What songs are like this one song?
December 16, 2009 12:01 PM   Subscribe

I want Pandora, but only for a specific set of user defined songs. Is there software that will listen to a song and then tell me what songs are similar to it within another given set of songs? I explain better inside.

Occasionally in my work as a video editor, I'll have to rescore a tv show because we don't have rights to the original music anymore. We're talking mostly instrumental music bed type stuff from a music library, not popular music for the most part. I don't have access to the original music library, so I can't just search for similar tracks there. I have a hard drive full of music I can use organized loosely by genre. What I want is to take the song that was originally used and then tell some software to go into this hard drive of approved music and find me a few songs that sound like the original.

I know there are some solutions DJs use to find beat matching stuff, but I don't know if this would help me, or what that software is.

Any ideas?
posted by brgale to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)
 
Genius does this within itunes, but I'm not sure if it works for music outside of the pop music library.
posted by craven_morhead at 12:06 PM on December 16, 2009


iTunes. "Genius" mode. In my experience works pretty well.
posted by contrarian at 12:07 PM on December 16, 2009


Response by poster: I'm working on trying this out. iTunes is still gathering information about my library.
posted by brgale at 1:02 PM on December 16, 2009


Response by poster: No good. iTunes doesn't recognize any of the songs. What I have isn't music by normal bands on normal albums. It's from music libraries where the music is designed to be used under video, for the most part.
posted by brgale at 1:10 PM on December 16, 2009


Yeah, I thought that might be a problem. I've had itunes hang up on lesser-known artists that I have, since I assume they're not yet in the catalog that it looks to in order to match things up. I would guess that there are less mainstream options, probably in the realm of DJs, but that's beyond my ken.
posted by craven_morhead at 1:13 PM on December 16, 2009


It's unsupported now but the program is still available for download: MusicIP

Unlike Genius mode, it's not necessary for this technology to know what your song is. I use it a lot and find that it does a great job of creating mixes of "like" music from an existing collection.

caveat: A large HD of tunes and/or a slow computer will make the initial scan take forever.
posted by mcstayinskool at 1:53 PM on December 16, 2009 [1 favorite]


BeaTunes does this: matchlists
posted by kelseyq at 3:29 PM on December 16, 2009


Amarok used to have a Genius-like feature that would do this, based (iirc) on the Last.FM database and your music library.
posted by pompomtom at 4:07 PM on December 16, 2009


(I say 'used to', because I haven't used amarok lately, not because I believe it isn't there any more...)
posted by pompomtom at 4:07 PM on December 16, 2009


what about last.fm and it's "scrobble" feature?
posted by phritosan at 8:59 AM on December 17, 2009


Response by poster: I'm working on trying MusicIP out. The initial scan takes a very long long time. It's been through about 700 tracks in 24 hours. That leaves about 5000 tracks left to go.

Last.fm won't work. This music is not traditional music in that is won't really have an artist or be part of last.fm's base. That works along the same lines as iTunes does, and iTunes won't work for me. It really needs to be something that analyzes the songs based on the quality of the music alone, not any metadata.

I'm gonna go try beatunes now.
posted by brgale at 2:32 PM on December 17, 2009


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