I recently began exploring some of the more fancy features of winamp, which is the piece of software I use to play all of my music on the computer. It has some quite cool stuff in it, all linked into it’s “media library”, which is basically a convenient way of storing information about all of the media files on your computer.
It does stuff like remember how many times you’ve played a track, thus creating a list of your favourite (or at least most listened to) songs. It also organises everything in useful ways so that it’s very easy to find the music you want.
The feature I’ve been most impressed with at all though is something called MusicMagic, which basically looks at all of your music, analyses it and checks it against a large online database, and comes out with other music in your collection which is similar in style. Once all of this fancy analysis is complete, you can select any track and ask winamp to give you a selection of other similar tracks, which it dutifully does, very accurately.
So now instead of the music I listen to either being album by album or completely random (which can result in very odd progressions), I’ve been using this tool to pick out playists depending on what I feel like listening to. Basically, it’s fantastic!