In this preview, I’m going to discuss some of the new data which the 1.9 mixer makes available, and show a few of the ways to use it. For this post, I’ll focus on some new keywords which have been added to the mixer vocabulary.

Reviewing Expressions

As a basic review, the mixer lets you use expressions in a variety of contexts, which can provide powerful tools for working with your music collection. These expressions can include references to basic metadata already in your file, like artist, title, or path. If you enable Power Search from the preferences dialog, you can enter an expression into the search bar with a preceding question mark, to do a power search, like this:

?seconds > 180

This will show all songs over 3 minutes.

Another context for expressions is adding columns to the song view in order to show data which otherwise might not be visible. For example, you might want to show how many channels your audio files have (1 for mono, or 2 for stereo). Normally this is not exposed in the user interface, but you can add it with the new channels keyword. To do this, simply edit the powerwords.txt file in your installation directory (copy examplewords.txt to powerwords.txt if you don’t already have one), and add a Power Column, like this:

[Channels] channels

The word inside brackets is the title which will show up in the song list, and the rest of the line is any expression (in this case, a single word, but it could just as well be bytes / seconds or any other expression). If you want the column to sort numerically, place a # symbol after the closing bracket. If you want to format a number as a date, place an @ symbol after the closing bracket.

For completeness, you can also use expressions inside patterns. In this case, just use the %{ } syntax, like this:

%{seconds}

This lets you access any available data when updating metadata or constructing paths.

New Keywords

Now that we’ve seen how powerful expressions can be, what new options are exposed in version 1.9? We’ve already seen the channels keyword above. Four more new words are missingname, missingartist, missingalbum, and missinggenre. Normally, if your files are missing metadata for artist, album, genre, or title, then the mixer provides a default value like “Miscellaneous” or “Various Artists”. If you want to find out whether a file is actually missing the metadata, or if it simply had one of those default values, you can use the associated keyword to find the relevant songs.

The most useful new keywords come from an improved connection between the mixer and MusicDNS. The central database behind MusicDNS has grown to over a billion rows of anonymous data, which gives us a lot of information about what music is popular, where it’s popular, and how it’s tagged. Additionally, as the data in MusicDNS is connected to MusicBrainz, we have access to richer metadata about artists. Version 1.9 includes the following new keywords (these are case insensitive):

Note that the above data depends on MusicDNS being able to identify your music, and connect it to our main database.

One quick example will show just how cool this feature can be. In this case, I have a library with two songs by “Nancy Wilson”. However there are two Nancy Wilsons - one is the jazz singer, and the other is a member of the rock band Heart. I’ll create a Power Column using artistBegin, like this:

[Artist Begin]# artistBegin

Now, in my songs list, I get the following image:

The extremely cool feature here, is that the mixer knows that the two songs are by different Nancy Wilsons, and provides the correct date in each case!

Final Words

You can also use expressions to power constraints and modifiers, which let you make your own rules for customizing playlists. Tomorrow we’ll continue our exploration of the new data available in the mixer by looking at the upgraded features available with recipes.

If you’ve used the mixer for awhile and have a premium key, you’re probably already aware that there are lots of ways to make mixes besides just selecting a song and pressing the mix button. For instance, you can create waypoint mixes, spiced playlists, or morph existing collections of songs. With version 1.9, we’ve added a new option: freestyle mixes.

A freestyle mix will take your seed selection, like a regular mix, and use that as the starting point to create a new mix. However, after each new song is added, that new song will become the seed as the mix progresses. In this way, the playlist will drift around your collection, stopping for a while here and there before moving into another section. (Particularly astuste observers may note that this is in some ways similar to a smooth shuffle throughout your collection.)

To create a freestyle mix, select your seed like usual, then choose the Power Tools/Freestyle Mix menu. All the usual options work, including playlist size, filters, and recipes.

Tips For Creating Freestyle Mixes

The existing tips page provides a bunch of good ideas for tweaking your mixes, but a few issues commonly show up when initially playing with freestyle mixes in particular.

Too Much Repetition - A freestyle mix will wander around your collection, but if it hits an area dominated by a single artist, you may get a “hot streak” of songs by that artist. In order to tame this beast, you’ll probably want to ue the “Restrict duplicate artists in a mix” option. Set this to at least one or two to help shake things up (unless you are, for instance, making a freestyle mix of just the songs by a single artist).

