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YouTubeEntries from May 1, 2007 - June 1, 2007
Blogmusik Review: Streaming MP3 Service
Another entry into the ad-supported streaming music game is Paris based Blogmusik, which launched a new version of their site a little over a month ago. Blogmusik allows you to search for music and play songs and albums on demand. The selection is actually very good - that’s because all the music in the service is uploaded by their community. The legality of the service is a little murky and Blogmusik doesn’t fully explain how it works, though when uploading songs they claim:
“All tracks available to the user of Blogmusik have been thoroughly analyzed by our song recognition engine. Each title you’ll upload will be analyzed, if a track matches an official release then it will be available to the community. This process takes a bit of time and is mandatory to pay the artists. If a track is not recognized, it’ll only be available for you through the ‘My MP3’ section. You’ll be able to share these songs through the ‘Blog & Share’ section.”
Aside from the legal issues, Blogmusik is a very cool service. The Web 2.0 style, Flash-based UI is clean and elegant and allows for some very cool interactions such as drag and drop. Just type your keyword into the search box and browse the matching results and click play to hear the song. There is also the ability to purchase the songs on iTunes and Amazon. You can share any song on your blog using an embeddable player or email a song to a friend. On many occasions I found a fairly long wait while the song loads which is the biggest problem area for the service.
You can also view details for any album and see all available tracks for that album. Unfortunately, there are no artist bios or related artist information available.
The primary concept of Blogmusik revolves around playlists. Creating a playlist is very easy - just click the “+” icon and an name your playlist. It then appears in the right column of the site. As you find songs in the service, you can just drag and drop them directly onto the playlist name to add them to your playlist. At this point there is no way to share your playlists, but the Blogmusik blog announced that feature is coming soon.
When you listen to an artist, you can click the “Smart Playlist” option to generate a DMCA compliant playlist based on the chosen artist. The smart playlist UI is very slick and clean. If you like a song, you can drag it directly to any of your custom playlists. If you don’t like a song you can click the broken heart icon to never hear the song again. Due to DMCA restrictions, you can’t save a playlist, cant go back and have a 3 hour listening limit. There doesn’t seem to be any limitations on skipping songs though. Even though you can’t save a smart playlist, it would be nice to be able to bookmark it for future access. They should also consider changing the name of this feature since Smart Playlist already has a fairly accepted meaning in iTunes and the feature behaves more like an artist station.
Aside from some the performance issues, Blogmusik is a very interesting addition to the Music 2.0 space and I strongly recommend checking it out. As far as the legality, I wish they would be more up front about their model so that users know what if they are getting involved an investing time with a legitimate service.
YouTube on Apple TV
Apple announced today that they will be offering YouTube access via Apple TV. A few weeks ago I posted a note about an Apple TV hack called A Series of Tubes. I guess it was only a matter of time before Apple decided to do their own integration. You can check out a video of the new Apple TV functionality at Apple’s web site.
NextTune Mood-Based Playlists
NextTune recently released a new version of their Mood Maker playlist creation software for both Mac and PC. Essentially, Mood Maker software is a standalone media player and playlist composer. Unlike some other tools like Moody, Mood Maker supports DRM versions of AAC and WMA.
After you import your music library, you can get profiles from NexTune’s online database for all the songs in your library. The song profiles contain a wealth of information including genres, styles, tempo, bpm, start/begining characteristics, moods, and many other song facets. Unfortunately if you have a very large library, getting profiles can be an incredibly slow process. Luckily you can have Mood Maker retrieve song profiles in the background but expect to run it for a few nights while you sleep. If there is no profile in the database, you can enter your own information and submit it to their database. NexTune lets you know if they are looking for information for specific tracks. if you are the first person to upload the information they credit your account with .10 NextDollars which you can use to purchase CDs from their online store.
Creating a Mood Maker playlist is a multistep process but very straightforward. Start by selecting up to three moods. As you select the moods the number of available tracks are shown on the display. You can then further configure the playlist by selecting genres and eras to include. Mood Maker also allows you to arrange the playlist by either grouping or randomizing the artists and genres. Additionally, you can create listening cycles which gradually increase and decrease the playlist tempo within a specific time cycle.
The resulting playlists are very good but you need to have an appropriate number of songs profiled if you don’t wish to have lots of repeat artists. You can export your playlists directly to iTunes and Windows Media Player as well as your iPod. You can also burn CDs (no DRM files though).
