D-World, Let's talk about Digital Music: MusicMagic Mixer™: Add Acoustic Powers to your WMA collection

MusicMagic Mixer™: Add Acoustic Powers
to your WMA collection

Give Your Player More Power

MusicMagic Mixer™ is a new Windows Media Plug-in to use with your Windows Media Player. You can enjoy all of your music with Mixer—an acoustically empowered music library manager.

Create custom playlists and hours of radio-like music listening to suit your mood. Simply by picking one song, or several songs, MusicMagic Mixer will compile a list of songs that are similaror different, or it can shuffle them into different, alternating sequences. There is no need to constantly change CDs or to listen to a radio with annoying commercials, just to satisfy a need for long-term music listening.

With just the touch of a button, you can enjoy your music with Mixer's automagic acoustical playlists, shuffle, search, and discovery.

Acoustic Expertise

The result of research by a team of physicists, musicologists and signal processing experts, MusicMagic's technology can automatically determine the key listening attributes of any song in WMA format. The MusicMagic technology is based on music's acoustic attributes, which are intrinsic to the listening experience. MusicMagic Mixer has been optimized for Windows XP

Get Started with MusicMagic

Getting started is easy. Download the mixer from wmplugins.com

. Once your music is put into Mixer, it will review your music library, process the music, and remember the musical attributes of your songs. Your computer will get this information from the MusicMagic server.

As Mixer processes your music, song titles will turn green for "go". This means that the song is now active. You can click on any of the "green" songs and MusicMagic will find a list of songs from your library which sound similar. You can send this list to your Windows Media Player.

Activate (Enchant) Your WMA Collection

After following the install steps, MusicMagic Mixer will appear on your screen. A Browse for Folder will also appear for first time users. You must select the folders in your computer which contain the music you want to put into Mixer.

If you want to add music later on, click on Library/Add Songs, which will bring up the Browse for Folder. Follow the steps for first time users.
After you have finished adding songs, Mixer will look-up analysis data for each of your songs from the MusicMagic server. This initial lookup will only use the metadata tag information, and is very fast. Music must be analyzed in order to be included in mixes and playlists.
Songs will appear in red before they have been processed. As they turn to green, this means the track has been analyzed and can be included in the activities of Mixer. Songs which turn to black are considered unusable in the creation of a playlist but can still be listened to.

The easiest way to process your music is to choose Library/Process Now from the menu. The Mixer will also process music whenever it is running and the screen saver turns on. Just remember to leave the application running until all your songs have been processed.

Note: The analysis of your tracks could take a little while—so be patient. Allow processing time for your music which is not already in Mixer library. Processing time varies from a fraction of a second to several minutes persong but is a one-time task (see the Predixis Web site FAQ

for more information). Naturally, you can make lists at any time with the songs which have already been turned green. The next step is to create your first mix.

Create New Acoustic Mixes

Playlists can be generated based on the number of tracks you want to play, the number of minutes you want to listen or to the maximum file size (megabytes). You can also base a new mix to just those genres which you select.

Playlists based on a specific mood, like "Party Music" or "Driving Tunes", can be easily saved. Whenever you select that mood, Mixer will create a playlist from those songs. You can always create new moods, or modify existing ones.

To generate a playlist, highlight a song you would like to use as the building block, and press the New Mix button.

A list of songs will appear in the lower window which are similar to the original song.

You can then press the Play button to send the selected songs to your music player. Mixer also supports dragging and dropping on to your portable device, music player, or CD burner as supported by those applications.

After you've made your first few mixes, you may want to browse the Predixis Web site Tips & Tricks section

for some more advanced options. Note that you can configure the size of the generated lists from the File/Customize Options menu.

Note: If you would like to build a playlist based upon multiple songs, press Shift or Ctrl Key, highlighting as many songs as you'd like and then press the New Mix button.

Acoustic Shuffle

In addition to creating hours of similar music playlists from your library, Mixer can also shuffle the list of songs to create acoustically different listening experiences: sawtooth shuffle (a random shuffle which alternates between loud and quiet songs); smooth shuffle (shuffle which minimizes the acoustic changes between each adjacent song) and jagged shuffle (shuffle which maximizes the changes between adjacent songs).

Note: You can also pick songs from a specific genre or a mix of genres. The Mixer genre list contains all genres indicated by the metadata associated with your WMA files.

Acoustic Discovery

Mixer is a great solution to help you discover indie music which complements your collection. Why? Because acoustic power discovers music based on your choice of song, album or artist sound.

MusicMagic Mixer is the ultimate music library power tool. This innovative solution will make your music collection come to life!

Predixis CEO Marc Campbell is an music and signal processing enthusiast. He enjoys working with an innovative team which can make music collections more enjoyable for Windows users.