Impressively smart playlist generation: MusicIP Mixer
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:
- Click on Library at the top of the source window (as per iTunes) to access the music library
- Select a song as a seed from which to create the mix
- Optionally, set criteria e.g. length of mix, file size of mix or number of tracks
- Click the Mix button (illustrated with stars) at the top left of the window to create the desired mix
- To save the mix, right-click in the Source pane, choose New Playlist, select the tracks in the mix and drag them into the new playlist
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
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:58 pm
nice. i’ll check this out i think; i’ve oft thought there’s a need for something to sort of ’semi randomise’ a music library. itunes’ randomness doesn’t seem particularly random - i do remember downloading a randomise plug-in that sort of did the trick, but this is clearly a different kettle of fish (or even peter gabriel, ahem) must say this is a really interesting blog, colin….nice balance between the technical and, er philosphical, for want of a better word. keep it up!
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Thanks Peter, glad you like the site. The next big step is to develop an audience! Hope to see you round these parts again and in the flesh, so to speak.
March 25th, 2007 at 10:57 am
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