Music Magic!

November 10, 2004

Yeah, I am in the grip of a consumerist mood for some reason.

I just wanted to share with you a fun program called “MusicMagic Mixer”:http://music.predixis.com/. It’s like “MoodLogic”:http://www.moodlogic.com/ with -three- two significant differences:

# MusicMagic works, whereas MoodLogic does not.
# The developers of MusicMagic Maker are still around, whereas MoodLogic staff appears to have been whisked mysteriously off-planet by aliens.
# -MusicMagic Mixer doesn’t work through the TiVo (_sniff_).- [Yes it does! See the update below...]

MoodLogic and MusicMagic Mixer both try to automate the creation of playlists. The idea is, you pick a song and the program tries to find other songs in your library that are similar.

MoodLogic relies on a database of listener-reported song profiles, which would rock if you’re wanted a thematic-based playlist except for the fact that MoodLogic does not allow that fine a control over the automated mixing. Also, Moodlogic is highly _genre_ dependant. You can’t pick a Moby song, for example, and get anything but electronica in the mix. Which is _lame_.

MusicMagic Mixer takes a little longer to set up, but it works on an acoustic analysis of each track — so you get mixes of songs that sound similar. Thematically you might get some strangness — but if you’re building a mix based on lyrical content, then you’re probably better off doing it manually anyway.

I’ve only built a few playlists with MusicMagic Mixer so far, but the results are much superior. Not being limited to a genre is a massive improvement.

Here are a couple of sample mixes.

*Root Song: Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf”*

At maximum variety, _MoodLogic suggests:_
|Pale Shelter|Tears for Fears|
|The Reflex|Duran Duran|
|Union of the Snake|Duran Duran|
|A View to a Kill|Duran Duran|
|New Moon on Monday|Duran Duran|
|Wild Boys|Duran Duran|
|Sowing the Seeds of Love|Tears for Fears|
|Everybody Wants to Rule the World|Tears for Fears|
|Girls on Film|Duran Duran|
|Planet Earth|Duran Duran|
|Serious|Duran Duran|
|Is there Something I Should Know|Duran Duran|
|Say Say Say|Paul McCartney|

At low-to-moderate variety, _MusicMagic Mixer suggests:_
|Coming Up|Paul McCartney|
|Jonestown|Concrete Blonde|
|When Love Comes to Town|U2|
|What a Day That Was|Talking Heads|
|Once In a Lifetime|Talking Heads|
|Laid So Low (Tears Roll Down)|Tears for Fears|
|Girls on Film|Duran Duran|
|Forget Me Nots|Patrice Rushen|
|Oddfellows Local 151|REM|
|Wizard of Finance|Parliament|
|Diving to be Deeper|Sinéad Lohan|
|Car Wash|Rose Royce|
|Homespun|Grant Lee Buffalo|
|The Reflex|Duran Duran|
|Kissability|Sonic Youth|

Notice that MusicMagic Mixer is bold enough to try to mix Paul McCartney with Sonic Youth, whereas MoodLogic has pretty much recreated the Duran Duran “greatest hits” album along with a few “Tears For Fears Pretend to Be Duran Duran” tracks. Bleeeeaaagh!

I am sure that both would perform much better if I had ten times as many MP3s on my hard drive as I do, but that MusicMagic Mixer can perform so well with only 1,908 tracks to choose from is pretty impressive!

Now, if only they could get MusicMagic Mixer to talk to my TiVo the way MoodLogic does.

*Update:* Ask and ye shall receive. In the comments Wendell Hicken says the new version of MMM — about to come out of beta — supports TiVo. If you want to try this version out, email *music at predixis dot com* to get the download link.

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