I want MusicThing!

December 2, 2009 4:27 PM

I am hoping to find an equivalent to LibraryThing, but for my music. That is to say, I don't need to share the actual music, just the catalog/metadata of what I have.

I would particularly like to get a visualization of my collection, like the tag and author clouds available on my profile at LibraryThing. I would love to find somewhere on the internet where I can upload my MediaMonkey database, and get an artist cloud and a genre cloud. And possibly stats on year, label, bpm, composer, duration, bitrate, etc. Also, sharing playlists would be nice. But secondary.

I saw a similar question, but he's talking about serving the actual music. I'm not particularly interested in that, although I wouldn't mind being able to upload/backup my music elsewhere. But I don't want to run a server 24/7. I just want people to be able to see what I have.

I found something almost right at Racks and Tags, but their entire mindset is oddly album-centric for a site that's supposed to be about MP3s. Most of their data appears to come from filename and path, which I found an odd choice for a site names racksandTAGS. I prefer to keep my not-very-big collection in genre folders, since I have a lot of singles. And, when Racksandtags makes an artists cloud, prominence is determined by number of albums, not number of tracks (another odd choice).

Anyway, does anyone know of a site where I can share what music I like, without sharing the actual music?

posted by timepiece to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

The product you want used to exist, and was called MoodLogic. It basically used a big classification worksheet, filled out by its users, for each song to categorize the mood, genre, BPM, etc. of the track. (Let's just say it was exhaustive, it took several minutes to fully fill out the data for each song.) The software's purpose, on individual machines, was to create mixes based on any variable in the classification database. The service existed for a few years, and then one day announced that the service would go social, creating a community where people's libraries would be visible and all those song variables would be dynamically visible. They published a proof-of-concept where moving a particular song (visualised by the track name) around inside a window populated by other songs (presumably of your choosing in the actual release) would cause each of the songs to move closer or farther away from the cursor based on similarity (or any of the variables you chose.) The next step was to make this work for users as well as songs--finding people with similar interests, and building a real functioning recommendation-engine (much more data-oriented than something like Last.fm.)

For whatever reason, though, none of the social aspects ever came into fruition. Site updates got slower, submitted music data stopped being processed by the MoodLogic servers, and the service (at least the web-facing portion) was totally abandoned without explanation. I heard it was bought out a year or two after the site stopped being updated, but that's been quite awhile now...the last official updates to the site were in 2004. Disappointing.
posted by Phyltre at 5:16 PM on December 2, 2009

Why not use, uh, LibraryThing? I know that there are LT users who are DVD people or CD people instead of book-lovers, I think they've even pointed this out it in their blog, in fact.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:15 AM on December 3, 2009

Response by poster: I don't want to use LibraryThing because I don't want the music data combined with book data, and I don't want to run a separate profile and have to log out and back in every time I want to switch.

In addition, there's no way to import the information for a lot of my stuff and I don't care to hand-enter more than 800 "albums" (several of which are singles catch-alls containing over 100 songs) or 4000 songs. I guess I could do an import of a csv, but LT's fields are just not set up for music.

Plus, they wouldn't be able to do any of the data statistics other than artist and tag/keyword.
posted by timepiece at 1:21 PM on December 3, 2009