I’m a sucker for new ways of browsing one’s music library. Whether it’s by hacking together detailed searches to build an auto-playlist in MediaMonkey or screwing around with random visual plug-ins, seeing one’s collection in a new light offers a lot of insight for the hardcore music geek.
The latest thing to catch my eye is Anita Lillie‘s master thesis for the MIT Media Lab titled MusicBox. This demo video does a great job at explaining music box, but here’s my attempt at a brief encapsulation:
MusicBox looks at your music, analyzes the files themselves as well as their metadata and builds a visual interpretation of the songs’ similarity to each other. So, on one end, you’ll see your classical music and on the other side you’ll see hip-hop. In between will be rock, soul, and other genres that are less sonically extreme. It gets even neater when you start using that information to form playlists, like a “path playlist,” which takes you from one extreme of your music collection to the other, moving between similar songs until the full range of your collection is covered. It’s very, very cool to think of a playlist that starts with Busta Rhymes and ends with Dvorak and sounds good.
I hope MusicBox becomes available to the rest of us at some point.
[link via Waxy]
Posted in Technology, Television, Movies, and Music