Download.com Review of Helium Music Manager

Helium Music Manager is a music tagger, renamer, cataloguer, browser, playlist manager and report creator. It can catalogue, edit and play the most common music formats (MP3, Ogg, WMA, iTunes M4A, FLAC, APE and MPC) as well as standard Audio CDs. Helium fully supports the major tagging standards including ID3 v2, APE2, Vorbis, WMA, Lyrics3 v2 and iTunes tags. Catalogue your entire digital music collection and audio CD collection with just a few clicks, regardless which media the files are stored on.

Use the new built in Music Information Browser to navigate through your music collection in an intuitive manner by means of a Web style user interface. Helium facilitates the structuring and searching of your favorite music by using the contents stored in the tags. Avoid manual typing; download tag information from various sources on the Internet (CDDB, Amazon.com, AllMusic, Discogs to mention a few). Download album art, artist pictures, track data, biographies, and lyrics.

Download.com Review of Helium Music Manager

All the buttons and windows can be overwhelming, but Helium Music Manager offers some valuable functions. It burns CDs from audio files on your PC. It includes a full-fledged audio player, Radon, which supports playlists. You can tag albums by type including bootleg, soundtrack, EP, and compilation, although first you have to select all the tracks in the album folder. The powerful tag editor and search engine support a variety of tagging formats.

It's not all good news, though. The confusing program installation prompts you to install MSXML files, opening up a separate installer window. You can't rip CD tracks. Gracenote CDDB hits a sour note with a registration that requires a username, password, and e-mail address. The nag screen appears at start-up and exit, reminding you of how many of the 15 allowed uses you have left. Still, people who have a lot of digital music on their PCs may find Helium Music Manager quite helpful.

 

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FileForum Reviews of Helium Music Manager 2005

Review

ninjeratu	Apr 25, 2005	Build 4536	3 out of 5	It's good looking and has lots of features, for sure, but has some annoying problems that _should_ have been stamped out in betatests. Surely SOMEONE betatesting had more than 5-6 MP3 albums? The #1 annoying thing is the import album function. Import a Various Artists folder and Helium can, for no appearant reason, create new albums and add some songs to these. Presumably it searches the net for a song-album match and add the song to the found album, though I have never allowed this. If you're importing many folders this might actually be difficult to correct since the annoying interface in Helium makes absolutely NO use of actual file folders and you might not know which Album a single MP3 belongs to .. That's why they're saved in folders, you moronic program! The GUI is often annoying and counter intuitive. Often the most used commands are hidden in menues while your screen is filled with useless information about the song currently playing and whatnot. Somewhere a beta tester should have pointed out that adding easily clickable buttons for stuff like "Browse album in Album Browser" would be a good thing, not hidden in menues. And, yes, you CAN customize toolbars and stuff. It's just that you're flooded with menues, commands and panes. You'll sooner quit the program in pure frustration than customize everything to your liking. Another winning annoyance is that it's almost impossible to prevent Helium from writing ID-tags to your MP3s .. which it does whenever you change or add something. Move an MP3 from one album to another (see above) and it need to update and write tags to all files in the album. Do this with a large MP3 collection for a while and you have thousands of fragmented files.. And a fragmented mind .. as often a single update can take a couple of seconds .. when all you wanted to do was change an Album name that the import function didn't get. Since Helium actually uses a database to store stuff in this should never happen. Leave my MP3s alone, thank you. Stupid program. The last major annoyance is the "Search for an album cover" function using the Amazon plugin. (There are other search plugins you can use). It's nice, though it rarely finds an actual cover. And you cannot ignore Not Found errors .. Try downloading covers for 20 albums and you'll probably end upp clicking Cancel 19 times. Most annoying. Some of the other search plugins actually do find covers from time to time, but more often than not nothing gets downloaded anyway. You might as well Google for the album covers yourself. Minor annoyances include the included audioplayer that is just a bar at the bottom of the page. It's way too small to be useful. You often press stop instead of skip forward. Which leads to another minor annoyance. If you use Winamp as your player and add an album to the play queue .. only the current song will be enqueued in Winamp. You have to press next song in _Helium_ if you wish to skip song. Even playlists refuse to queue all songs in Winamp. Helium is probably a media manager done by consensus, not by anyone actually using it daily with huge collections of MP3s. Too many flashy, pointless functions that are frustrating to use and too few easily used, simple and intuitive functions. It's got huge potential, though.
MentholMoose7	Nov 25, 2004	1.8	5 out of 5	Best Music Management on the market!
fredrikkarlsson	Sep 19, 2003	1.7.2	5 out of 5	The bug listed below in version 1.6 is solved in version 1.7. I was also a bit sceptic about this program at first, but I must say that version 1.7 is a real hit. These guys certainly know what they are doing.
Synapse Syndrome	Apr 23, 2003	1.6 Build 2865	3 out of 5	I would say that this is a very good program, but it doesn't work with mutli-user 2000/XP systems. It can only be run from the administrator account that it was installed on, and even then it screws with all other accounts (when you right click anything it tries to reinstall itself). Other than that it's a great program and I hope that these bugs will be sorted out soon.
maria@citymob.nu	Feb 24, 2003	1.21	5 out of 5	This program helps a lot when having lots of mp3 files scattered all over your hard discs and on CD-R's. I have very good control of my music.
adamsandler	Jan 15, 2003	1.21	5 out of 5	I like Helium very much. I have been a registered user since version 1.6, and they have been making really good progress on the features and interface

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The MetaBrainz Foundation Launches

Apr 22 2005,
21:56 UTC

The MetaBrainz Foundation Launches

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. April 19th, 2005 -- The recently formed MetaBrainz Foundation assumes the stewardship of the open-data MusicBrainz Project. The MetaBrainz Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt corporation, was formed to give MusicBrainz a solid legal footing for executing upcoming business relationships. The move to create a corporation is necessary as the MusicBrainz database grows and matures and corporations take notice of the premier alternative music metadata provider.

The board of directors for the new corporation includes the following noted professionals:

- Dan Brickley, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Joichi Ito, Neoteny Co. Ltd.
- Robert Kaye, Chairman and Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation
- Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School and Creative Commons

This strong board of directors gives the foundation access to a far reaching network of professionals that aid the organization in achieving its goals. Coinciding with the launch of the non-profit, the MetaBrainz Foundation starts its first fundraiser, which aims to raise $25,000 and increase the awareness of the project. This money will be used to bootstrap the foundation and to fund the operations and further development over the next six months. After six months, the foundation anticipates enough income from commercial data licenses to sustain operations.

