internet, such as point-to-point directions, current weather forecasts, stock quotes, movie listings and local gas prices. Likewise, it can load news feeds, e-mails and document, as well as video from YouTube, Google Videos, or QuickTime movies.
Looking a little more closely at the product website however, I wonder whether this will amount to anything more than a ragbag assortment of different freeware functionality - the visualizer and music map recommendation engine are available elsewhere. The proliferation of windows in the screenshot above doesn’t look exactly promising. No definite availability date on the website.
Via: Playlist
Link: Product page
Like many people, I’ve encountered occasional news items about Second Life. For example, I read a while back that BBC Radio One ran a festival there last year. Although I’ve been intrigued by the development and popularity of this virtual world, I’ve never quite got round to setting up an account and travelling there. However, encountering an article entitled Virtual open mic shows in the Hummingbird Café finally prompted me to go ahead and do so. Here’s an example of what piqued my interest:
The Hummingbird Café is one of the most popular destinations for live music in the Second Life community […] With a few taps on his computer keyboard, [club owner] Harlow’s avatar flies through the air and lands comfortably on the stage […] “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big round of applause for our next act: Peter Greenstone from Austin, Texas!” The crowd erupts into a hearty ovation that sounds as raucous as any crowd you’d hear at a major concert venue. But in reality we know that around the world the hundred or so patrons of the Hummingbird Café have just typed the word “clap” on their keyboards from the comfort of their living rooms.
Thus was the entity known as MusicInterfaces Miles born (when creating your avatar, you can choose any first name, but the list of available surnames is predetermined - I’m a big Miles Davis fan…). After downloading the Second Life client (61mb for the Mac version), and typing in a login and password, I found myself in the orientation centre. This consists of four little islands where you pick up the basic skills necessary to navigate and communicate in Second Life.
At time of writing I’m still there. I’ve managed to stop looking like a transvestite trucker - that’s me pictured above (yes, I realise I’ve opted for a very unimaginative look…) I’ve learnt to fly, drive and gesture, but clearly there’s some more stuff to learn as I haven’t yet figured out how to leave the centre! When I manage that, I’ll go in search of the Hummingbird Cafe and, if successful, some other music venues.
Link: Second Life
The following excerpts indicate the remarkable lengths to which the record industry has gone to respond to the unpopularity of DRM, as described in a recent NYT article (my italics):
“… the expansion of the online marketplace, coupled with ever-worsening CD sales, is now all but forcing the music companies to tread on ground they once viewed as off limits.”
“Starting this week, Suretone Records, a label distributed by the Universal Music Group, plans to distribute video files featuring popular acts […] on file-sharing networks that the industry has long viewed as illicit bazaars for pirates… the video files will not be wrapped in protective software to limit copying, executives say. But they will also be incomplete: users who download them will see perhaps half the video and will be directed to the label’s own Web site to watch the complete version.”
“RCA Records […] plans to advance its promotional campaign for Avril Lavigne’s new album with the first in a series of short manga — Japanese comic-book episodes … The video clips, which run two to three minutes each, are expected to be released in unprotected form as free podcasts on iTunes, among other outlets. Fans will also be able to use special software, probably offered on a label’s Web site, to take snippets of the episodes and rearrange them, executives said.”
“[Suretone Records’] files are being distributed online in an arrangement with ArtistDirect’s MediaDefender unit, which is better known as a contractor hired by labels to place fake, or decoy, versions of songs or other media files on file-sharing networks to thwart would-be pirates. Before the Suretone video deal, the company had also begun planting fake files containing promotional messages for advertisers like Coca-Cola.”
Link: Music Labels Offer Teasers to Download (NYT)
See also: Engadget overview of reactions to Steve Jobs’ DRM declaration
I’m slowly but surely writing longer capsule reviews and plugging the gaps in my coverage of music recommendation services. I’ve just discovered another site that I like a lot: MusicMap. Why do I like it so much? Because of its simplicity, there’s no signing up, no pressure to make friends, submit data or anything extraneous: just type in an artist and MusicMap presents you with a cloud of names garnered from Last.fm data, those names being larger or smaller depending upon their relevance to the original query. The recommendations are pretty good, but then Last.fm’s service in this area is, in my experience, currently the most accurate. Nicely presented, my only wish would be that the recommendations were linked to the relevant page on Last.fm. Otherwise, colour me happy.
Link: MusicMap
Link: Last.fm
Via: All Along the Watchtower
In the short span of days since my last post about Last.fm’s concert notification functionality, there have been further developments (either that or I was terribly unobservant last time!). Now, for certain listings, there’s a little icon beside the date of the concert which indicates whether it’s possible to purchase a ticket for the event via a Last.fm affiliate. This is the last link in the chain - users can be notified of a gig and purchase tickets relatively seamlessly without having to Google for a ticket agency. I say relatively seamlessly because the purchasing process isn’t integrated directly into the page (a little Ajax magic wouldn’t have gone amiss here), rather the user has to select a link on the concert details page which pops open another window for the ticket vendor’s website - in the case of the Keane link I clicked, I was taken to a ‘See’ page that listed all of Keane’s concerts rather than the exact one that I’d chosen via Last.fm. Also, at the top left of the See page is a ‘return to last.fm’ box, but this returned me to my dashboard page, not the event page I’d departed from. Not a big deal, but not quite 100% flow either. I’d expect that such details will be sorted out in time though. Also, at this early stage, there aren’t many listings for which tickets are available. Again, as Last.fm acquires partners, this is bound to improve.
A nice detail I’ve just noted is that events on the Event Recommendation page are subtly colour-coded into five categories: ‘gig you’re attending’, ‘recommended gig’, ‘festival you’re attending’, ‘recommended festival’ and ‘friends’ event’. Under a friend’s event, the friend is named along with the number of other Last.fm-registered attendees (the event page shows who these people are). They’ve also added iCal (Apple’s built-in calendar application) notification friends’ and recommended events, alongside the aforementioned RSS feeds. (One more reason for me, one day, to migrate from Entourage.) Now if they could just supply a recording of the gig as a memento and a wirelessly-conveyed hangover cure, I think we’d all be very happy…