Welcome to day five of MusicIP Mixer 1.9 preview week. This will be the last post, for now, about the new features. I’ll wrap up with a few final miscellaneous features.

Two Extra Rules

With the pile of constraints, modifiers, and other rules introduced so far, here are two more which might, at first blush, seem a little odd. The first one simply replaces the acoustic ranking algorithm with a fixed "no bias" level.

<fixed/>

This lets you apply any of the other rules by themselves, without the acoustic data.

The jitter rule lets you introduce some controlled randomness in your mixes. This is similar to the variety slider for regular mixes, but tends to give better results. The full syntax looks like this:

<jitter cond="expr" exp="bool" low="expr" high="expr"/>

The exp option uses an exponential distribution instead of a flat distribution (the default is flat).

The low and high options specify the range of the jitter. The default range is .9 to 1.1. Bigger ranges will produce more randomness.

File/Save As Text

Moving on from recipes, one of the new features is the rather unassuming Save As Text option under the File menu. This takes whatever data is being displayed in the song window, and saves it as tab-delimited text. Just choose the columns you want to have displayed (you can right-click on the column headers to enable and disable columns, drag the columns around to position them, and click to sort them). Then use Save As Text to get a text version of the mix. This can be an easy way to share lists of songs, or post them to blogs. Simple, but convenient.

Nested Filters

Many months ago, we conducted a poll on the forums to see what the most requested feature for 1.9 would be (with some restrictions). The winning selection, with 50% of the votes, was nested filters. So, what’s a nested filter?

Regular filters allow you to create a set of conditions for which songs are currently visible. Some of our users like filters so much that they create a lot of them. In this case, the left hand pane becomes a bit unwieldy with too many entries. In order to clean things up, it’s convenient to be able to store them in a tree structure, like the folders on your hard drive.

Rather than stop there, though, we added an extra twist - you can choose to have nested filters inherit the properties of the parent filter. In this way, you can build a heirarchy with increasingly narrow conditions, to let you easily drill down to whatever specific filter you have in mind. (If you don’t want to inherit conditions, just make sure the parent filters are empty.)

To create a nested filter, either right-click on the parent filter and choose New Filter, or use drag-and-drop to drop one filter on to another. This should work just like other tree controls you may be familiar with.

We hope you enjoy the new version of the mixer. As always, if you have questions or comments, you can leave them here or on the forums.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:53 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.