The problem I have with standalone software like this is that it essentially acts as a second media player instead of complementing the one I already use. I have almost 22,000 songs in my library and managing them in iTunes alone is hard enough. The amount of work required to profile all those songs in yet another application is a lot to ask (only about 20% of my music seems to be in their database). Tools like Moody don’t have the same level of detail or sophistication, but the data it generates goes directly into my iTunes comment tags. Unfortunately, iTunes does not have support for all the information stored in NextTune so there really is no good way to get around this issue.
LaLa to Offer Streaming Music
Techcrunch reports that LaLa, the online CD swaping service, just announced it will be offering free, legal, on demand streaming music. LaLa figures that if each user purchases just one CD per month, they will be able to cover their costs.
Prime Condition: Great Workout Mixes
Music is a terrific motivator while working out and a new service called Prime Condition (beta) takes it to the next level. The service allows you to design your own workout routine and download a customized mp3 mix. The unique thing about prime Condition is that the workout mix contains a female voice-over that instructs you throughout your workout. The voice provides basic instructions on good form, counts your reps, tells you when to rest, and informs you on what’s coming next.
You create workouts using a cool Web 2.0-style configuration tool. You build a routine by selecting exercises from a set of body area specific menus. For each exercise you can set the number of reps, rep speed and rest time. As you continue to build your workout routine, the service displays the workout’s total time. If you want to mix cardio into your routine, there is an intuitive time-based UI that allows you to adjust the intensity level. For instance after five minutes of biking you can increase intensity, after the next five minutes increase it more, etc. Once you have designed your workout, Prime Condition will let you mix a playlist and generate a downloadable mp3 file with your new workout.
The service provides a free tier that limits your workout to 45 minutes and uses their own music for your mix. For $9 a month you can upload your own mp3s, get queue priority, and encode higher quality workouts. You can also make your workouts public and browse workouts from other members via a tag cloud. The UI is clean and simple but sould use some better organization and consistency. Unfortunately, it does not seem like there is an easy way to share/email your workouts with another person. If you already use a portable player when working out, and are looking for a little extra motivation, you may want to Prime Condition a spin.
Check out my workout mix…
Spiralfrog Now Live in Canada
Spiralfrog recently launched their Canada-only beta site. Spiralfrog is an ad-supported legal download service that contains audio content licensed from the catalogs of the world’s major and independent record labels. You can access the service from the US, but Download Squad has a review and some screenshots of the service.
Last FM Visualizations
Initially, i really appreciated the way Last.FM would chart my listening behavior. It provided new insights into my music consumption that were unavailable in iTunes. Over time, they became less interesting. The trapped-in-time snapshots fail to provide me with any additional insight into my behavior. So I decided to take a look at some tools that use your Last.fm data to make it more personal and insightful.
Lee Byron
There has been a ton of buzz regarding Lee Byron’s beautiful histograms of Last Fm data. His inclusion of the time element has the power to elicit a strong personal connection to your listening history. As you explore the histogram, you can see how preferences change over time an how one could map that data to personal events. Unfortunately, Mr. Byron does not provide a means to generate your own histogram.
Chart Stream
Inspired by Byron’s work, this is a tool that provides a simple visualization listening habits over time, derived from weekly Last.fm artist charts. Chart Stream does not allow you to view your own data though has a number of nice examples.
LastGraph
More promising is LastGraph, which looks like it will generate a Byron-esque histogram based on your Last.fm profile. However, when I went to use the tool, there were no rendering nodes currently online. I’ll need to check back after the holiday is over.
Your Last.fm in Time
Another tool for visualizing behavior over time. Unlike the others, it graphs artists based on total cumulative playcounts. Though not as useful or immersive as a histogram, it does provide some interesting insights into behavior.
Chart Changes
This is a very cool Greasemonkey script that inserts chart position changes directly into your Last.Fm charts.
Score500
Displays historical data from the overall charts as charts and diagrams. And it calculates and displays the chart changes over a period of time. You need to request an account to see your own data.
How Do You Listen to Music?
This a a very interesting tool that provides some very insightful behavioral statistics and charts.
Extended Last.fm Stats
Just type in your Last.fm username and a date range and this tool will return tons of interesting artist stats such as playcounts, weeks in charts, and chart positions.
Mainstream-O-Meter
The Mainstream-O-Meter calculates your mainstreamness by comparing the listener count of your favorite bands to the average listener count of the five bands who have the most listeners among Last.fm-users.