Shortly after the launch, the MetaBrainz Foundation will offer licenses for its live data feed to customers who wish to use MusicBrainz data in their commercial offerings. The live data feed enables customers to maintain a continuously updated copy of the MusicBrainz database that is never more than seventy minutes out of synchronization with the main database. The data continues to be freely available for non-commercial uses both in its twice-weekly snapshot form and its live data feed. Corporations interested in licensing the data should consult the MetaBrainz web site or contact the Foundation directly.

MusicBrainz fosters a community of volunteers who contribute their knowledge about music to the project. Using MusicBrainz' peer review system, volunteers carefully groom the database to maintain a high level of accuracy and remove data redundancies. The database contains information about artists, albums, release dates, tracks, audio CD identifiers and acoustic fingerprints for tracks.

Recently, the MusicBrainz project released its much-anticipated Advanced Relationships feature that allows users to contribute detailed information about musical works and artists. These expanded capabilities can capture all of the credits that are typically printed in the liner notes of an audio CD, as well as data found in comprehensive musical biographies or discographies:

"With Advanced Relationships, MusicBrainz expands its data coverage beyond basic metadata and sets its sights on becoming a user contributed music encyclopedia. The project can now capture more information ranging from common knowledge to obscure facts about music. We are finally ready to incorporate the detailed information that users have been clamoring to contribute." said Robert Kaye, the Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation.

Strong growth in the user base and data size of the project shows that the Internet community has embraced the MusicBrainz project. With 100,000 registered users and 3 million tracks in its database, MusicBrainz emerges from its infancy and charts a new direction towards building a comprehensive music encyclopedia. MusicBrainz aims to collect information on all styles of music from all cultures around the globe, and make this information freely available to the general public.

Website: http://metabrainz.org

How will this effect Audioscrobbler?

[quote][b]Quoth gulogulogulo[/b]: SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. April 19th, 2005 -- The recently formed MetaBrainz Foundation assumes the stewardship of the open-data MusicBrainz Project. The MetaBrainz Foundation, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt corporation, was formed to give MusicBrainz a solid legal footing for executing upcoming business relationships. The move to create a corporation is necessary as the MusicBrainz database grows and matures and corporations take notice of the premier alternative music metadata provider. The board of directors for the new corporation includes the following noted professionals: - Dan Brickley, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation - Joichi Ito, Neoteny Co. Ltd. - Robert Kaye, Chairman and Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation - Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School and Creative Commons This strong board of directors gives the foundation access to a far reaching network of professionals that aid the organization in achieving its goals. Coinciding with the launch of the non-profit, the MetaBrainz Foundation starts its first fundraiser, which aims to raise $25,000 and increase the awareness of the project. This money will be used to bootstrap the foundation and to fund the operations and further development over the next six months. After six months, the foundation anticipates enough income from commercial data licenses to sustain operations. Shortly after the launch, the MetaBrainz Foundation will offer licenses for its live data feed to customers who wish to use MusicBrainz data in their commercial offerings. The live data feed enables customers to maintain a continuously updated copy of the MusicBrainz database that is never more than seventy minutes out of synchronization with the main database. The data continues to be freely available for non-commercial uses both in its twice-weekly snapshot form and its live data feed. Corporations interested in licensing the data should consult the MetaBrainz web site or contact the Foundation directly. MusicBrainz fosters a community of volunteers who contribute their knowledge about music to the project. Using MusicBrainz' peer review system, volunteers carefully groom the database to maintain a high level of accuracy and remove data redundancies. The database contains information about artists, albums, release dates, tracks, audio CD identifiers and acoustic fingerprints for tracks. Recently, the MusicBrainz project released its much-anticipated Advanced Relationships feature that allows users to contribute detailed information about musical works and artists. These expanded capabilities can capture all of the credits that are typically printed in the liner notes of an audio CD, as well as data found in comprehensive musical biographies or discographies: "With Advanced Relationships, MusicBrainz expands its data coverage beyond basic metadata and sets its sights on becoming a user contributed music encyclopedia. The project can now capture more information ranging from common knowledge to obscure facts about music. We are finally ready to incorporate the detailed information that users have been clamoring to contribute." said Robert Kaye, the Executive Director of the MetaBrainz Foundation. Strong growth in the user base and data size of the project shows that the Internet community has embraced the MusicBrainz project. With 100,000 registered users and 3 million tracks in its database, MusicBrainz emerges from its infancy and charts a new direction towards building a comprehensive music encyclopedia. MusicBrainz aims to collect information on all styles of music from all cultures around the globe, and make this information freely available to the general public.

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MusicBrainz Non-Profit White Paper

MusicBrainz Non-Profit White Paper
by Robert Kaye
February 2003

1. Introduction

MusicBrainz aims to create a music information commons where the community
creates and maintains a public database of information about music. This
music metadata will enable non-ambiguous communication about music, and will
allow the Internet community to discover new music without any of the bias
introduced by marketing departments of the recording industry.

The MusicBrainz project has been around since the fall of 1998 (previously the
CD Index), and is now gathering more support from the community and
partnering companies. In order to give MusicBrainz some legal muscle and to
ensure the future availability of the dataset, it is proposed that MB be
incorporated in California as a non-profit corporation.

However, creating and running a non-profit corporation costs money, and with
limited resources, MusicBrainz will depend on donations from the community
and industry sponsors to elevate it to the next step.

2. MusicBrainz Today

The first version of MusicBrainz, which nears completion during the first
quarter of 2003, focuses on creating an open database of basic music metadata
which can be used for identifying audio CDs and digital audio tracks (MP3,
Ogg/Vorbis, WAV, etc.). MusicBrainz is comprised of three separate components
which all work together to enable users to semi-automatically identify music
and apply clean metadata tags to their music collection:

MB Web site: The MusicBrainz web site allows anyone on the net to search,
browse, and maintain the community metadatabase. The web site users
(moderators) can add new metadata to the site, edit or correct existing
metadata, and delete incorrect metadata via the web-based moderation system.

MB web service/client library: All of the MusicBrainz data is available to the
public via the RDF-based web service. A web service client can search for and
request information about any artist, album or track in the database. A
client library released under the LGPL is available for developers who would
like to support MusicBrainz in their application. This client library
abstracts out the details of interacting with the MusicBrainz web service,
and allows a client developer to add metadata lookup to their applications in
a short period of time.

MB Tagger: This 32 bit Windows application (similar applications with support
for other platforms are also in development) takes an end-user's collection
of MP3, WAV and Ogg/Vorbis files, generates an acoustic fingerprint (TRM Id)
for each track and, using the fingerprint, looks up the track metadata. If
the main server does not have the metadata available, the application guides
the user through the process of entering the missing information into
MusicBrainz so that future users may benefit from the new metadata. After the
proper metadata has been downloaded/entered, new metadata tags are written to
the user's audio files.


