Introducing a few new members of our MusicIP enabled mp3 player family.

They make mixes. They’re stylish. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and price ranges. And as if that weren’t enough, each mp3 player comes preloaded with at least 100 songs of new music by some amazing new artists who you may not have realized you were missing. Better yet, since MusicIP has made it possible to make playlists right on the player whenever you feel like it, all that preloaded music can be trickled into the playlists you create on the fly…New artist A meets Old favorite #1…they mingle, your ears enjoy…let’s just say it together now - it’s pretty freakin’ awesome.

MusicIP *hearts* Memorex.

You can find the mp3 players, such as this one, on the shelves at Target. Or in Jenn’s arms. (But she’s not sharing.)

To learn more about Memorex’s digital audio players, you can visit their website here.

We’ve been busy around here, and our poor blog has been neglected. But I’ll start here by introducing one piece of our hard work. Last week we announced our work with The Orchard. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re the world’s largest digital music distributor, which means they get the music from tons and tons of artists and labels into the online music stores so that you can find them, listen to them, and love them.

But that’s not all.

When you hear a song in an advertisement…The Orchard might have been behind that. The featured song you clicked on while perusing an online music store? Could have also been them who made it happen. The way they work with their artists goes beyond just trying to put albums on the proverbial “shelves” of online music stores. And we think that’s pretty darn cool…so when they approached us about building a synch licensing tool for music supervisors to find new music, we knew this would be something exciting.

You may be thinking “Oh yeah - I’ve seen that interface before…” Yep, it’s the same Playground design that’s been used to help music fans prepare for the long nights and ringing eardrums of multi-day music festivals. But this time, things are slightly different. For one, while I can show you what it looks like, you probably won’t get to see it yourself. I know, I know - but it looks so fun! However, at least for now, this Playground (called Trackdown) is serving a very important purpose for music supervisors around the world looking for the right song for their film, T.V. episode, or commercial.

Yes, there’s more to it that’s in the works. Yes, it’s very exciting and I know you want to see it. No, I can’t be bribed with chocolate to tell you the password. (But if I cooooould be bribed, my email address is…oh, wait nope. No. Can’t be bribed. Shhhhh…we’ll talk later…)

What we love about this project is the potential. The potential for a supervisor to stumble upon something that they didn’t expect but absolutely fits. The potential for an artist who may not have the most friends on Myspace and doesn’t have plans to head out on tour this summer…but through Trackdown gets a break and establishes a following (groupies and all). We see potential for growing the relationships between the music supervisors, the musicians themselves, and the people out there who say “hey, who is that? I really like it…” while watching their favorite T.V. show.

So we may not have been writing too much about the day to day, but we think a satisfied music supervisor, a musician with some coin in the bank, and a new fan humming a new beat are all very, very worth it.

On Thursday, Jenn and I will be headed to Vancouver for New Music West, which is one of the biggest indie music festival on the west coast. Conveniently set in one of my favorite parts of the world, it should be a fantastic time with oodles of yummy new music (don’t you just love this time of year?).

If you’re going to be there (or, if you can’t make it, but still want to learn more about the 200 bands showcasing there this weekend), check out the NMW Playground, powered by us, MusicIP.

This is our second festival Playground - the first was for NEMO last year in Boston. You can learn about their Playground here, and check it out here.

For this Playground, we’ve done a couple of things differently. First, you’ll notice that when you click on the “Play” button, you’ll hear an entire song by that artist or band (instead of just a thirty second sample).

Next, click on “Venue”, which will show you the date, time, and venue of that artist’s show. Now, attendees not only have everything they need to listen to some great new music, but can also grab the necessary information to catch them live in Vancouver.

Sweeeeeet.

So far, we’ve used the search box inside MusicIP Mixer to search your local collection, and other websites. In an earlier post, I mentioned that we’ve added a new option: Search World. This post will explain more about that feature, and what it means.

Part of the advantage of having a metadata set like MusicDNS, tied to the MusicIP acoustic analysis, is that we get a pretty good idea of what most artists sound like. We can tell which songs are popular and that provides clues about which songs might best represent a given artist. Our Acoustic Discovery product allows our recommendation services to be used by other companies with music. One feature we’re often asked about is helping people who are looking for an artist, like Lily Allen, find music which may not be by Lily Allen (since they don’t have those songs), but which would still be interesting.

We call this service Global Music Link, or GML for short, because it links music globally. The world’s popular music meets the long tail. Hi!

