With the beta 4 update of 1.9, we’re introducing yet another rule which you can use to make mixes just the way you want. This particular rule gets right to the core of our acoustic analysis, and because it lets you tweak the results based on acoustic properties, we’ve named it tweak.

Tweak

The tweak rule lets you push a playlist in one of six directions, based on acoustic properties. Because the core playlisting engine is doing a lot of different work to build the list, these particular rules are more like nudges in a given direction, rather than an absolute lock on the desired property. Still, they can be useful. The key properties exposed in this version are bass, energy, and tempo.

The full syntax looks like this:

<tweak cond="expr" index="type" more="boolean" weight="expr"/>

The index attribute lets you choose the property you want to base the tweak on - either bass, energy, or tempo (there is no default value, this attribute is required). The more attribute lets you specify if you want more or less of the given property - more tempo will mean faster, less tempo will mean slower, and so forth (as a reminder, though, these are general nudges rather than hard and fast rules). The default is more! The default weight is 2.5.

As an example, here’s a recipe that will try to produce a playlist which is overall faster and higher energy than an equivalent mix without the recipe:

<recipe name="Give Me More">
  <tweak index="energy" more="true"/>
  <tweak index="tempo" more="true"/>
</recipe>

One common thread we’re hearing from people playing with all these new features is the need for more examples. When we finish this next round of testing, we hope to introduce some ways to make all this power even easier to use.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 5:20 pm 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.