The basic metadata includes a list of artists and artist aliases (e.g.
alter-ego names, alternate band names and common abbreviations) and for each
artist a list of albums and the tracks for each album. MusicBrainz assigns
each artist, album and track a unique identifier, which can be used to refer
to a particular artist/album/track without having to deal with the semantics
of correct spelling and conflicting names in the database.

These identifiers provide the Internet community with a means to establish a
meaningful computer-based dialog about music. This unambiguous dialog is
enabled by an RDF based web service interface and presents the first baby
steps towards the "Semantic Web", where computers can carry on a meaningful
discussion without involving human beings. The RDF used in the web service
uses portions of the Dublin Core and is documented on the MusicBrainz site.
MusicBrainz encourages others to use the RDF in other future music
applications to enable a host of new applications and features that are not
possible today.

For instance, it is not possible today to exchange a playlist with a friend,
since your friend may not have the same files that you do; even if your
friend does, the files may be located in a different location on the hard
drive. Using MusicBrainz, a user can create a playlist that consists solely
of MusicBrainz track identifiers, and then send that playlist to their
friend. Their friend will be able to feed the playlist to their
MusicBrainz-enabled audio player and then have the player match up the
available tracks. If some of the tracks are not available in the collection,
the player could go out to music sites such as EMusic.com, MusicNet or
Pressplay to download the missing tracks. The MusicBrainz identifiers allow
future audio applications to carry on unambiguous conversations about music
and to enable a whole new set of features for music enjoyment and music
discovery.

The MusicBrainz dataset has been created and maintained by its user base of
over 2000 volunteers. Since its inception as the CD Index in the fall of
1998, and the consequent renaming to MusicBrainz in the fall of 2000, the
database has seen more than 160,000 additions and changes (moderations) to
the database. Even without any promotion of the site, and all of the software
just now emerging from a beta state, the dataset is growing and improving in
quality. To see the latest statistics on MusicBrainz, please visit:
http://musicbrainz.org/stats.html.

MusicBrainz's human moderation approach encourages participation in the data
maintenance process and thus yields higher quality data, since many eyes will
spot even the smallest mistakes. Active moderation, concise technology for
identifying music and a carefully designed database allows MusicBrainz to
collect data with greater accuracy than services like GraceNote. The
GraceNote service suffers from an overwhelming number of errors and duplicate
entries in their database, and without a focus to reduce duplicates and to
correct errors in the database, they cannot compete with MusicBrainz in the
long run.

Furthermore, GraceNote charges serious amounts of money for severely
restricted access to its data. FreeDB, the free alternative to GraceNote, has
not created any new technology to advance the state of the project. FreeDB's
goal is to provide a service that is free and backward compatible to the old
GraceNote/CDDB service. This gives MusicBrainz the advantage to create the
first well-edited, highly structured and comprehensive music encyclopedia on
the net.

Once the TRM (acoustic fingerprint) and audio CD based music identification
portions of MusicBrainz have been completed, the service is poised for a
significant increase in the number of users contributing to and using
MusicBrainz. This will provide a powerful alternative resource for
non-commercial music developers and a very low cost alternative for
commercial music services and channels.

3. MusicBrainz Tomorrow

The basic metadata framework that the first generation of MusicBrainz puts
into place will enable more comprehensive and subjective metadata to be added
to the community metadatabase. A few possible additions include:

Reviews/biographies/ratings: Unlike the rest of the existing MusicBrainz
dataset, artist/album reviews/ratings and artist biographies and are not
factual metadata, and thus they will require a different approach in
collecting and maintaining. However, this subjective metadata may present the
most significant revenue source for MusicBrainz. (see below for details)

Music Discovery: The advanced music classification from above will allow
MusicBrainz users to browse the available genres and discover new music as
they find genres that describe their own musical tastes. Combining the music
classification with user-contributed information about their own musical
collections will enable MusicBrainz to offer collaborative filtering services
to its users.
Advanced Music Classification: Today's music classification systems leave a
lot to be desired, since music classification is a highly subjective task,
and few subjective systems have been developed to date. However, MusicBrainz
can harness the power of many users to create a representative classification
system that will evolve over time as musical genres evolve. Using data
collected from thousands of users will enable MusicBrainz to statistically
infer Genre Curves for artists and albums.

Detailed Music Information: MusicBrainz will expand to cover more information
about music such as artist web pages, official fan web pages, detailed
support for classical music (e.g. composer, opus number, orchestra,
conductor, etc.), and any other relevant pieces of information that will make
MusicBrainz into a comprehensive music encyclopedia.

Music Genealogy: MusicBrainz may keep track of which
artists/performers/engineers contributed to a piece of music, and when these
contributions took place. Combining this contribution data with data on how
artists influenced each other will create a genealogy of modern music.
Imagine being able to track Britney Spears back to Beethoven!

These are just a few of the possible future directions of MusicBrainz. The
actual directions will be heavily influenced by the MusicBrainz
partners/sponsors to create a mutually beneficial relationship between
MusicBrainz and its partners and sponsors.

4. MusicBrainz Licenses

MusicBrainz is devoted to using the right licenses for the right job and thus
the GPL (GNU's General Public License) is used for the server software and
the LGPL (GNU's Lesser General Public License) for the client library. The
use of the LGPL allows even closed source applications to use the client
library to access the MusicBrainz server.

The overall goal is to remove as many obstacles to accessing the MusicBrainz
dataset as possible and to foster the inclusion of MusicBrainz technology in
third party applications. To support this goal, MusicBrainz makes the dataset
available to the public by placing portions of the dataset into the Public
Domain and releasing other portions under Creative Commons'
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License 1.0:

Core data: The core data is comprised of the artist, artist alias, album, and
track information, as well as the CD Index identifiers, and TRM identifiers.
All of this data is released into the Public Domain.

Derived data: The derived data consists of artist, album and track text
indexes, as well as moderation and voting information, which is released
under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License from the Creative
Commons.


Subjective data: In the future MusicBrainz will collect artist biographies,
album reviews, music ratings, and other non-factual data and also release
them under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.


To some people the use of the Public Domain for the core data may come as a
surprise. However, the United States Supreme Court decided that facts are not
copyrightable and all of our core data is essentially comprised of facts.
This limitation, combined with the desire to have commercial enterprises use
the MusicBrainz core data to extend the reach of this data, makes the Public
Domain a perfect choice.

5. MusicBrainz and Commercial Enterprises
Even though MusicBrainz is an open source and open data project, MusicBrainz
actively encourages companies to participate in the MusicBrainz community.
The availability of the core dataset in the Public Domain encourages
companies to work with and link to the MusicBrainz dataset without having to
navigate a complex maze of license requirements.

