Music on your mac: Beyond iTunes

iTunes is one of the oldest Apple applications, and it is been around before even the MacOSX. It a media player and although it started as a purely music management tool it is now handling movies, podcast, radio streams and iPod/iPhone apps. However, in an average library still, the largest portion is the music. The average libraries can range from a few GB to TB, meaning from 1000 songs all the way up to 100,000 songs. And if we assume that you have the maximum number of songs still you might get bored. You heard all those songs again and again and again... What is afterwards... Well radio stations are one option, but not the best. Even if you find a station that plays Jazz or Rock only from Jazz artist to Jazz artist it might be a huge difference. So what do you do in that case?

Well the best solutions that have come up is Last.fm and Pandora. Both are great tools to find new artists and expand your music horizons. So how do they work what is the difference? I puzzled myself for a while and finally I found the answer. A very comprehensive article by Steve Krause, a well know analyst in the field of technology and gadgets world. I recommend reading the whole article to fully understand the concepts of the two different world.

Last.fm: It is probably the first tool of its kind. It is a collaborative based system for music recomendations. How it works? You are searching the artist you like, and it will start a station playing a random song of that artist. You can mark as Love or Ban that artist and the song. The filters will compare you sellection with the sellection of other users, and will find new suggestions for you. The more you listen, the more sellections.
Pandora: It is a complete different concept. It characterize the songs in 200 different parameters (music genes) ranging from the general genre all the way to beat rythm and melody. By letting you sellect an artist it will start filling the segments of your music genome as they call it. Based on that genome new music will be coming your way every time you are logging on.

Pros and cons:

• Music recomendation: Pandora although smart, if you love more than one genre of music it can easily balck out and run out of suggestions. Last.fm on the other side since it is based on simlar taste base, it will never run out of options although it might take wrong route.
• New artists: Since the Last.fm filters are socially based, before a new artists is surfaced, it will take time since it has to make it to the favorites of other users before it is piped to you. Pandora, on the otherside is independed of that so even the next minute after a new artists is added into the database, will come up as a suggestion.
• Interface: Pandora is purely web based interface, and recently it introduced the Pandora Desktop, which utilizes the Adobe Air. It is still however a snapshot of the web interface. Last.fm gives out a stand-alone program that is different from the on line interface. The Last.fm application is scrobbing (the word is used from last.fm to denote the tracks you listened to) all the songs you heard on your iPod.

Overall both programs have their pros and cons. I would say that the ease of use, Last.fm is much better than the one from Pandora. However, the music recomendation is more acurate from Pandora, since it is based on analyzign your taste. Given the fact that is a much newer application it has room to improve.

The botom line is that Last.fm and Pandora are great alternatives to iTunes, and are extremely helpful to discover new artists.

iTunes Tagging Vs. Sorting

One of the features I love in iTunes is the ability to sort a song with a different title or artist than the one it is actual named with. so let ’s say that we have the song “I walk the line” as it was preformed by Bob Dylan. So it is part of the “Dylan-Cash sessions” and the album artist is Bob Dylan. However since in that song both Dylan and Cash are singing the artist song is Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. The info panel wi look something like this:

The known iTunes Tag (info) panel.

However I want the song in the iPod to be indexed as if it was from Bob Dylan so I can find it under the selection Bob Dylan. So you can go to less famous panel called sorting. There you can change the title or artist (album etc) different that the original so it will be easier accessible.

The less known iTunes Sorting panel.

So now after this changes we can easily find this song under Bob Dylan, and not under Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. It is extremely important especially when you are forgetting the duets, or if you are bilingual, and you are editing the tags in your native alphabet but you want to find it with the latin alphabet. This is useful for searching a song on iPod and iPhone that do not support other inputs. See the following picture for example.

The Sorting panel used for international sorting and tagging.

Now the best part is that you can find this song by either typing “Σπανουδάκης” or “Spanoudakis”.