Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

The masters of the smooth song at transition at The Echo Nest  have put together a 10 minute version of the Christmas classic by stitching together  of 50 different versions of Jingle Bells.  Some of the transitions in the clip are really quite amazing - better than a human could do - of course the computer has the advantage - not only can it align the songs and manipulate the faders like a human can do - it can also time stretch or compress a song to force it to align - something that even the best turntable master would have a hard time doing.  Some of the song alignment techiniques  are described in chapter six of Tristan's thesis.

I hope that Echo Nest opens up for business soon - the song transition technology that they are pioneering will be an important distinguishing feature for them.  I've listened to many hours of automatic radio - shuffle play on the iPod, as well as the streaming recommender radio stations like Pandora or last.fm - and have grown weary of the 'iPod whiplash' that comes from these systems.