Music recommendation and discovery engines are hot stuff but what if you could use some of the same juju to better organize the music you already have in your collection? The newly launched Veenix TuneExplorer for Mac does just that. By looking at qualities the company says include "pitch values, pitch variance, fundamental strengths, and a host of other sonic qualities" - the program acts like Pandora within your music collection. ]]>
It will analyze the music on your computer and build playlists based on "energy" or similarities to a song of your choosing. You can listen to those playlists through the TuneExplorer player or port those playlists over to iTunes.
TuneExplorer was built primarily as a demonstration interface for Veenix's music analysis software, called the SonicLogicEngine. As an interface, it's not terribly exciting (ironic, given where I discovered it) - but hopefully the science behind it can be judged on its own merits. The software goes beyond the BPM analysis of competing services like Tangerine and is ultimately intended for licensing by other, larger services that leverage things like user tags and web data. I liked the results I got from TuneExplorer.
Related work is being done by a number of groups. Sun Labs researcher Paul Lamere, whose Search Inside the Music project purports to combine both tonal and social qualities in organizing music, is one. TheFilter is faster, prettier, more useful and compelling (and available for Windows or Mac) - but I don't know that it really builds similarity- based playlists as accurately. It may be good enough, though. I may use TheFilter more than TuneExplorer, unless TheFilter's playlist recommendations just don't do it for me. TuneExplorer may be the best way to jump in to my collection, create some quick playlists for iTunes and then get back out into iTunes proper, where I'd presumably spend most of my time. On the other hand, TheFilter's recommendations may be "good enough" and made up for by the vastly superior user experience.
Any preference for TheFilter, though, is just speaking as a consumer. The math behind TuneExplorer's SonicLogicEngine may be the more compelling in the long run. That project's consumer facing product is very easy to use and is definitely worth a look.
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