Too Much Variety - This is the flip side of the previous problem. If you start with your entire collection, you might very well go from classical, to new age, to jazz, to pop, to rock, and end up in metal. If that’s what you’re looking for, great! Otherwise, you might want to create a filter to put some boundary conditions on what sort of music is allowed for a specific freestyle mix. In this way, you can still provide some rough context (all rock songs, or all songs from the 80’s). Just right-click in your library, select New Filter, and choose the conditions which you are interested in. Select the filter, then choose your seed and select freestyle mix from the Power Tools menu.

If you are using a filter, you might not care too much which seed you start out with. If you want to just randomly pick a seed, one easy way is to select All Genres and All Artists, then shuffle the results, and use whatever’s at the top as your seed.

One last note: you can make multi-seed freestyle mixes - in this case, each seed forms its own freestlye mix, and the results are woven together. If this gets too trippy, you might want to consider smooth shuffling the results in order to get some reasonable structure back into your playlist.

Tomorrow, we’ll start looking at some of the new data exposed in MusicIP Mixer 1.9.

Over the next week, I’m going to describe some of the changes which are being introduced in the latest update to MusicIP Mixer. First, a few brief words about this blog - as you may have noticed, we haven’t been updating this much. Our focus has been on creating a lot of back-end infrastructure and support, and that doesn’t lead to a lot of interesting blog posts. Also, with the forums, we have an easy way to interact more directly with our users. However, with the 1.9 beta release, I thought it would be worth a few posts to cover the new features. If you’ve missed the regular blog updates, and would like to see it updated more frequently, leave a comment and let us know. Otherwise, we’ll probably continue to use the forums as our main channel of communication.

As before, the beta will be initially available only on Windows. To download the beta, you will need to create an account on the MusicIP website, and join the beta program.

So, what sorts of goodies can you expect in 1.9? Here are some teasers to whet your appetite.

Optimizations Aplenty

A lot of behind the scenes work has gone into our core engine. The communication to our server has been tightened to be more robust, our use of threads has been improved to accelerate the validation process, and memory usage during validation has been reduced. While working on the web-based version of our engine (which supports millions of songs), we’ve dramatically increased the speed of generating playlists - this shows up mostly noticeably with faster waypoint mixes and morphs.

Improved Mixes

This release includes an update to the core algorithms we use to generate the mixes themselves. This shows up in the artist recommendations (right-click on an artist and choose Similar Artists) as well as in regular mixes. On the preferences dialog, this update is configurable as MyDJ Ranking V2.

Additionally, we’re introducing a ton of new options for the recipes feature. This gives you access to the masses of data available through MusicDNS, to tweak, nudge, and adjust your mixes in a whole variety of new ways. Some of this data is also available through power words, so you can use it in custom searches, columns, and other contexts.

Naturally, we’ve also included a bunch of bug fixes addressing some of the most common issues reported by our users. Full details on the bug fixes and minor changes will be available on the beta forum. Tomorrow, we’ll introduce a brand new way to create mixes.

Every great chef needs a great set of tools to help create the perfect set of recipes. Now that Mixer 1.8 has been out a bit, with the new recipes feature for customizing playlists to your own taste, I’d like to show you one of the tools we use internally to help tweak our own recipes. In order to use this feature, you will need to be comfortable creating and editing recipes.

Note that this is more of a hack, and may not be supported in future versions, especially in this form. It is still a useful tool for now.

First off, one of the main requests we frequently get is being able to tweak playlist options from the main user interface. Although this hack doesn’t cover all of that, it does do some of it. To get this hack to work, you’ll need to pass -playlistcontrols on the command line when you start the mixer. (If you need help passing command line arguments, check out the command line options for MusicIP Mixer).

After starting the mixer with the -playlistcontrols option, you’ll have a new option on the View menu - Show Playlist Controls. Select this, and you’ll have a new window to customize the current recipe. You can keep this window up while you use the mixer, or hide it from the View menu whenever you’re done. Note that you can press the Remix button to update the current mix after you change the recipe.

If you’ve jumped ahead and followed the above instructions before getting this far, you might have noticed the default Playlist Controls window has nothing but a Remix button. In order to get some controls there, you need to build them into your own recipes - the existing recipes do not have any controls. These controls are expressed in your recipes as “inputs”. An input is basically a parameterized setting to a recipe. Most of the places where you have previously used hardcoded values, you can use instead put the text “param foo” to refer to a user-settable option. The name is up to you, foo is just a placeholder name developers like to use.

