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YouTubeEntries in iTunes (8)
ITunes Adds Live Search
iTunes added a live search feature to the iTunes music store today. When you begin typing a menu appears to try and autocomplete your search keywords. The feature does seem to provide keywords for artists, albums and songs though there is no visual distinction between the keyword types. While this is a welcome addition, Yottamusic has had a similar feature now for months, and does show the distinction between keyword types.
iTunes Live Search:
Yottamusic Live Search:
My ITunes Widgets
ITunes is now offering a suite of widgets that help them dip their toe into the music social networking space. The suite of widgets are beautifully designed (as expected) and provide a range of customization including different sizes and color schemes. The widgets allow you to share items like your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews, and iTunes favorites.
While this is pretty cool, the widgets only provide data based on your interaction with the iTunes store, which is cool if you buy lots of music and happen to only listen to your purchased items. I guess that way no matter who’s widget you see, the music will always be available for purchase. However, it would be great if they provided a means to actually share your true charts that included no-store music. Until that day comes, I guess I’ll stick with the Last.fm widgets.
Signal: Control iTunes From Your iPhone
Signal is a terrific new application that allows you to turn your iPhone or Pocket PC into an advanced wireless remote control for iTunes, Winamp, or Windows Media Player. The application allows you to control playback, browse or search your media library, and edit playlists, and rate songs from anywhere in the house - all from the palm of your hand.
After you install the Signal application on your computer you will receive an IP address that can be accessed via Safari on your iPhone. Currently playing songs display in their full album art glory and automatically update when a new song begins. You can also directly view the current playlist/queue with a single tap at the top of the Now Playing screen.
There are a few issues with the software which will hopefully be resolved soon. First, you can’t add songs to a specific playlist, only the playback queue. More importantly, if you navigate to a song in your library from say an album list and play it, there is no way to get back to the original album list. The music icon takes you to the main library menu instead. Sometimes there is a little lag between the iPhone controller and iTunes but most of the time the performance is acceptable. It would also be nice if the Now Playing metadata - artist, album and song were clickable links.
All in all, Signal is a super cool application. The real power comes when iTunes is hooked into your home stereo system. Unlike a traditional remote with limited range and line-of-sight issues, signal works as long as your iPhone is connected to the Internet. As if the iPhone isn’t cool enough, just imagine the look on your friends faces at your next BBQ when they see you controlling your party’s music on your iPhone while cooking for them in your backyard.
SonicLiving:Concerts and iTunes Store for iPhone
SonicLiving, the personalized concert and event tracking tool, has released an iPhone version of its service. The iPhone version provides not only concert tracking tools but also access to browse the iTunes store. SonicLiving members can access their personalized concert calendars and view all shows for any day across 13 major metropolitan regions. Once you find a show, you can view details or find tickets. Unfortunately, unlike the full browser version, you can’t add the show to your calendar, view members who are attending, or post comments. It would also be nice if the service provided you with a view of shows in your wishlist and allowed you to automatically add shows to iCal.
The most interesting feature of the service is the ability to browse the iTunes store. Type the name of an artist into the search box and select the desired artist from the results. You can then browse an artists discography, view album details, listen to 30-second samples, and add songs to a shopping cart. To purchase songs, you need to go to the full browser version of Sonic Living. Unfortunately at this time, albums don’t include artwork and you can’t add full albums to your cart.
Overall, this is a good attempt by a Music 2.0 site to provide an iPhone version of their service. With some of the additional improvements stated above, SonicLiving may provide users with a truly great app in their hands.
iTunes Purchase Yields Preferred Seating For Concerts
I occasionally purchase music on iTunes but usually search for DRM-free versions first on other services. I heard great things about the new Beastie Boys Album, “The Mix Up” and decided to purchase it on iTunes since they were offering it DRM-free. I was not expecting to receive an email a few days later that explained that purchasing the album on iTunes made me eligible for preferred seating to the upcoming tour via Ticketmaster. Of course there is alot of fine print that explains exactly what “preferred seating” means, but the general idea behind this feature is an excellent one. DRM-free download purchases coupled with rewarding fan loyalty finally begins to fulfill the promise of the Music 2.0 revolution while simultaneously providing a strong incentive against pirating. This approach helps iTunes and the labels legitimize download purchases and increase sales by adding value; It rewards fans who decide to purchase music legally when many other options exist; and, helps artists drive more ticket sales where many of them generate the bulk of their profit.