MusicBrainz is not hostile towards commercial (for-profit) corporations! On
the contrary -- MusicBrainz will only reach its full potential if commercial
corporations use the dataset and encourage their customers to participate in
the MusicBrainz community. Any and all corporations around the globe are
encouraged to use the MusicBrainz core dataset to establish meaningful and
non-ambiguous conversations about music.

The derived and subjective data components in MusicBrainz are licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, which
prohibits the use of the data in a commercial setting. However, MusicBrainz
will make commercial licenses to the data available to companies that wish to
use the data in a commercial setting. The income from these license
agreements will provide MusicBrainz with the needed revenue to ensure that
the dataset continues to evolve and remains available to the public.

However, many companies are skeptical about using open source software because
there is no one to call (or hold responsible) should the software fail. Open
data projects like MusicBrainz are in a similar position -- what if the data
is wrong? Or not in the database at all? The answer to this lies in the
MusicBrainz community -- the community is comprised of individual
contributors who work hard to enter and correct the data in the system. The
MusicBrainz server software also enforces a peer review system, under which
users must review and approve changes made by other users. The peer review
system combined with the motivation, expertise and pride of its contributors
will ensure that the data in MusicBrainz will be comprehensive and reasonably
correct.

Only reasonably correct? No one can guarantee that all the data in a database
is correct. Not even the commercial companies that provide metadata services
can give this assurance. The MusicBrainz community will respond to problems
found in the database and fix mistakes faster than any commercial company
with paid contributors can, since the MusicBrainz community is global and is
never closed for business. Furthermore, the community is more supportive of
MusicBrainz than of other commercial services due to its open nature.

Another area corporations are skeptical about is the issue of service
reliability. The MusicBrainz servers have always lived in professional
colocation facilities with excellent connections to the Internet, and even
though there has not been a legal corporation watching over the servers for
the first four years of its life, MusicBrainz has had only a handful of minor
service interruptions.

In the future, MusicBrainz plans to create a network of mirror servers that
will mirror the dataset across the globe. Any corporations that would like to
work with MusicBrainz, but would prefer to handle their own servers for
reliability and added load balancing, will be welcome to operate their own
MusicBrainz mirror server. This option leaves all the service reliability
concerns in the hands of the corporation.


6. MusicBrainz Non-Profit Corporation

In order to ensure that the MusicBrainz dataset will continue to exist and
continue to be available to the public, a tax-exempt non-profit corporation
(503.c.3) should be created. This non-profit should adopt a set of bylaws
which will state that MusicBrainz will make all metadata created by the
MusicBrainz community available to anyone who wishes to download the data.
The MusicBrainz corporation should consider itself the guardian of the
MusicBrainz dataset and its community, and should take the necessary actions
to ensure that MusicBrainz can continue its mission.

The MusicBrainz non-profit should strive to become self sufficient over the
course of 2-3 years. To achieve this independence, it should pursue the
following possible revenue streams:

Contributions from the community: Users of the MusicBrainz Tagger will greatly
benefit from the project by having the tagger automatically clean up the
metadata present in a user's collection. For-profit companies charge for this
service, and MusicBrainz should ask users for a $10 contribution for the
service of cleaning up the metadata.

Google style ad-words program: As MusicBrainz gains more users, it will be
possible to offer an ad-words program similar to the one pioneered by Google.
Third parties will be able to purchase small and unobtrusive advertisements
that will be shown on artist/album pages.

License artist/album reviews and biographies: When MusicBrainz provides the
infrastructure to collect and manage album/artist reviews and biographies, it
will ask the authors of these works to assign the copyright to MusicBrainz.
These reviews and biographies will then be made available to the public under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Furthermore, as this collection of reviews and biographies becomes
comprehensive, MusicBrainz will offer a commercial license to this content
for use in commercial applications and web sites.

Provide MusicBrainz dataset services: As corporations switch away from
proprietary music metadata services, MusicBrainz will gain a larger user
base. However, since MusicBrainz is community funded it will be unable to
provide the bandwidth for millions of users to access the dataset. Large
commercial customers will be encouraged to setup their own MusicBrainz mirror
servers to handle the load of their own customers. However, some commercial
customers will not want to deal with this in-house and would rather contract
out these hosting and integration services. MusicBrainz will be available for
hire to carry out the hosting and integration of the dataset on behalf of
corporations. In the same spirit, if commercial customers would like to have
a dedicated support staff for addressing problems with the service or data,
MusicBrainz will also be able to provide these services.

The above revenue streams will take some time to develop, but over time
MusicBrainz will strive to grow its revenue and become self sufficient.
Should MusicBrainz find itself in a position of having excess revenue (where
a for-profit company would pay a dividend), it will offer grants or awards to
open source/open data/music projects and their developers.

MusicBrainz has never had anything to hide, and all of its business has been
visible to the public. The finances are transparent and all discussions are
carried out in a public forum. With this approach, MusicBrainz will attempt
to create a new kind of non-profit corporation that can continue to hold the
trust of its community.

Conclusion

Community feedback about the MusicBrainz project has been overwhelmingly
positive; now is the right time to take MusicBrainz to the next level and
create a non-profit corporation. If you believe that MusicBrainz has the
power to make a difference, please consider contributing money to
MusicBrainz. While we are looking for sponsors to contribute larger
donations, we welcome any donations. Anything helps to move the project
forward and keep it alive.

--
`The moroccans with the carpets
seem like saints
but they're salesman'

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MusicBrainz kicks azz, needs Macs

MusicBrainz kicks azz, needs Macs
Robert Kaye has re-launched his MusicBrainz service today. MusicBrainz is set of Free Software tools that are used to fingerprint audio tracks in MP3, WAV, Ogg and other formats, and to create unique identifiers for songs.

What this means is that the MusicBrainz tools can sample a piece of an audiofile, create an "acousitic fingerprint" of the song, and then check with the MusicBrainz server to see if it knows about the song yet. If it does, your music-player will automagically fetch the artist, album, track title and other info (as well as reviews, ratings by people you trust, playlists that include the song...). If it doesn't, you can enter the track info yourself and submit it to the MusicBrainz database so that the next person who comes along will get the info.

This is a lot like GraceNote's proprietary CDDB service -- which is how iTunes and other players figure out which CD you have in the drive -- but it's way, way better. Organizationally, MusicBrainz is setting itself up as a nonprofit, so there'll be none of CDDB's expensive and restrictive licensing terms for people who want to make players that use the service.