Now, you can use this same service for free inside MusicIP Mixer with your own collection. Start by selecting “Search World” in the search box.

Next, type in the artist, album, or track you are looking for and press ENTER. The mixer will query our GML server to find matches for that text. Based on our database, the “most likely” match for what you typed will be selected, either an artist, album or track. A dialog box gives you a summary of the results.

Next, we make a mix based on the recommendation - you can see this on the status as a “GML Mix”. If we happen to guess the wrong match, you can right-click on the status bar, and see the alternate artist, album and track matches (up to the 10 most likely in each category).

If you want to know more about embedding GML style results into your own applications or websites, you can use our request form to get information.

Mixer 1.8 Preview: Enhanced Tag Fixing

When MusicIP Mixer 1.7 was released, with support for MusicDNS, the only fields supported for tag fixing where artist and title. This allowed us to get some initial feedback on the feature while we worked on the MusicDNS backend.

Now, MusicDNS is chugging merrily along, absorbing millions of rows of data every day, and steadily improving. Since our big December update, we’ve been providing extra data to MusicDNS regularly using our improved data mining process, and we’ve grown the available data set significantly. For commercial users, this data is available in a single download via the MusicDNS Metadata Export.

With version 1.8, now more of this data is now available for updating the tags in your music collection. First up, there’s a new panel on the preferences dialog which lets you choose the fields you want to fix:

The Artist and Title fields are enabled by default. The other fields are all new. Here’s the scoop on the new fields.

Genre - We’ve covered this extensively in earlier posts. The MusicDNS genres are basically aggregated information on how most people classify their tracks generally. If you have used specific genres on your songs, you won’t want to overwrite those, but this can be convenient for quickly sorting all your unclassified tracks.

There are three options for using genres. Since MusicDNS provides up to two genres, sorted by how frequently they are used, you will get separate recommendations for “Rock”, “Pop”, “Rock/Pop” and “Pop/Rock” (to use one example). The options let you simplify this a bit if you don’t want so much detail:

• Use default genre - simply use the name provided by MusicDNS
• Use simplified genre - this will sort multiple genres alphabetically, so “Rock/Pop” becomes “Pop/Rock”, eliminating one extra category.
• Use only primary genre - if there are multiple genres, just use the primary one. This loses some detail, but reduces the number of genres.

As always, you can edit any genre recommendations before applying them by clicking on the recommendation table - this lets you type in next text before applying the edits.

The rest of the fields are related to albums. MusicDNS provides album information which is correlated with the MusicBrainz database. This associates fingerprints/puids with albums, so we can figure out release year, album name, and track index on album. When we download the metadata from MusicDNS, we automatically choose the album which is the best match for your tracks. This is most effective if you do Fix Tags for all tracks which are on an album at the same time - you can do more than that, but if you only provide a single track, there isn’t as much context to determine the best album match.

Once we find the best album match, we can provide the remaining fields:

Year - this recommends updates to the year field. Generally, this should correspond to when the associated album was released. There are two options:

• Use oldest year - use the oldest available year for that track. In other words, if it was on multiple albums, use the information from the album that was released first. This will get you closest to the actual recording date, as you won’t end up with the dates of, for instance, Greatest Hits collections.
• Use album year - use the year of the album which the track is assumed to be from.

Album - name of the associated album

Track - track index of the associated album

As we continue to enhance MusicDNS, we plan to keep updating our tag fixing feature. In the meantime, if you have suggestions or corrections to any of our metadata, you can contact us at support@musicip.com.

So far, we’ve introduced rules which can restrict which songs show up in a mix by applying user customized rules which can depend on the seed songs, or on the contents of the playlist being created.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to be so draconian - you might just want to emphasize a certain kind of song, or make some songs show up less often. To do that, you can use a new kind of rule, called a modifier.

Modifiers look a lot like constraints, except instead of providing hard limits, they provide gentle (or not so gentle) nudges. Let’s suppose you want to have songs which you’ve rated 4 or higher show up more often in mixes. Here’s one way you might do that with modifiers:

<modifier weight=”2″>rating >= 4</modifier>

(In a real XML file, >= would be written >= )

The weight provides a “nudge” value. You can think of it as expressing how often a matching song should show up, relative to a non matching one. In this case, songs rated four or higher would be twice as likely to show up with the modifier, as without.