Inputs can currently be mapped to either checkboxes or sliders. If it’s a checkbox, the parameter will evaluate to 1 if the box is selected, or 0 if it is not. If it’s a slider, you can choose the range of values, and the user will pick one by moving the slider. This way, you can make the values in your recipes customizable on-screen.

A checkbox input looks like this:

<input param=”lock” type=”checkbox” label=”My Option” value=”on”/>

A slider input looks like this:

<input param=”foo” type=”slider” label=”Foo” minLabel=”Low” maxLabel=”High” min=”0″ max=”9″ value=”0″/>

In each case, param is the name of the parameter, type is the type, the labels will show up on the playlist controls, and value is used for default settings. The slider has additional options for the range it allows.

Once you have created and selected a recipe with inputs, you’ll be able to adjust the parameters using the playlist controls. Just adjust the spice, press the Remix button, and see how your playlist changed.

Checkbox controls can be useful in combination with the cond setting of a constraint or modifier to allow you to turn parts of your recipes on and off at will. Sliders might be useful for making the effect of a modifier stronger or weaker.

Here’s a sample recipe to get you started:

<recipe name=”Restrict Mixes by Era”>
<input param=”restrict” type=”checkbox” label=”Restrict mixes from different eras” value=”on”/>
<input param=”numyears” type=”slider” label=”Allow this many years:” minLabel=”1 year” maxLabel=”10 years” min=”1″ max=”10″ value=”5″/>
<constraint cond=”param restrict != 0 and seed year != 0″ cutoff=”0″>abs(year - seed year) &lt; param numyears</constraint>
</recipe>

This recipe defines two inputs, restrict and numyears, which are used in the constraint as parameters. The checkbox can be used to enable or disable the constraint, and the slider controls the range of the condition in the constraint (how many years separated matching songs can be from the original song). The controls for this recipe look like this:

Have fun, and make sure to clean the counter when you’re done.

Ok, here’s a quick tip for the image obsessed (this one should work on Windows and Linux). In the cover art view, on the lower left corner, you see the cover for the current album - this works if you have either a single song selected, or all songs selected are from the same album, or you have an album selected. If you have songs from different albums selected, though, then you don’t get any artwork.

Instead, you’ll get one of several variations of the boring gray box, like the one over on the right.

But…

If you pass -artists on the command line, you can enable artwork for the case where all songs are by the same artist, or you have an artist selected. To do this, you’ll need to create a folder/directory, and then pass that as an argument to the -artists command. So it would look like this:

MusicIPMixer -artists c:\artists

Inside the c:\artists folder, create a subfolder for each artist you have images for. For example, you might make a

c:\artists\u2

folder, and put an image of U2 there. If you put more than one image in the folder, then a random one will be chosen each time it gets displayed. You can usually download artist images from their webpages, or do a Google Image search. To go quickly to the Wikipedia page for an artist, if they have one, you can select the artist and press Ctrl-W.

Here’s an example with several albums from They Might Be Giants selected. The image I’m using for my collection is a promotional one from the TMBG website. Isn’t that more interesting than a dull gray box?

You can learn about other command line options, on the Mixer help pages.

Big news for Rob and his MusicBrainz team (and by team I mean over 300,000 dedicated music fans) today:

MusicBrainz is an online database of music information, maintained by an international
community of dedicated enthusiasts and managed by MetaBrainz, a US-based 501.c.3 non-
profit. By working with MusicBrainz, the BBC plans to underpin its broadcasts with a data-
driven, comprehensive online offering, enabling music discovery through its music websites
and beyond.

Matthew Shorter, Editor, bbc.co.uk/music says: “The BBC is getting closer to its audiences by
letting fans write and tag the information around the music they love. Using the MusicBrainz
database to achieve this confirms the BBC’s commitment to work more closely with external
suppliers and with the wider web community.”

Commitment to music? Check. Benefits music lovers? You betcha. Commerce strangling information/knowledge? Well, of course not.

By George, I think we have a winner.

Since we love holidays so much we’re offering premium mixer keys at 40% off through Memorial day! That, and we want to try out some features of our new shopping cart. Regardless, who doesn’t love a sale. Regularly $19.95, these babies are going for the low low price of $11.97. You can get the discount by following this link (and only by following the link).

The discount is applied when you check out, so don’t worry that the price that shows up in the shopping cart is the full price - just keep clicking and you’ll see the big savings.

Of course, if you have any problems with the shopping cart or checking out, we’d love to hear from you so we can make the user experience as great as possible.

Hope you all have an amazing long weekend filled with fantastic mixes!