But it's also technologically far superior. CDDB can only recognize CDs. But as music is increasingly distributed online without any CD package, CDDB is getting less and less useful (plus, CDDB is riddled with errors and has a really bad API, so it's hard to build sophisticated services that rely on it). MusicBrainz works off of acoustic fingerprints, which are granular to the level of a single track, recognizably at different sample rates, and work across different file-formats.

It gets better. Because each fingerprint is unique, it means that two people can unambiguously discuss the same track. I can send you a playlist from my computer and your computer can play the songs I'm suggesting, even if you've given them different filename, have them stored in different formats, or have added different metadata about them.

This is also an extremely sweet basis for building collaborative filters atop of. If your computer and my computer can say with confidence that two tracks are the same, we have the basis for collaboratively filtering our collections and finding stuff that we should be listening to -- even if we don't know it yet.

There's only one catch: none of this stuff runs under OS X -- yet. Which is a goddamned shame, but Robert's broke, and he needs Apple hardware to play with in order to get this stuff ported over to MacOS. This is seriously cool stuff, and all the kids're gonna want it. Let's hope someone out there knows someone at Apple who can intervene on Robert's behalf and get him a loaner so that the Rest of Us aren't left out in the cold.

The answer to this lies in the MusicBrainz community -- the community is comprised of individual contributors who work hard to enter and correct the data in the system. The MusicBrainz server software also enforces a peer review system, under which users must review and approve changes made by other users. The peer review system combined with the motivation, expertise and pride of its contributors will ensure that the data in MusicBrainz will be comprehensive and reasonably correct.

Only reasonably correct? No one can guarantee that all the data in a database is correct. Not even the commercial companies that provide metadata services can give this assurance. The MusicBrainz community will respond to problems found in the database and fix mistakes faster than any commercial company with paid contributors can, since the MusicBrainz community is global and is never closed for business. Furthermore, the community is more supportive of MusicBrainz than of other commercial services due to its open nature.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Robert!)

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Helium Music Manager 2005 User reviews

 (21 votes)

CNET User Reviews

 

SHOW:  This version  |  All versions

The "Photoshop" of digital audio management

10-Apr-2005 07:02:45 AM

Reviewer: [H]omer

Pros: This is without question, not only the best Music Manager available today, but also one of the most refined and professional pieces of software ever ... in any genre and on any platform; an absolute classic.

The extent to which you can manipulate audio file metadata with Helium is truly staggering, and the interface is slick, powerful, extremely professional, and indeed one of the most liquid and gorgeous UIs of any application I have ever worked with. It is also surprisingly stable (for a Windows application); easily one of the most robust on that platform. Tagging, organising and finding digital audio files has never been so easy, nor such a pleasure to do.

Helium was designed to do one thing, and do it well, and that is work with embedded metadata in digital audio files that support tagging. It is not, nor has it ever pretended to be, a clone of iTunes, etc. There are 'Jukebox' applications; there are Media Players; and there are Taggers. In the realm of Taggers, Helium is King.

Cons: None

To address some of the points in the main CNET review ...

"The confusing program installation prompts you to install MSXML files":

This is necessary support files for the application, just like the support files required by any other software. If your system doesn't already have them, then they are installed. How is this a problem, and how is this "confusing"? The reviewer must be easily confused.

"Gracenote CDDB hits a sour note with a registration":

CDDB is only one of several options, of which FreeDB is also one. Surely this is an issue with CDDB, not Helium?

"The nag screen appears at start-up and exit":

Yes ... and? It's 'evaluation' software. Just register and get rid of the nag screen. How is this different from any other evaluation software?

"people ... may find Helium ... quite helpful":

Yes, and people may find your reviews quite helpful ... once you've learned how to properly evaluate the software you're reviewing.

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Does it all!

08-Mar-2005 11:40:29 AM

Reviewer: dj kaah

Pros: Very complete, has it all.

Good interface.

The Music Information Browser is awesome!

Supports all formats I use.

Cons: Takes a while to learn.

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No 1 Music manager, awesome tag editing capabilites

18-Apr-2005 12:46:54 AM

Reviewer: yggmark

Pros: This product is THE STATE-OF-ART music manager, the tag editing cabailities are simply outstanding, it sorts the music in any way you like without a lot of expanding and clicking in tree structures. The internal player is good-enough to replace any other player (even though you can have it interacting with winamp etc if you would like. The development team responds to potential issues urgently and have a really good communication with the users through the web. I simply must say that it is worth every dollar.

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Best of all music manager

20-Mar-2005 11:25:12 AM

Reviewer: Bighead

Pros: Nice interface. Fast, and has all the links to find almost the ankown.

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hard to use

07-Mar-2005 08:00:45 AM

Reviewer: 9thSense

Pros: many features

Cons: crowded interface

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Helium Music Manager screen shot

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	Your music collection is okay with Helium Music Manager.

Today, with huge hard disks being a status quo, a lot of people store all their music on their computer’s hard disk, instead of CD’s and DVD’s. But how to keep all the music files you have in order? How to make storing of the music in your collection comfortable and have compositions available at first request?

I’m going to tell you about Helium Music Manager – a program that will help you forget all the difficulties you encountered, trying to deal with loads of music you’ve got.

In Helium Music Manager you’ll find a lot of features, music lovers extremely need: powerful and fast composition search, sorting by any parameter, rating system and many other features.

As for me, I liked such an option as sorting by «Mood» and sorting by «Situation». If you invited someone who likes only certain type of music, or you just feel like listening only to entertaining music, then select in “Custom View” sorting by «Mood».
You may easily make Helium Music Manager play the compositions the way you want and in the order you prefer without wasting your time building special playlists.
In Helium Music Manager compositions are played through external player, so you may keep on using the player you like, say WinAmp, and use Helium Music Manager only as your music library. Though along with Helium Music Manager goes quite a good native player «Radon».


RADON MINI-PLAYER
It is quite comfortable to use this player, since in Helium Music Manager there is a Radon Remote panel, which serves as a remote control for the player. So, you may launch Radon just once, minimize it to System Tray, and still you can control it through the Radon Remote panel from within the main window.
You may use Radon player separately as well, that is without Helium Music Manager itself. I suggest trying a new mode, which I’ve never come across before in other players – «Party Mode».
«Party Mode» is a very interesting feature that may be quite useful during a party. In this mode you may set an access password, so that no one but you would be able to adjust the volume, stop the music or change anything else. Only adding compositions to the playlist is available for everyone – nothing more. Probably, the program developers added this feature in order for the guests not to fight when they choose a new song :) In case the master has forgotten to set a new password, so the password remained default, we may confidentially inform you that «Party Mode» password is “Radon2”.
Now, let us get back to our music library.