Musical Taste Meter
The script lists the users top 20 overall artists and lists the 8 most similar artists to each one, then delete’s any repeated artists. The idea is to see how varied your taste is, a score of 9 is extremely unvaried while 160 represents an extremely varied one.
AEP Calculator
AEP is a measure of how diverse your music tastes are, based on the top 50 artists in your Last.fm profile.
Eclectic Score
A script that computes your eclectic score based on the 20 top artists in your musical profile from Last.fm.
Similarity-O-Meter
Compare two Last.fm users, based on their personal musical tag clouds. This approach is different from the approach used by Last.fm, where users in the population are compared based on the common artists in their playlist.
Personal Tag Cloud
Generates a genre-based tag cloud based on your top artists within a specific time frame. there is also a tool to generate a cloud of recommended artists.
Jadam Kahn
in Tools, Data Mining, Statistics, Visualization
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Moody: Mood-Based Playlists for iTunes
Text-based tagging provides an good method for categorizing your music but is often labor-intensive. Additionally, iTunes does not provide an efficient way to tag your music. Moody is a desktop app for the Mac (PC version coming soon) that provides a mood-based approach to creating iTunes playlists. Moody presents you with a color grid that spans from sad to happy on the x-axis and from calm to intense on the y-axis. While you listen to a song in iTunes, you click the appropriate place on the grid to “mood-tag” the song. Moody also provides a very useful Quicktag option that will skip ahead to the next song as soon as you tag the current song.
You can listen to mood-playlists directly through moody. When in Listen mode, you just select one or more moods you want and press play. Moody also creates a folder of smart playlists directly within iTunes so you can access your mood playlists in iTunes and sync them with your iPod. You can choose Moody to store the tags in either the comment field or the composer field. Storing in the comment field just adds the mood tag to your existing comments but storing to the composer field will overwrite the existing information. Unfortunately, the playlist names are a bit difficult to decipher. They use an alphanumeric designation based on the grid, but there is no reference to which axis is which.Moody’s strength is in its basic approach, elegant UI and ability to quickly tag your collection. While the calm/intense and sad/happy designations may not work for everyone, most users will likely imprint their own mental model on the grid. That being said, it would also be nice to have user control over the colors because colors mean different things to different people. Two variables keep things simple, and the resulting playlists are actually surprisingly good. However, I don’t feel two variables provide enough granularity and control for the time investment to tag my entire library. I would prefer a UI that had a variety of sliders that contained more music qualities like fast/slow, male/female, vocal/instrumental, solo/orchestra, etc.
The Filter Playlist Generator: Review
I recently used a very cool Last.fm analysis tool to check out my listening behavior. To my surprise, 50% of my listening was from my top 25 artists even though I have 7300 artists in my iTunes library. Of course I can just use shuffle or create manual/smart playlists to expose myself to more of my own music. However, sometimes you just want to create a playlist without the hassle of hand-picking songs or configuring smart playlist parameters. I recently discovered The Filter, a promising tool for iTunes and Windows Media Player, that automatically creates playlists based on artists, genres or individual songs.
Download and install The Filter application on your hard drive (Mac and PC versions available). After you complete a basic, free registration form, The Filter scans your iTunes library. I have about 23,000 songs in my library and the entire scanning process took just under 10 minutes. To create a playlist, just select three songs from your iTunes library and click the “F” button. You can base the resulting playlist by your selected songs, artists or genres. The Filter then generates a playlist of songs from your iTunes library based on matches in their community database.
To test the product I selected three songs from my Jazz genre and set the playlist to match the songs. The resulting playlist (shown below) was pretty much spot-on. The Filter allows you to set the number of tracks for a playlist and expand your playlist once it is created. I do wish there was the ability to restrict the playlist from repeating artists and songs from the same album.
One your playlist has been created you can use The Filter to explore album reviews and recommendations for the music in your playlist. You can then purchase recommended songs at the store of your choice (Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, MSN, etc.)
The Filter also provides you with a personal profile page on their web site that provides you with recommendations, artist bios, album reviews, and YouTube videos. However, when I tried accessing my page, there was no information on it. Worse, they failed to provided a reason why nothing was showing up.