You can decrease a song by using a fractional modifier:

<modifier weight=”.5″>rating = 2</modifier>

In this case, songs rated 2 should be half as likely to show up.

Just like constraints, you can do comparisons with seeds songs in your modifiers. One of the new methods available is version 1.8 is called overlap. This returns the number of words that two phrases have in common, ignoring words like the and a. Here’s a modifer which says if a given song’s genre has at least one word in common with the seed genre, then it should be weighted more heavily - this is a looser version of our genre locking:

<modifier weight=”2″>overlap(seed genre, genre) != 0</modifier>

Ok, that’s it for our brief overview of constraints and modifiers. If you look in the installation folder, you can see the source code for several examples which you can use to try out your own rules. As a reminder, the file is called recipes.xml.

If you’d like to ask questions, or share your ideas, you can talk to us on our forums. We’ll showcase more examples in future posts. Have fun!

The previous post in this series introduced constraints. This post will show some of the more advanced options, and provide a few more examples.

So far, we’ve seen how to use a constraint to specify extra conditions on which songs should be included in a mix. The full constraint system lets you do more than that - you can specify specific percentages of songs you would like to see satisfying certain conditions. To do this, we add two more attributes: min, and max. These specify the minimum and maximum percentages you would like to see rules satisfying the condition. Percentages are normally expressed in statistical notation, where 0 means 0% and 1 means 100% (.5 would mean 50%). If you would like to use a different scale, like 0 to 100, you can use the scale attribute to select it. By default, the minimum percentage is 100%. Naturally the maximum percentage cannot be less than the minimum percentage.

Let’s use a somewhat offbeat example to check out this feature. Suppose you want to make sure your playlist contains an equal amount of songs by men and women performers. You might recall you can express a power search like “songs by men” or “songs by women”. So, you could combine the following two rules:

<constraint min=”.5″>songs by women</constraint> <constraint min=”.5″>songs by men</constraint>

In this case, since we’ve tried to get %50 in either category, and the categories are mutually exclusive, we should end up with an equal number of songs by men and women.

As in our previous example, there’s a gotcha lurking here… artists which are not yet marked by type may creep into the mix since the engine doesn’t really read rules the way a human does - neither rule explicitly rejects songs not by men or women. To guarantee this, you could add a third rule:

<constraint>songs by men or songs by women</constraint>

Now you should get precisely the behaviour we’re interested in.

Finally, we’ll finish up with a detail. If you impose a very tight constraint, or series of constraints, you may end up with no songs to put in your mixes. To minimize this, a constraint will, by default, exclude no more than 50 songs before disabling itself in a given mix. If you would like to alter this threshold, you can specify a different one using the cutoff attribute. Specify a cutoff of 0 to mean there is no limit.

Next time, we’ll introduce a new kind of rule!

One frequently requested feature for MusicIP Mixer has been the ability to have more control over how playlists are created. The simplest option when creating a mix is to control which songs are considered candidates for inclusion in the mix. To review, there are several options already in the mixer for this:

1. Filters - You can create a filter with any conditions expressible in the mixer. Select a filter to restrict yourself to songs matching those conditions (like songs added in the last 30 days, or songs which you’ve rated more than 3 stars). Or, you can right-click on the Mix button to apply a specific filter when you create a mix.

2. Exclusions - Exclusions take a heavier handed approach. You can create them just like filters, using any conditions supported by the mixer, but these will apply to all your mixes, regardless of any other settings. This is typically used for “blacklisting” certain songs (songs rated 1 star, spoken word songs, podcasts, whatever you don’t want to end up in a mix).

3. Genres - You can use the “Restrict mix to selected genre” option to make sure only songs matching the seed genre are included. This option is a little bit different than numbers 1 and 2, because it depends on the seed song, and isn’t just a blanket rule.

As of version 1.8, we’ve added a new feature called constraints. Constraints effectively extend the concept of exclusions to conditions which can depend on anything about the seed songs, or indeed, on a variety of other choices. Currently, the process for creating constraints requires just a little bit of XML knowledge. Rules for creating mixes live in the file recipes.xml which sits where your copy of MusicIP Mixer is installed. The outermost tag is called recipes, and inside that tag are nested recipe tags. Each recipe is a set of rules which you can apply to mixes. Once you have some recipes defined, you can select the active recipe from the Mix options panel in your preferences.

The advantage of storing these as XML is that they are easier to share - as you’ll see over time, some of the rules can get a little tricky. Let’s dig right into things and make a simple constraint. In this case, we’ll make sure that all songs in the mix are within 5 years of the seed’s original release date.

