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

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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…

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It’s been a while since I last listened to Ornithology by Charlie Parker, but that’s what I’m doing as I write this post. I don’t own a copy, but on impulse I typed the artist’s name into Seeqpod’s search box, hit the button and the search engine came up with it along with 11 other songs. As it finds relevant songs, it displays them in a list on the left of the page (see screenshot above), clicking the green arrow adds it to your playlist. Registering allows you to save your list to play again another time, provided you register.

A search for Ornette Coleman turned up only five results, two of which provided no track details apart from the artist’s name (these two came from the otherwise brilliantly written free jazz blog Destination Out). Searching for Madonna turned up 95 results although a significant proportion of them were for Madonna Over Yorkshire which is either a t-shirt manufacturer or/and some kind of music act… such uncertainties might be cleared up by clicking the Artist Info link beside the artist’s name on the playlist. This takes you to a Seeqpod page that aggregates links under categories for Videos, Blogs, MySpace, Wikipedia, Lyrics, Buy, Tour Dates and Ringtones.

Perhaps more interestingly, The Pod Crawler tab provides a scrolling, continually updated, list of whatever music the search engine finds as it grazes the web. As with the specified artist search, artists can be added to the playlist to save/play later. As an indication of the variety of material Seeqpod turns up, within the space of a couple of minutes I’d assembled a playlist containing Love, Solex, Derek Bailey, Public Enemy, Don Quixote (from the Gutenberg archive), Incredible Bongo Band, Frank Zappa, Fu Schnickens, Joanna Newsom, Rimsky Korsakov and Craig David…

As a front end to a search engine with a specific focus, Seeqpod is impressively intuitive to use. It could do with some spit and polish on its graphic design to improve its credibility, but it’s a great way to try out an artist before buying, rediscover old favourites or simply discover new music.

Link: Seeqpod

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I recently posted about iConcertCal, a free iTunes plug-in that sought to provide notification of concerts based upon the iTunes library. Last night, I was clicking around my Last.fm account and stumbled upon its own concert notification system. Very nice it is too.

It’s very Web 2.0 as all of the concert listings are user-generated. Users can enter concert details and indicate whether they’re attending or on visiting other users’ pages and spotting an already listed gig can join to be displayed as attending. Gigs are displayed in the left sidebar under ‘Events’ of users’ chart pages. Last.fm makes concert recommendations based upon your - and your musical neighbours’ - listening habits. Tick boxes allow users to choose from one or more of the following choices: ‘Events I’m attending’, ‘Friends’ Events’, ‘Recommended Events (based on my profile + location)’ and ‘All Events Near Me’. With all but the last criteria selected, I’m shown an impressive selection of concerts, many of which I wasn’t aware of, but would consider attending (John Cale, Lee Scratch Perry, 4hero, Theatre of Hate, Adrian Sherwood and Manu Dibango to name but a few). There are a few misses - the prospect of seeing The Killers or The Arcade Fire doesn’t interest me at all, but I suspect would a few of my Last.fm registered friends.

I’m also glad to see that since this functionality was first iterated in a very limited fashion, it’s now possible to see past events that you’ve attended and if they’ve been covered in users’ blogs, links are dynamically generated to those reviews.

I’m very happy to note that all of this information is available via RSS feed so I don’t have to keep checking back on the Events page, but can instead see it in my preferred newsreader. Unfortunately, I can’t link to my page for you to look at as you have to be logged in to see it, otherwise the URL defaults to the Last.fm homepage. I do think this is a brilliant addition to Last.fm and really deserves to be promoted much more widely than it currently appears to be. It could really drive traffic to the service. If you don’t already have a Last.fm account - now’s the time!

Link: Last.fm

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iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

iConcertCal is a bit of a clumsy name, but I like the implementation. The idea of a gig notification website was something a friend and I did a little preparatory work on a few months ago. It’s a distinct gap in the market - how many times have you discovered too late that a band was playing in your local area, but the concert is sold out or it took place two days ago? How great would it be if you could visit one easy to use website, select the bands whose gigs you want to be notified of, submit your email address and forget about the whole thing until you receive an email saying that band X have announced they’re visiting your town in two months’ time and you can ‘buy your tickets by clicking on this link’. After some initial research, it turned out this wasn’t exactly an original idea and ultimately, it looked like too much work so we shelved it. None of the sites we looked at though, were as easy to use as our concept which was built around a set of expanding choices in an Ajax interface that aspired to the simplicity of the Google homepage.

These people (their About page states “We are not a company and this is not a commercial venture. We are just two grad students in electrical engineering. We wrote this plug-in in our spare time because we were tired of missing concerts for our favorite bands and we figured other people probably are too” - my hats off to them!) have taken an attractively different approach by integrating their interface into iTunes and using iTunes’ library as a basis on which to search the web for relevant listings. Very nice. Unfortunately it doesn’t list a single upcoming concert. I know I have fairly obscure music tastes, but a quick read of the FAQ revealed that it doesn’t do listings outside the US which is a great shame. Fingers crossed that the service can be extended.

Link: iConcertCal site
Via: MacUser

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“Tangerine lets you easily create playlists with upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It does that by analyzing the BPM and beat intensity of the songs in your iTunes library.”

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