So, while I’m at work, I tend to have some sort of music going on in the background, since I don’t have my whole personal library available (at least, not yet), I’ve become a member of the streaming radio revolution. The obvious choices (for personalized stations, and music you actually want to listen too) are Pandora and Last.fm. I’ve really grown to like both services (although I have a slight preference for last.fm at the moment) the main issue for me is that I have 5,000 songs sitting on my hard drive, all artists I like, so why can’t I get the same awesome intelligent matching among those tracks?
Mirage is an implementation of a Masters thesis on music analysis, the proof of concept code was written in C# (under mono) and targeted at Linux, specifically the Banshee music player. When at home, I love Banshee, I’ve done my fair share of development work on it, and always have a fresh svn checkout of it to see whats new. However, work is on a Windows machine, and I want this cool nifty awesomeness their as well. As a result, I have embarked upon a port of the Mirage library, as well as the creation of an iTunes plugin to make this code useful 
Since I figured some other people might be interested in this I made a project at Google Code. There’s not much their yet, just some clumsy stabs at working with Visual Studio (I’m using the 2008 Beta 2… its ‘free’ as in Beer). Anyways, I’ve jotted down some erratic thoughts as to possible goals/design choices.
The current installer should run fine if you have iTunes installed, and parse mp3 and aac files fine. (sorry 32 bit only at the moment) However, I really need to do some more investigation before I’ll know if I’m passing the right data into the library.
Anyways, its cool and all kinds of fun to start using COM If anyone has experience with windows ports and wants to lend a hand or some advice, its all more than welcome.
Technorati Tags: c#, music analysis, smart playlist, iTunes, last.fm , pandora, mono, mirage
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I’d be interested in how fast Mirage is in analyzing tracks, and how perceptually coherent the playlists generated are.
I’ve been using MusicIP Mixer ( http://www.musicip.com/ ) for about 3 years and have been quite pleased with it. Enough that I actually paid for it back when it was still in beta.
To be completely honest, I hadn’t ever heard of musicip before, I’ll definitely check it out. There’s actually a licensing issue with using the GPL’ed libraries in conjunction with iTunes, so at the moment, it looks like I won’t be supporting that (at least not directly through COM, although I could still parse the db file on my own) However, my inclination at the moment is to give a little more time and energy to checking out the banshee to windows port, or (the more likely option) try Songbird (http://www.songbirdnest.com/), and investigate a solution with them.
As to accuracy, I can’t really say at this point, the port isn’t really functional yet, and is still pretty slow. However, 90% of the time is decoding the audio to process, and were looking at some other solutions for that, so well see!