REPORTS
If you want to share your music with your friends and you need to quickly make up a list of compositions you’ve got, then you may use the «Quick Report» tool. The program will quickly generate a list of compositions in HTML or TXT format. Though to my mind, the main goal of report creating is to make up a cover for your CDs that you can easily produce with the «Burn Files» tool.


BURN FILES
Helium Music Manager can burn both CD and DVD. Before burning mp3 files to a CD, make sure the files are free from errors. You may perform error checking with the help of «Analyze MPEG files» tool.


BEAUTIFUL MUSIC COLLECTION
You’ve created a music collection but you have no suitable pictures for your disk covers? This problem is also solved in Helium Music Manager. You may use a plug-in for pictures downloading. Just right-click on the album lacking pictures, select «Pictures» and then – «Get from internet». The program will help you find a proper picture for your CD cover.

We’ve not yet mentioned all the features Helium Music Manager offers, so we suggest you download and try it yourself.

If you’ve got a lot of music, then download Helium Music Manager, install it, and you’ll see how easy it is to keep your music collection in order.

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I Know That Song!

I Know That Song!

02.12.03

By Sebastian Rupley

In an effort to provide an open standard for recognizing and identifying digital music files, MusicBrainz, an open-source metadata service, has unveiled a new music-recognition service. Working with partners who've developed technology that can recognize file tags associated with digital music files, MusicBrainz is aiming to create a complete public database of tagged music files that allow for easy identification, searching, and sorting. This database could, for example, help online music sites provide automated song recommendations. Since 1998, MusicBrainz has, with the help of a community of 2,000 contributors, been building an archive of over 650,000 music tracks. Each track is tagged so that client software can recognize the song. The technology that MusicBrainz uses to recognize digital songs through these tags comes from a partner company, Relatable. Another company, AgentArts, provides the technology used for data mining of the information in the MusicBrainz database.

In the nearly five years that MusicBrainz has been pursuing its goal, intelligent music data-mining has become a Holy Grail for entertainment software developers, device manufacturers, and online music services, all of whom already spend heavily to license metadata services that can recognize songs through digital fingerprints. The explosive popularity of digital music players and online music downloading is driving the need for such data mining. The recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas presented many high-capacity digital music devices that can archive and sort vast music libraries. MusicBrainz has been signing commercial and non-commercial sponsors to help it grow an open-source service that can compete with services that license song recognition technology.

"Currently there is no free and universally accepted digital music metadata available to the online music space," said Robert Kaye, founder of MusicBrainz, "and the very few commercial companies who provide this resource offer their services under highly restrictive and expensive licenses. It is our belief that a universal standard for digital music recognition is simply too important and valuable to all online music services to be monopolized by any one company. We also believe that online music consumers would much rather contribute to a truly open source resource."

MusicBrainz has posted a white paper on the technology and goals behind its effort. MusicBrainz is releasing its dataset of tagged songs into the public domain under the name Creative Commons.

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MusicMagic Mixer™: Add Acoustic Powers to your WMA collection

MusicMagic Mixer™: Add Acoustic Powers
to your WMA collection

RELATED LINKS

WMPlugins.com

Download MusicMagic Mixer

Marc Campbell
January 2004

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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MusicMagic helps you manage your digital music collection. It can organize by artist, album, or genre and allows you to manage your music based on your unique musical preferences -- all based on the acoustical elements in your music. With the selection of a single song, a play list consisting of hours of music can be created to suit any mood or even event. Features include: Easy and quick creation of custom playlists. Connects to 3+ million song attribute database. Supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, & FLAC Provides sound-based playlists, shuffle, search and discovery features. Supports large music collections, including independent, classical, and little known music. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later, iTunes. Fast Free Tech Support For Your Mac Get Support Partial User Reviews/Comments Write A Review Comment by Anonymous : This program has completely changed the wa y i listen to music. its brilliant makes really acurate mixes and is the easiest and quickest way to make compliations for background music at parties etc. You select one song and it plays via whatever media player you like song that sound similar. A brilliant Program only wish it could read all file types (theres a hack on the message board to get around this problem though). (1/5/2005, Version: 1.1.3.2) [ Reply ] Review by Eddy : Well, 1st of all, it's just like the 'Browse' function in iTunes, with maybe a few diferrent shuffle functions. 2nd. Where are all my AAC files?? Doesn't read them. Since 95% of my Music is AAC, this program has no added value for me. (9/2/2004, Version: 1.1.2b5)

Reader Ratings: Features: Ease of Use: Value: Stability:

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MusicMagic Mixer 1.1.2

MusicMagic Mixer 1.1.2 REVIEW DATE:  02.08.05 Product: MusicMagic Mixer 1.1.2 Price: $29.95 direct. Company: Predixis Inc., http://music.predixis.com     Total posts: 1   $29.95
By Troy Dreier
This app mixes like a bartender, blending a little of this and a little of that to make a tasty combination. Once MusicMagic 1.1.2 has analyzed your music collection, select a song or album to have it make a custom playlist based on your choice. You can tweak the results by right-clicking on songs and selecting More Like This or Less Like This from the pop-up window. Preference options let you dictate how much variety you'll get in your creations. We love how crystal clear the interface is; it's simple enough that anyone can start making mixes immediately. MusicMagic playlists will play in your default music player, where you can transfer them to your portable device. It's the only program here that can be used on both Macs and Microsoft Windows systems.

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MP3 Insider: It takes a village to beat the iPod

	MP3 Insider: It takes a village to beat the iPod

By Eliot Van Buskirk
Senior editor, CNET Reviews
(March 7, 2003)

Apple's iPod has been our favorite MP3 player for more than a year, mostly because of its world-beating design. The player's physical wins are obvious: a small size, an intuitive menu structure, and the much-lauded scroll wheel. The iPod's software is equally impressive and subtler than most since you barely notice it. Currently, no MP3 player integrates with its corresponding file-transfer software as well as the iPod does with iTunes. And because players have to be synced to your computer regularly in order to load new songs, seamless integration with your digital-music collection is a key denominator in the perfect-MP3-player equation.

Cases in point are the Mac and PC iterations of the iPod. The Mac versions received a 9.0 rating from CNET, while the Windows models scored an 8.7. The reason for this ratings disparity is simple: the Mac iPod integrates much more tightly with iTunes than the Windows version does with MusicMatch. On a Mac, all you have to do is plug in the iPod; iTunes launches, checks for new content, and syncs it to the portable device's hard drive without crashing or freezing. The MusicMatch experience on a PC is decidedly bumpier

Synergy is not always a vacuous marketing term
It's not the iPod, the operating system, or the iTunes software alone that makes the Mac iPod so smooth to use--it's the way that all three work together seamlessly. Apple has a clear advantage over other portable-device manufacturers because the company controls the operating system, the computer hardware, and the product design. To see how much harder this sort of integration is within the Windows world, consider the new iPod clone that I just reviewed, the eDigital Odyssey 1000. This hard drive-based player has more features and a 20GB hard drive for less money, but loading MP3s onto it, especially initially, involves an inordinate amount of work on the part of the user. Clearly, your time is too precious to spend all weekend reorganizing your 20GB music collection into a bilevel folder tree (with the Odyssey, all files ideally need to be inside an album folder, and all the album folders need to be contained within artist folders).