(If you don’t have many years, you might want to consider using the new feature of the Fix Tags command, to add years to your tracks.)

A basic recipe looks like this:

<recipe name=”Example Recipe”>
<constraint>expression</constraint>
</recipe>

In this case, only songs which match the expression will be included in your mixes whenever the Example Recipe is active. Version 1.8 of the mixer adds several new functions which are particularly useful for writing constraints. Here’s how to express our example year lock:

abs(seed year - year) < 6

Note that we’ve prefixed the year keyword with the word seed, meaning we are referring to a seed song, and comparing it with all other songs in the mix. In this case, we are saying that the difference between the seed year, and the year of any song in the mix can be no more than 5. abs is a function which takes the absolute value of an expression (it makes negative numbers positive), and just makes the expression easier to write.

There’s a gotcha hiding in this rule - if your seed song has no year, then the expression seed year will evaluate to zero. This means only songs with a year between -5 and 5 will be considered in your mixes (in practice, only other songs without years would match that). This is probably overkill. What’s you’d like to say is apply this rule only if the seed song actually has a year specified. Constraints let you express these conditional expressions with an extra cond attribute. In this case, the condition is:

seed year != 0

Since we are dealing with XML, we’ll need to use XML syntax to express the whole thing, which ends up looking like this:

<recipe name=”Era Lock”>
<constraint cond=”seed year != 0″>abs(seed year - year) < 6 </constraint>
</recipe>

Next up, we’ll explore some extra corners of the constraint system and introduce a few new features.

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, but we have a few more things to talk about in the coming week, as we’re getting ready to launch the MusicIP Mixer 1.8 Beta. This post will get the basic introduction out of the way, and we’ll be following up with a series of posts showcasing some of the most important new features.

Initially, the beta will only available on Windows. If you aren’t signed up as a beta tester yet, you can check out our earlier post on joining the MusicIP beta program.

I’ll touch on the two biggest changes right now, but look for future posts to fill out some of the details.

Rule-Based Playlist Controls

This is the biggie. In the past, we’ve received lots of requests about ways to tweak, cajole, massage, and adjust how playlists can get created. (Like “Can my ratings affect a playlist”, or “Can I make my playlist %50 pop and %50 rock”). Rather than taking the most popular recommendations and hardcoding those, we’ve opened up the playlist engine so you can create your own rule sets, and share them with your friends. These rule sets get exposed as XML, which we call recipes. This simple change opens up tons of new opportunities in making playlists, which I’m sure we’ll be exploring those for a long time.

World Search

Our MusicDNS acoustic fingeprint service has been experiencing tremendous growth. We’ve now been able to take that same data, and provide an extension to the mixer’s search box which gives you access to more options. Now you can search for artists, albums, or songs which are not in your collection, and create mixes based on those. For instance, if you want to make a mix based on Lily Allen, just select “Search World” in the mixer, type “Lily Allen”, and you’ll get a mix based on tracks by Lily Allen.

If you want to get full details on all the bug fixes and minor changes, those will be posted on the Beta Forum as soon as the MusicIP Mixer 1.8 beta is available.

Well, we’re finally back in Los Angeles, after a jam packed few weeks of music and fun. While we were learning and meeting people during the day, we were soaking up some new sounds (as well as meeting more people) at night. Toronto was a blast - as Jenny and I are native Torontonians (well, her native, me just there for a while), it was nice to experience a little taste of winter…then get to fly off and leave the heavy wool behind.

By the time we arrived in Texas, we had become fairly accustomed to this new schedule — going to see live bands in the evening just seemed to go along with having dinner, breathing and such.  What a hard life…I know. In both places, we got to meet a lot of talented, eager bands who were eager to learn more. I love this part of the job.

At CMW Jenny and I were walking the floor, but everything’s bigger in Texas — as such we were in the brand new 10×20 MusicIP booth. We weren’t the only ones who enjoyed it; when you’re busily packing up computers, product sheets, and a ridiculous number of cords at the end of it all, it’s pretty cool to have some one come by and say “My friend and I were talking about your booth here and we think it was the best one.” Thanks! We love it too.

All around, a great couple of weeks spent in two fantastic towns with an insane amount of talent to enjoy.

Next up - Billboard Mobile Entertainment Conference and CTIA Wireless 2007, both in Orlando, Florida from March 25 to 27.