The Filter - an iTunes playlist generator
The Filter is
a plug-in for iTunes that will generate playlists that match the 'mood
and tone' of your seed tracks. Judging from the the FAQ, it
looks like the playlists are generated by the standard collaborative
filtering techniques, which means that 'mood and tone' really means
'people who liked this song, also liked these songs'. So we
can add another collaborative filtering music recommender to the
mix. Pretty soon we are going to need a recommender just to help
us pick a music recommender.
The Filter currently only works with iTunes for Windows, so I can't try it first hand (a Mac OS X version is coming soon) - but from the screenshots and FAQ it looks like the app tries hard to look and work like iTunes:
One of the difficulties faced by all of these CF and content-based recommenders have to face is how to resolve song titles to their music database. Some, such as MusicIP use a music fingerprinting system to resolve a track to the proper metadata, while other systems, including The Filter, will attempt to match songs to their database by using the information in the ID3 tags attached to your song. This means that if the ID3 tags are not correct, The Filter won't be able to build playlists from or including that song - the only course of action is for you to fix the ID3 tag of the offending song. For many, the ID 3 tags are a mess (even songs that were ripped from CDs can have problems).
It seems to me that for a music recommender to distinguish itself from the ever growing pack of recommenders it either has to be extremely innovative (like Pandora ) or execute really well - like qloud is trying to do. I'm not sure if The Filter has what it takes. - Thanks Jeremy for the tip.
The Filter currently only works with iTunes for Windows, so I can't try it first hand (a Mac OS X version is coming soon) - but from the screenshots and FAQ it looks like the app tries hard to look and work like iTunes:
One of the difficulties faced by all of these CF and content-based recommenders have to face is how to resolve song titles to their music database. Some, such as MusicIP use a music fingerprinting system to resolve a track to the proper metadata, while other systems, including The Filter, will attempt to match songs to their database by using the information in the ID3 tags attached to your song. This means that if the ID3 tags are not correct, The Filter won't be able to build playlists from or including that song - the only course of action is for you to fix the ID3 tag of the offending song. For many, the ID 3 tags are a mess (even songs that were ripped from CDs can have problems).
It seems to me that for a music recommender to distinguish itself from the ever growing pack of recommenders it either has to be extremely innovative (like Pandora ) or execute really well - like qloud is trying to do. I'm not sure if The Filter has what it takes. - Thanks Jeremy for the tip.
Posted by Kelly on October 16, 2006 at 02:26 PM EDT #