So, what's an MP3-hardware manufacturer to do? Maybe they should stop writing software altogether and let third-party shareware developers handle the interface. After all, you don't see Dell or Gateway developing operating systems and software for their hardware.

Let the software people write the software
This idea occurred to me after following a company called Red Chair Software, which offers a nifty app called Notmad Explorer that syncs your PC with Creative's Nomad line. If you own a compatible Creative player--the original Nomad Jukebox, the Nomad Jukebox 2, the Nomad Jukebox 3, the Zen, the Nomad II, or the MuVo--you can purchase the software from Red Chair for $10 to $35, depending on which package you buy. Besides clean syncing, Notmad offers some out-there features, including the ability to use the Jukeboxes as Web-based MP3 servers or SQL databases, as well as advanced playlist creation.

I e-mailed the owner, director, and sole full-time employee of the company, who calls himself Red Chair, to find out how his firm ended up in the intriguing position of writing software for someone else's electronics.

When Red first came up with the idea of writing software for the Nomads, Creative offered a software development kit (SDK) for third-party companies to use when devising new add-ons. But initially, Red says, the SDK was too buggy to be of much use. His problems were solved when a Belgian Nomad user reverse-engineered the Nomad protocol. In America, such a stunt is illegal, but that's not the case in Belgium. The user released his own SDK, called JBDirect, in late 2001. Red Chair started using the Belgian's handiwork in early 2002 to create Notmad.

What, they didn't sue?
Eventually, Creative found out about this. But instead of suing the bejesus out of Red Chair in the manner that many shortsighted corporations typically do, Creative's top brass endorsed the idea, and the company now supplies Red Chair with an improved SDK, free equipment, and early driver information to help him keep up with Creative's development cycles. Why? Because the company knows that Red Chair makes its MP3 players more appealing--especially to the sort of hard-core techie types who use the software to build SQL databases and gauge their USB transfer rate with that of other Notmad users.

People are taking notice. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Creative's support staff occasionally refers users to Red Chair's site to download the Notmad software, in hopes that it will correct their problems. And Red told me that sales are three to four times what they were a few months ago and continue to improve every week. These days, what other companies can cite that sort of growth rate? Aside from maybe DuctTapeGuys.com, I can't think of an example.

Red Chair is no longer an isolated case. MoodLogic, the song-identification company that I wrote about in June 2000, is poised to make a similar move. Since it already develops software that can automatically identify songs in your collection and fix their ID3 tags, MoodLogic is uniquely positioned to redefine itself as a third-party device-syncing developer. After all, it would be pretty convenient to transparently clean up your improperly tagged files as you send them to your MP3 player.

To this end, MoodLogic has quietly been adding support for more and more MP3 players to its song-identification product. Elion Chin, cofounder and vice president of corporate development for MoodLogic, told me that the company plans on releasing beta 2.0 of its new DeviceLink software on March 7. The app has been designed from the ground up to integrate more tightly with MP3 players. Currently, DeviceLink supports three players: the Apple iPod (Windows), the Archos Jukebox, and the RCA Lyra Jukebox.

A full version of DeviceLink will be available to MoodLogic users in March for an additional fee of $10. If the company can successfully combine its existing song-identification technology and add cool features such as the ones that Red Chair has been working on, device manufacturers will be falling over themselves to bundle it with their MP3 players. Users will certainly benefit and could start defecting from the iPod ranks--especially now that many iPod users report that the player's internal battery dies after a year.

The hippo and the bird
Device manufacturers have been dropping the ball on the software end of the equation for long enough. At best, their apps don't get in your way; at worst, they ruin perfectly good hardware. Maybe it's time that hardware builders admitted that they need some help. In the strange ecosystem where hardware meets software, things might work better if device manufacturers formed a symbiotic relationship with companies such as Red Chair and MoodLogic. Everyone wins: The devices gain new powers, users get more out of their players, and syncing-software developers collect registration fees for their efforts.

MP3 Nugget: Create instant playlists

I love Winamp--the clean original version 2.81, not the newer release that Nullsoft developed while operating under the auspices of AOL/Time Warner. But compared to Windows Media Player and MusicMatch, Winamp is sorely lacking in one department: playlist manipulation. OneClickPlay can help. It's a freeware executable that you can drop into as many directories as you want. Double-click it, and OneClickPlay will scan that directory and all of its subfolders, then spit out an M3U playlist that Winamp will automatically play. It's the perfect MP3 Nugget: small, free, and efficient.

Download OneClickPlay now

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moodlogic: my review

moodlogic: my review

having downloaded, installed and then coughed up the USD$50 to activate my music through moodlogic and connect my mp3 player to the tool i was obligated to spend some serious time getting to know the software. over the last week and a half i've used, abused and generally grown to understand how moodlogic operates and how it can be useful when it comes to accessing my music collection. read on if you want my full take on moodlogic and it's devicelink technology.

i had intended for this review to be a fairly organized what's good, what sucks type post. but i got a little sidetracked and didn't really write an outline before i started rambling. so it's a little less like that, but hopefully still useful and informative.

what i have come to understand it is

moodlogic, in the most concise words i can find, is itunes. indeed, after some serious time spent with both programs in the last few months i have to say that moodlogic is a better itunes. moodlogic is the missing piece in the iriver puzzle as well; it can give you the much desired auto-playlists that ipod users hold over us as the holy grail of their own players. actually, that's a bit of a lie: it can give almost auto-playlists -- it won't enable your iriver to make the lists on the fly, but it can do a darn good job cookin' them up and sync'ing them to your device. more on the sync'ing in a bit. i have to qualify my statement above before all fifty mac users out there come down on me as mac users are apt to do when ever anyone attacks an endangered species like apple.

moodlogic has a nice, clean, simple interface to it. it is very itunes-like in it's brushed metal and candy store button look. actually, i firmly believe apple lifted more than just the spirit of moodlogic for itunes (and i can say this because moodlogic has been around for a few more years than itunes). the itune/ipod playlist generation by genre now looks clearly ripped off (maybe oem'ed?) from moodlogic. and the interfaces are strikingly similar. which i find doubly strange because moodlogic is a windows app with a mac app look.