There are also some funky UI issues with The Filter (on my Mac). The application window has a problem moving to the background when other applications are active and sometimes disappears when you switch over to iTunes. Even though I selected for song info to automatically display for now playing songs, the application doesn’t refresh the content in the more info window. Personally, I think The Filter would be much better if it was integrated into iTunes, similar to the iLike sidebar. Aside from some of the bugginess of the program, The Filter does a pretty good job when it comes to its primary function - creating good playlists based on limited inputs.
Jadam Kahn
in Playlists, Review, Tools, Recommendations
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SpotDJ: Innovative Radio-Style Experience for iTunes
Do you ever pine for the days when listening to the radio was a great experience? The days of knowledgeable DJs who really knew what they were talking about? DJs who had passion for the music they were playing and knew about the musicians and their influences? When bands would come on the radio and discuss their songs and what they mean? Those days may be gone for terrestrial radio, but a new Music 2.0 service called SpotDJ is taking the concept to the next level.
SpotDJ is a web site and downloadable application that delivers a unique radio DJ style experience to iTunes playback. Members of the SpotDJ community record their own audio spots based on individual songs and artists. After listening to a song in iTunes, instead of going directly to the next song, you hear a relevant spot about the song or artist you just heard (assuming a spot exists in the database). For instance, I decided to listen to some Dandy Warhols today to test out the service. After the first song finished playing, I was very surprised to find out that Courtney Taylor-Taylor himself recorded a spot about his favorite songs. As I listened to more songs there were more spots by Courtney about touring, how the band got their name, and his influences. How cool is that? As another test, I listened to the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique. Sure enough after each song, I got spots that discussed the individual songs, the band and where all the samples came from.
If there is no spot for a specific song, SpotDJ will see if there is a spot for the artist. If there is neither you wont hear a spot. Once all spots for a particular artist have been heard, the system is smart enough to know not to play them again. Want the experience on the go? SpotDJ can also attach spots to playlists on your iPod. You also have the ability to comment on individual spots, send member messages and email/embed spots. So there’s no spot for your favorite song? SpotDJ provides a variety of methods to record your own spots - via microphone, uploading an mp3 and even via phone.
Aside from some needed UI tweaks, SpotDJ is hands-down one of the coolest Music 2.0 services I have ever seen.
WebWare 100 - Music 2.0 Nominees
The 2007 WebWare 100 nominees were just announced. A number of Music 2.0 companies are represented including iLike, Lala, Last.fm, MOG, MyStrands, Napster, Pandora, PodOmatic, and Upcoming. They also have nominees for a number of other categories. You can visit the site to vote for your favorites.
Rhapsody.com Now Has Lyrics
While building a playlist on Rhapsody earlier, I was pleasantly surprised to see that many songs now have a “Lyrics” link. I never noticed this before. I share Jason Herskowitz’s feelings about Rhapsody’s iterative development practices. It’s great that they are continually working to improve their product, but as a user, it would be nice to be notified when cool new stuff like this happens. I found this snippet on Futuremusic from last week:
“RealNetworks has inked a deal with LyricFind, a Toronto-based concern, to incorporate Lyrics into the web-based version of Rhapsody. The announcement follows a recent announcement by Yahoo Music, who teamed with Gracenote to offer a similar feature. Rhapsody will offer authorized lyrics and other meta data such as albums covers, release dates, and additional credits. When lyrics are available for a particular song, Rhapsody will showcase the content with a Powered by LyricFind tag helping to brand the company for broader recognition.”
I assume it will be some time before most songs have lyrics associated with them. Now Rhapsody should begin improving the web player so that i can toggle between the song lyrics and metadata during playback.
YouTube on Apple TV
So I guess it was only a matter of time until someone figured out how to get YouTube videos onto AppleTV. Now I may actually have to go and pick one of these up.
From MacNN…The new unofficial plugin for Apple TV called “A Series of Tubes” brings YouTube video content to internet media hub, expanding its current functions beyond the Apple’s limited QuickTime trailer previews and iTunes’ top 10 lists. The plugin delivers a number of playlists, including spotlighted YouTube videos along with most commented and most-viewed content (week/month) from the popular video-sharing site. Settings also enable users to cache video content for optimal playback.
The YouTube plugin for Apple TV is not yet available, but the video below demonstrated the Apple TV plugin.
