A few people here have mentioned this app but it's relatively unknown on last.fm so I thought I'd enlighten people. No this isn’t an advertisement, I just know any audiophile will love what this can do for them.
Last.fm groups artists based on other peoples tastes and allows you to discover new music based on what others listen to. But after finding this music and spending hundreds of dollars in CDs, you have a gigantic library of songs and you can't possibly remember them all. Let's say you're in the mood for "
Living Loving Maid" by
Led Zeppelin and you know you have some songs that sound similar but you can't remember what they were or who they were by. That’s where MusicIP comes in.
MusicIP Mixer is an acoustic fingerprinting app that scans your library, fingerprints it, then allows you to create groups of similar sounding songs. This is similar to what Pandora does to match music but instead of a person listening to a song and saying it has a "guitar riff" "fast beat" and "female vocals" MusicIP uses computer algorithms to detect the same things, and create a unique audio fingerprint of the song. The fingerprints are submitted to MusicIP for reccomendation purposes but they don't track or keep a log of what songs you have, so you don’t have to worry about privacy issues.
So let me get to the goods and tell you how this works for you.
After your library has been fingerprinted (could take days by the way) you choose a song you're in the mood to listen to. Then by clicking on "create mix" MusicIP will create a playlist the length you choose with similar sounding songs. Of course like all computer driven matches there’s some margin or error so you can then go through the list and click "more like this" or "less like this" for the songs and it will reform with a more accurate playlist based on your input (songs, albums, and artists can also be blocked completely). You can also restrict mixes to be within a single genre (based off your genre tag) or block genres completely if you don't want spoken word or ebooks making it into your music playlists.
Once you have your mix of upbeat standup-and-get-wild party music, or relaxing classical jazz to-end-the night-with music you can play it in MusicIP or (and this is where it rocks) hit "send to" and play it through your default last.fm enabled media player. And if the mix is really great you can save it as an .M3U and play it on any player supporintg .m3u or give the mix to a friend like a digital mix-tape.
Since the playlist is played through your regular player you don’t need anything extra to track your music through last.fm. Music IP works as a smart playlist generator to help you rediscover what you already have.
It also has a lot of library management features including the ability to find all duplicate songs in your library but being able to find all similar songs is probably the most useful feature, so try it out, it's free so you got nothing to lose.
http://www.musicip.com/
rock against bush