buttons in moodlogic are few, obvious and one click does much. they have empowered the single click you could say. moodlogic's primary goal is to allow you access to your music in a non-standard, not-just-files-on-disk way. they want you to pick what you listen not by artist, or silly id3 genre, but by mood. to accomplish this task they require users to fill in their "mood database" for them. in return for answering a little questionaire about songs on your hard drive and submitting this information to moodlogic you get credits. credits can be used to "activate" songs on your hard drive, enabling moodlogic to access these tunes when it creates auto-mixes. the more songs activated, the bigger, badder and ultimately better your mixes that moodlogic generates will be.

it's the concept of "mood" that took me a few days to get my head around. not all the music in my collection works with moodlogic. tracks that aren't music, like the spoken intro tracks between songs on tom waits' album 'nighthawks at the diner' are a good example of this. because they don't have a mood, and because you wouldn't want the spoken track showing up in a mood mix without the audio track immediatly following it (something moodlogic cannot be told to do), you're better off removing these tracks from moodlogic. not from your collection mind you. you just want to tell moodlogic that this is a track it should not concern itself with. with the red herrings weeded out i found moodlogic's auto-playlist generation capabilities to be really be quite good. i've been listening to the mood+tempo lists it placed on my iriver player for the past few days and the songs are well selected. the mood well regulated. on a rainy fall day there's nothing worse than a bubble gum pop tune showing up in your melancholic play list.

moodlogic, i have come to learn, is not the way to access your music. it's a way. there are still times when i want to listen to a whole album, something moodlogic does not let you do particularly well. you have to create a custom playlist for each album and it's not easy to make sure the tracks are in their proper album track order. infact, i have a huge gripe that moodlogic won't let me sort tracks in it's display by their id3 track number tag. but when you've got a lot of music and you like your mp3 player to act like a personal radio station, moodlogic is a great way to add some simple categories to that "radio dial". i can now carry 20 gbs of music with me, plus access it based on the mood i'm in. driving the car? i'll want fast, aggressive music (or maybe not...). writing some code? i like mellow, electronic music because it makes for great background noise. whereas the iriver's shuffle function was a nice way to keep the music random, the moodlogic auto-playlists keep the music random and constrain it to mood. i find myself twiddling with the remote considerably less because a power song came on while i was coding and broke my concentration on my work.

what i now know it ain't

i can repeat myself here: moodlogic, i have come to learn, is not the way to access your music. it's a way. i don't find the moodlogic interface useful for all kinds of music. epic albums, things that really needed to be listened to from track 1 to track n and in order, they don't work well with moodlogic. when it comes album- or even artist-based browsing i much prefer the winamp music manager interface or even my own carefully organized directory structure i use for storing my music.

the good, the bad, the ugly, the awaited

first the good:

• nice, simple interface lets you quickly and easily create mood mixes.
• the devicelink interface is excellent. i really like it. it's very smart too: if you have two playlists sync'ed to your player and they both have the same song in them, the song only gets sync'ed once. it's that kind of forethought that permates the tools inner workings. as a programmer it's i can really appreciate this level of detail.
• if you're trying to access your music by mood, tempo range, year range, artist of genre it's execellent.

the bad:

• accessing your music through moodlogic by album or track number is almost impossible (you're left having to mouse over tracks for this kind of information). it's a little easier by track name but not much. they could make moodlogic a one-stop music interface if they made album and track based access less frustrating.
• sync'ing complete albums because of the above problem becomes laborious: you have to create a playlist for the album and make sure the tracks are in the right order. you'll do it once or twice and quickly realize it's deadly slow way to things.
• if you're starting out with moodlogic and you have a LOT of mp3s (especially ecclectic music) then you're going to be spending a lot of time adding the mood information to the database by hand. the good news is moodlogic "pays" you in the form of copious amounts of credits to answer their mood questionaire for tracks that aren't in their db already. infact, i could have tagged my whole collection for free based on the amount of credits i've earned submitting info to the database. consider this approach before you cough up the USD$50 for the 10k of credits. the downside is that this takes time. and it's a mouse-intensive questionaire so have some ice packs near by to help fight rsi.
• for some reason their ability to read id3 tags is limited. i'm an anal retentive id3 tagger. my tags are as close to perfect as i can get them, even for the music i've downloaded and not ripped myself. regardless of this, when updating the mood database by hand for songs, the questionaire that pops up can't read the artist, title and year information from the id3 tag (and it's there in v1.0 and v1.2 format). stupid. this should not be.

the ugly:

just one thing here: i'm torn on the interface. i'm not a mac user (although i have lamented about trying mac in the past) so why do i want a mac interface on my windows machine? it's nice and simple, but there's a steeper learning curve because buttons don't look like window-style buttons and the gui just generally doesn't behave the way i expect a windows gui to behave. for a good criticism of this mac-type interface used in apple's quicktime product see this page. it's a good read and supports my criticism of the moodlogic ui.

the awaited:

moodlogic is promising some online integration by way of "playlist sharing". i'm not sure how great this will be: yea i can see your playlist but does that matter if i can't also get the tunes? i'll make that call as the new online features appear.

the other awaited update is, well, the next version of moodlogic. because they use a credit model to pay for their development costs and make money, they give the software away for free. so future upgrades are gratuit. this means i'll be anxiously awaiting the next version, hoping it addresses some of my complaints and improves upon what i'm now convinced is a great way to access my vast and growing mp3 collection.

the summary

i could have saved myself the USD$50 if i'd realized i had enough eccletic music on my hard drive to make up the credits i needed to tag my entire collection. keep this in mind if you're thinking of trying out moodlogic. visit the profile center in the tool early on and sort on credits awarded (moodlogic gives you 2 credits if the song isn't in the db at all, 1 credit if it's there but not many people have submitted their opinion of it, and 0 credits if it's there and they have enough opinions to form a good average of the mood of the song). also, if you're considering moodlogic and your collection is currently small it'd be a good idea to get started with it now because otherwise, like me, you're left with a few evenings worth of work hand-tagging the files that weren't found in the db. at least if you start with a small collection your time spent hand-tagging will most likely be spread out over a longer, more comfortable period.

i like the tool. i like having the mood-based interface to my music. i've often wanted just the romantic stuff, or just the upbeat stuff, and now i can get at that music without having to spend any more time managing playlists as i add and remove music from my collection. if they can take my criticisms and improve the ui i think they could get pretty close to a killer interface app. make it cross-platform and you're done. i'm not regretting the loss of USD$50 dollars for moodlogic. if you have varied tastes in music i highly recommend moodlogic.

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