In my previous Mixer post, I showed how to use the mip protocol to connect the mixer to different search engines. In this post, I’d like to follow up on a promise I made there, and show how you can use the mixer to share playlists on a friendly website called FIQL. This is one way to pass around virtual mix tapes like I talked about in my first Mixer post.

If you’ve never seen the FIQL website, give it a look - I’ll still be here when you get back. You can see some playlists I’ve posted there (which will lead into my next post… sneaky huh?) Another nifty playlist sharing site is Webjay, and there’s plenty others too. For now, though, I’m going to focus on FIQL, because we’ve got some tricks I’d like to show you, thanks in part to some help from the FIQL guys in creating an API to work with their site. Note that the system has been evolving a bit, so you should really be using the most recent Windows release (1.7.1) if you want to follow along at home.

Ok, let’s start with the easy bit. If you’ve created that perfect mix, which you just have to share with everybody, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a FIQL account. Pretty simple, standard stuff. Next, you can use their tools to fill out forms, add links, and go through a bunch of steps to get it posted. It’s not super hard, but it’s not as easy as right-clicking on the playlist in MusicIP Mixer and selecting Post to FIQL. After any necessary logins, you’ll be at the same page, with everything already filled out. You’ll probably want to type in a more detailed description at the bottom explaining why your playlist is so cool, and then you’re done.

Now we get to the good stuff. The flipside of uploading playlists is downloading playlists. If you just want people to see your playlist, you can send them a link to the page where it’s hosted. And the FIQL guys can send your playlist to Napster or Rhapsody if they can match your songs to ones on those services. But if other people want to download your playlist into their own collection, they can use the FIQL URL to import it directly into MusicIP Mixer. This is almost as easy as uploading playlists - just use the File/Import Playlist menu, paste in the FIQL URL, and you’re good to go.

Something pretty cool happens next. The songs from your playlist get mapped to the same songs in my collection. So I can actually listen to your playlist from my own collection. Wait a minute…, you’re thinking, that’s pretty sweet I agree. But you probably don’t have all the same songs I do, so that’s not gonna work. Busted! That’s a good point - what’s a poor music junkie to do? Well, in the mixer, we do this:

For any song we recognize (which covers about 98% of the music we see), we can replace the song from your playlist with the closest match from your friend’s collection. That way they can get the gist or flow of your playlist even if they don’t have all the songs. (Songs we know nothing about will get dropped - if you analyzed your tracks first, though, that won’t be a problem.) In fact, if they like the modified playlist enough, they might even want to post it themselves. In this way, a playlist could move around the web, from colllection to collection, assuming a distinctive shape based on the collection in which it was currently residing. Hmmm… perhaps I’m anthromorphizing a bit too much.A few minor points to note: Playlists imported from FIQL show up with a different icon in the mixer, so they’re easy to spot. When you select one of these playlists, the album artwork viewer will show the avatar of the person who originally posted it to FIQL. You can right-click on the playlist to get links back to the original poster’s member info, or the original playlist, so you can post comments there.

For my money, we can make this process one step easier - and we do that with our old friend the mip protocol. In the previous post we saw mip:addsearch URLs. Now, I’d like to introduce the mip:import URL. It comes in two flavors:

Once you have your playlist expressed in a mip:import URL, you can just put that on your website, email or chat client, and your friends can just click on the URL to instantiate your playlist in their collection with no extra steps. How’s that for easy?

What if your friends don’t have MusicIP Mixer… the links won’t work for them right? That’s true, you’ll have to hook them up. I have some extra links I can share if you’re interested to make this a little bit more user friendly. But this post is already getting rather long, and I really want to make one last excuse to say cool. Therefore, I’m bringing out the black box for scary technical stuff…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 8:56 am and is filed under MusicIP Mixer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.