Privatunes
Personally, I was never really bothered by iTunes embedding my email address in the track metadata though many users lathered themselves into a frothy frenzy. Privatunes is a tool for Mac and Windows that erases personal information from your legally purchased iTunes Plus tracks. Just select the song you want to anonymize and Privatunes will do the rest. The tool also allows you to backup the original file just in case. Unfortunately there is no batch processing at the moment so you need to convert each file manually.
Stats Galore! Internet iTunes Registry
The Internet iTunes Registry is a project that allows you to upload your iTunes library file to a central database and get detailed reports on the listening behavior of yourself and the entire community. iTunes provides minimal information on your listening behavior and Last.fm, while much better, is more focused on providing recommendations and community tools.
After completing the free registration, I uploaded my library.xml file. I was pleasantly surprised to see all the available features and tools to help me analyze my behavior including:
- Artist, album and track statistics
- Histogram style listening habits
- Stats about your ratings
- Detailed genre and subgenre stats
- Tons and tons of useful and useless charts
- An interesting set of odd facts about your behavior
- A wallpaper generator
The one thing that bothers me most about the project deals with genre mapping. iTunes lets you assign custom genres, which can cause problems when calculating community statistics. To simplify the charts, IIR asks you to map all of your genres to their predetermined set. Unfortunately, this set only contains a few basic genres and some strange ones - for instance there is a rockabilly genre but no R&B. I understand the need for genre mapping, but IIR should use the default list that is used in iTunes.
There were a few performance problems here and there, the UI could really use some polish and I could not get some of the tools to work properly. However, It is definitely worth checking out if you’re like me and always wanted to know how many hours you have actually used iTunes since installing it and what your least recently played song was. You can check out my page here.
Jadam Kahn
in Community, Data Mining, Statistics, Tools, Visualization, iTunes
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2 Comments
NuTsie Review: iTunes on Your Phone
I have an iPod and a cellphone, though most of the time just carry the latter. nuTsie (beta) is a new application that allows you to access your iTunes playlists through your cell phone. After you register for your free account, nuTsie sends a text message to your cell phone with a link to download their mobile application. On the web site, you are taken to a page to upload your ITunes library XML file. nuTsie then tries to match songs in your library with songs in their catalog on their server. This process may take a while depending on the size of your library but they will send you a text message to your cell phone when the process is complete.The nuTsie web site provides you with a dashboard/profile page that contains links to all of your playlists. nuTsie only provides songs in your library that match items in their catalog and unfortunately, the catalog seems to be pretty slim - only a tiny fraction of my songs actually matched.
Don’t think of your playlists in the traditional way - think of them as stations with pre-determined content. The service seems to follow DMCA rules for playback - such as random order, no knowledge of the next track and no skipping back tracks. You have the ability to hear your playlists directly in the browser if you don’t want to use your cellphone.
I personally have a Motorola Krazr, which is not currently supported by nuTsie so I did not get a chance to test out the service on a mobile device. However, their site provides a pretty good overview of the UI. After you launch the application on your phone you will see a collection of all your playlists. When listening to a playlist, you will see the album art, metadata, track progress, and graphic that explains how to control playback. While nuTsie is free, it will eat up your data minutes, so be careful unless you have an unlimited data plan.At this time there is no way to make your profile or specific playlists private. You can also listen to other users’ playlists, though nuTsie lacks the ability to browse or search members or playlists in any easy way. Its also uncertain whether you can access member playlists via your phone. The UI is very plain, crowded and can use some reorganization to make primary actions more prominent.
nuTsie is only in beta, but if they address the issues around their catalog size, community development and user experience, they may have a very compelling service. nuTsie’s comes at the same time Pandora announced products to deliver streaming radio to certain cell phones. Couple that with the introduction of the iPhone later this month the mobile music market is looking at a promising 2007.
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