Uncategorized
Doubly Impressed
I've been playing around with MusicIP Mixer based on Chris' recommendation. After getting through the "Oh my word, this is sucking up all the processing power of this monstrous computer" while it indexes and "validates" your music, it does a really interesting job, finding similar songs across all sorts of genres, albums, artists. In trying to share this wonderful news with the world, I exported one of the playlists, but iTunes just dumps it out as a tab-delimited text file. There's not much I can do with a file like that on this machine; because Google Docs has gotten so good, I haven't bothered to dig out a copy of MS Office. So I threw it into Google Spreadsheets to see what would happen. Bastards auto-magically imported it into a perfectly formatted spreadsheet without that interim Excel step where you do the machine's job and say what it's delineated with, if there are headings, etc.
Unlike Google, MusicIP isn't perfect yet. It brings in more of the exact same artist/ album than I'd like. It has a slight case of feature-itis: I don't need to play the songs in it, I don't need another MP3 tagging solution (and I'm guessing most of the target audience already has an incredibly anal tagging plan* in place). And I'd like to be able to pass it multiple songs from different artists, but that's just me thinking as a person. How the hell does the machine know what x songs have it common? That's what it's supposed to be doing for me. Watch it take over my sonic life.
* Apologies to anyone with a non-music incredible anal tagging plan.
Discussion
5 comments for “Doubly Impressed”
Post a comment
Another complaint: it seems to feel, like ketchup, G. Love & Special Sauce goes with everything. I disagree.
To disable multiple songs from the same artist, use the “Restrict duplicate artists in mix” option.
To pass multiple songs from different artists, you can just use standard list multi-selection keystrokes. Or sometimes it’s easier to just make a playlist, drop the songs there, then select them all and press the mix button.
There’s tons of options, which isn’t always a good thing, but does give some nice flexibility once you figure them out.
As to Tom’s comment, you can always use constraints, modifiers, or filters to tweak how the output comes out. I can provide more info if interested.
Disclaimer: In case it isn’t clear, I work for MusicIP.
Wow, thanks Wendell. I’m going to assume you have some Google alert set up and don’t just trawl the entire Internet. Obviously much of the problem with the software is the fact I’m an ignorant yutz who starts playing with stuff without ever bothering to read anything.
I just dug into the options and found some really nice tweaks along with your suggestions. I’d definitely take any more info you’d care to provide.
I haven’t dug as deep into the options, but I’ve been searching my collection for “wtf” moments, and I just found my best one yet: it made a mix that starts with “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone, goes through Xiu Xiu, The Jam, William Parker, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” and the Max Tundra remix of Ruby’s “Lilypad” - and ends with … “Bright Mississippi” by Thelonious Monk. If a kid from Williamsburg had made this mix, I’d dock him for the bad joke with the song titles. But from a computer? Awesome.
I was wondering if the titles get figured into the fingerprint: I had one mix based on a song pull in the acoustic version of the same song, which is either impressive audio analysis or looking for similar words.