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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 9:26 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.