Thursday, July 10, 2008

Summer Music Mix


Mixwit


wKHM has a little goody for the listeners today---a mix I totally love of 1970's-ish soul/R&B love songs. Hope you enjoy---there are a couple of recent tracks here but I like them so much because they are such faithful tributes to that period. Gotta love Corinne Bailey Rae. For some reason, these kinds of songs remind me of long summer days as a 10 - 13 year old at the community pool, admiring my first-ever crush --- Romeo Lopez. C'mon---how many girls kissed Romeo their very first time? Its some memorable stuff!

We know: the girl is a geek
its OK. Did you all know there are about a zillion (more or less) social/music networking/mashup applications on the web? True. Some extremely cool stuff: Some like MixWit.com and Muxtape.com provide cool tools for music fans to organize and share their tunes with others on the web, others, like iLike and Pandora are intended to get a feel for your musical tastes by analyzing your libraries and designated favorites and then suggest the music of other members that might have appeal. I especially iLike the feature where its possible to review the track listings of "friends" playlists---mixtapes, as it were.

Frankly, I don't think Pandora has lived up to the promise of its colossal underpinnings, The Music Genome Project (MGP). Folks who are looking to find previously overlooked or new music like things they already know may enjoy it more than I---as for me, I'm looking also for a way to dig deep in my own collection which is huge and I forget about some really good stuff. ILike comes very close when users attach its widget to their iTunes or WMP libraries by leveraging information about the collection compared to the track currently in play---its sometimes a good place to begin grabbing a large set of music you might want to pare down into something a bit more directed... its a fairly lean and clean piece of code and I've never been inconvenienced by its running continuously against my library---not many of these apps can claim as much....

So that's the root of my current quest: find, or build if I must, a really good playlist generator. The MGP has all the data, and intellectual property, that would be needed for the foundation: really detailed cataloging of hundreds of musical attributes per song.... almost all of 'em . Embellishing and combining the best features of Pandora, iLike, iTunes and developing some controls that allow specification of the human factors ("i want to work out", "i'm not feeling adventurous but I want to rock", "i don't want to be reminded of my old boyfriend", etc) *I think* would closely approach building the perfect beast.

Anybody seen that out there? If not, how about making a mix for me?

1 comment:

jill said...

Have you tried last.fm? It has the social networking stuff, as well as a large catalog and pretty good "I want stuff like" matches.