Rollyo Music 2.0 Search
Sometimes when I’m searching for Music 2.0 related items on Google, I end up getting lots of irrelevant results since the search parameters include the entire web. This is even worse when I search for companies with common names like Pandora, Rhapsody, and Apple. So I decided to create a custom Music 2.0 searchroll with Rollyo. Rollyo allows you to create custom searchrolls based on any sites you want. The Music 2.0 search confines results from 25 highly trusted sources in the Music 2.0 space. This should make it much easier to weed out the irrelevant results I get from a full web search. Of course you can always expand your search if you don’t find what you are looking for.
You can access the Music 2.0 search directly from the top right corner of this blog or get it here. You can also add the searchroll to your Firefox search. Feel free to comment if there are any other sources you think the searchroll should include.
Pandora's Sexified Redesign
Pandora just launched the redesign of their web site. Aside from some slick Web 2.0 style design (round corners, gradients, faded patterns, etc.) the site features fully integrated advertising. Not a bad idea given the potential for impending rate hikes for streaming radio. Now I’m not a huge fan of advertising on the web, but Pandora’s implementation is pretty interesting and effective. Ads on most sites look like they are just slapped into a space on the page with little relation to the overall page and many users simply ignore standard skyscraper or square ads due to “banner blindness”. Pandora’s integrated approach makes the advertising and page seem like a cohesive whole.
The ad integration includes (not in all cases) a short message in the upper left, branding in the upper right, a skyscraper ad on the right, a background image towards the bottom and right and a text ad directly beneath the main content area. Many advertisers also have a branded Pandora station as well. As you progress though songs, the ads reload and cycle on the page.
Jadam Kahn
in Radio, Personaliztion, Streaming, Design, Recommendations
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Webjay Closing June 2007
Webjay, the playlist sharing community purhased by Yahoo in January, 2006, will be closing its doors in June 2007. The announcement on WebJay’s web site encourages users to backup their playlists before going offline. While personally I was never a big fan of the service, I give them lots of credit for pushing XSPF as a playlist standard. The service has always raised some thorny legal issues but no reason was given for its closure. Perhaps Yahoo is looking to integrate better playlist functionality into their own Y! Music products.
Audiobaba: Trait-Based Recommendations
Audiobaba is a simple and elegant music search and recommendation engine. Most recommendation engines provide song matches based on related artist data (artist X is similar to artist Y) and collaborative filtering (people who listen to X listen to Y). Audiobaba takes a different approach. Every song in the Audiobaba database is “fingerprinted” with acoustic characteristics and other special-sauce qualities. When you search for a song on Audiobaba, not only do you get the song you are looking for (provided it’s in their database), but also songs that sound similar based on a “fingerprint” match. This is great for both discovering new music and helping you create playlists that flow together based on similar qualities.
Just type the name of a song or artist into the search box and Audiobaba returns an alphabetized list of individual songs along with their respective 30-second samples (if available). When you find the song you are looking for, click the “match” button and Audiobaba returns a list of similar songs. You can filter the results on a sliding scale from mainstream to independents .
To test the system I tried to find matches for Charles Mingus’ very unique sounding “Boogie Stop Shuffle”. Audiobaba returned many songs from the jazz genre that indeed matched many qualities such as instrumentation, tempo, style and mood. A few other searches yielded similar successes while others were mixed.
If you feel a song isn’t related, you can click the “Thumbs Down” button to help Audiobaba refine their results. They should really change the name of this button since “thumbs down” really implies that I don’t like a song. Perhaps allowing user to use a sliding scale from Great Match to Poor Match would be better as it allows for positive as well as negative user feedback.
A cool feature is the RSS Songfeed. When you find a song you like, you can subscribe to it’s RSS feed. When new songs show up that match your song, they will automatically appear in the feed. Audiobaba also allows you to bookmark tracks. However, since there is no login for the site, if you switch computers or browsers, you wont be able to access your bookmarks. Many of the independent tracks are provided as free downloads and they also provide links to purchase songs on Amazon, Buy.com and iTunes.
Audiobaba is still in Beta but needs to make some improvements to the search functionality and UI. Simple misspellings will return no results and the system does not provide a Google-style “Did you mean X?” feature. While I do like the idea of universal search, they need to provide a better way of filtering the results by songs and artists. For instance, if I search for “The Doors”, I need skip ahead many pages since results are provided in alphabetic song format. While this results format makes sense for all songs by a selected artist, its a real pain when just searching for a specific artist. There are also some funky AJAX problems such as strange linking and back button behaviors.
