Yes, I recently purchased an iPod. Yes, that means I am a big music nerd. Yes, that means I will further bore you with iPod minutia:
I would really like it if, after I sync my iPod with iTunes, it would submit any unaccounted playcounts to Audioscrobbler. I would suspect alot of people’s music consumption happens on their iPod instead of iTunes…
I would be a much more studious tagger if it wouldn’t keep switching away from the “rating” mode. I very rarely change the volume or fast forward into songs. All I do is rate. I want it to never leave that screen.
This is more of a product design thing, but I would really like to have the a more tactile option than the touchwheel. Sure, it’s nice and smooth, but I might favor a knob or thin disc with a little finger indent like on a home stereo. The main benefit would be to have it notched so that you “feel” the equivalent of a click as you browse menus or rate things. (I often select something wrong if I don’t squarely lift my finger off the touchwheel.) Success would mean being able to navigate/rate without ever having to look.
Mixmatcher is rolling along quite smoothly. The Belgians and Brazilians have begun to take over. Playlists are being made, and descriptions are being written. The XML feed of songs is isn’t showing every new song added in Bloglines, although the XML file has all of them in there. (Anyone know why? What is it checking to tell if there were changes? Is it reading a particular date? Is it expecting a certain type of date?)
I don’t know if I’m feeling masochistic or something, but for some reason I am going to open up Mixmatcher to you all, right now. Possibly for only a limited time, possibly forever. We’ll see how it goes. (Sorry, no circa 1998 launch party.)
What is Mixmatcher? Mixmatcher is part mixtape database, part playlist generator, part contextual music metadata database, part new way to discover new music, and part human collaborative filtering. Mixmatcher is a collaborative playlist environment, where people give meaning to songs by adding them to playlists. The more playlists that a song gets added to, the more meaning, contexts, and potential uses it gives that song. You’ll see when you get there. All comments and such should go to ben@magnetbox.com.
You can now publish your own playlists in the iTunes Music Store! (Examples: 1, 2, 3) iTunes will save your mix for one year, and you can rate mixes, e-mail the mixes, and (of course) buy all the songs in a mix. (Ben shuffles back into secret laboratory.)