MusicIP Mixer 1.9 Beta
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.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:13 am
While I use the forums a lot and find them excellent for asking and answering questions about MusicIP I prefer the blog for announcements about new features, or examples of how to do something. For me the big advantage of the blog is that I have it in my Google Reader so anything new here just appears automatically and I do not have to hunt through the forum to find new content. Plus the blog is pretty low volume, too low recently
, compared to the forum.
Anyway, I am really looking forward to trying 1.9 beta out when it is available.
May 5th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Great to hear about these changes and looking forward to 1.9 with high expectations.
A brief thought about this blog though. Commercial blogging is about creating a relationship with your customers (primarily). It’s about developing trust and understanding so that you have “some money in the bank” when things go a bit wrong, which they inevitably do from time to time in any company.
So I would therefore suggest to not think of this blog as being a place just to make announcements of features and usable things, but rather to use it to keep the name of MIP in customers minds’ through constantly keeping their feed readers fed, to offer insights into the challenges in the kind of work you do, to open up some problems to your audience for wider consultation and to show the fuller human side of MIP. Show us your company culture in between the lines. In short, make the challenges you face transparent to your customers so we feel even more part of this work.
Other companies have won a lot from this approach, from GM and Sun to Microsoft. Honestly and openness is hard currency in the “social media” world, so you should work this blog much harder.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Please give us more info on the blog… It’s a lot more convenient and faster to look up…
May 16th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Well, we’ll see what we can do. I have one nifty feature to unveil next week, and then… hmm… stay tuned to find out.