Despite its faults, I found myself having lots of fun playing around with Audiobaba. Their unique approach to music discovery, coupled with a simple UI creates an addicting user experience.
Peel Makes Managing Music Blogs Easy
Even with all the great online stores and music discovery sites out there, sometimes you just need the advise of music experts, especially if you are into obscure genres. This is where music blogs really come into their own. You can be assured that whatever you are into, there is at least one person out there who is blogging relentlessly on the subject. While music blogs really fill the expertise and esoteric gaps missing from the larger services, there are so many, that keeping up with your favorites becomes a numbing experience. Songbird, the open-source desktop web player and browser mashup has features that let you track your favorite music blogs and easily download the mp3s posted on them. Songbird is still in a developer preview and my experience with it so far, while promising has been less than smooth sailing. That’s why I was so pleased when I came across Peel - an mp3 blog reader and player for the Mac.
Just add links to your favorite music blogs and see them appear in the left pane of the application. Click a blog name to see the list of available mp3s. You can then play the files directly in the application or download the directly to iTunes. The cool thing here is that you can listen to all the files from a single blog as a continually streaming playlist, which is great when you just want to listen to new music while you are working.
You can also click the “Web” tab in the right pane to view the blog as if you were using a web browser. Unfortunately, the browser mode seems to disable links so using the “open in browser” feature is a better bet. This is a missed opportunity. It would be great if I could navigate to other music blogs in browser mode and automatically add new ones as i come across them instead of needing to manually add them. Peel should also consider either partnering with or creating their own directory for music blogs so that the entire experience from finding, exploring, adding and managing music blogs is all under one roof. Even better would be a way to harness all the blogs bookmarked by their users in conjunction with some additional community tools (such as tagging, ratings, etc) as way to dynamically and create a collaborative music directory for the entire Peel community.
Despite some of these shortcomings Peel is a very elegant and simple tool for discovering and downloading new music.
Massive Music 2.0 Directory Update
While doing research for the Logos of Music 2.0 posting, I had come accross many sites that were not included in my original Music 2.0 directory. I just finally posted links to almost 90 new sites in the directory which can be found on on the right column of this blog.
Rhapsody Finally Adds Member Profiles
I have been a longtime user and fan of the Rhapsody subscription service. When they finally launched their web-based service over a year ago, I was even happier since the service would now work on my Mac. Rhapsody was slow to introduce many of the features that were available on the Music Now service such as a personalized home page, adding music to your library, and creating playlists via the browser. I’m very pleased to see that they have finally implemented user profile pages albeit with a dose of caution.
You can access your profile directly from the “My Rhapsody” tab or the new “My Profile” tab. Rhapsody allows you to customize your profile by selecting from a list of predesigned avatars and predefined text fields. It’s likely that they don’t allow you more customization to shield themselves from the hassle of needing to manage community content even though other community sites have proven that the community itself does effective policing of offensive content.
A very nice feature of a profile page is the “Trends” tab which uses a combination of meters and “artist clouds” to graphically represent a member’s musical taste and preferences. I’ve always had mixed feelings regarding tag clouds but here they work very well because they are restricted to artists within a specific genre as opposed to user tags which can represent almost anything. Rhapsody also provides a “Charts” tab but at this time, I was unable to find any profile pages that had this feature working (though charts do work on your “My Rhapsody” page). The profile page also displays recent tracks with the added ability to hide your listening history from the public.
You can present up to twenty playlists to appear on your profile by simple selecting which playlists you wish to show. This is a nice feature because many times, you may have a playlist that is not complete or listen guilty pleasure playlist you don’t want other to see. The playlist overview displays the number of tracks, total time and artists in the playlist. This approach is very nice as it provides the user with enough information to decide if its is worth an extra click for more details.
The “ratings” area displays a list of recently rated tracks and users can generate an instant playlist based these tracks. The Instant playlist options are pretty interesting because not only can I create a playlist based on someone’s five star tracks but also on their one star or blocked tracks. You can further customize the auto-list selecting the number of tracks in the final playlists as well as restricting it to all tracks, recently played tracks or not played recently tracks.
The community features should be extended on your “My Rhapsody” page to show recommended members (members who closely match your listening behavior), members who have added one of your playlists as a favorite and notifications for when favorite members create a new playlist. Overall, the profile addition to Rhapsody is a very promising step ahead and I look forward to the near future when these community features are even more tightly integrated into the overall service.
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