onfocus

I added a sidebar to the front page here at onfocus that shows the last few albums (with cover art) I've listened to in iTunes. Let's skip why I might want to do this for now, and just jump into the how. People have been doing this since MP3 players have existed, and there are several services that can do this for you now. I send my tracks to Last.fm, and there's My Strands—both of these services have HTML snippets you can add to your site that will show some aspect of what you're listening to. Last.fm is great at putting together charts of tracks and artists, but does nothing with albums. So I had to code my own "now listening" widget to show recent albums. Here's how it works in case anyone out there wants to do something similar: My server has a Perl CGI script called getAlbum.cgi that accepts an artist and album name. Once getAlbum receives an artist and album, it searches for a match on Amazon via their API. If a match is found, it puts a little HTML together with the details, adds the album to a local HTML file: now-hearing.html, and removes the last entry. I include the file in my weblog, and that's what you see in the sidebar. With the server script in place, I just needed a little glue between the server and iTunes. A Windows script called now-playing.vbs checks to see if iTunes is open and playing, and then sends the current artist and album to the server. I set the script to run every 20 minutes with the Windows Task Scheduler. It doesn't grab everything that's playing (especially if I'm shuffling around), but it gets pretty close. I use more than one computer, so I didn't want my Mac to be left behind. I set up an AppleScript that basically does the same thing as the PC script. Instead of using an outside process to run the script at regular intervals, I used the AppleScript idle handler to hit the server every 20 minutes. Then I set the script to open when I log in. If you want to try this setup, you can grab the code:

• getAlbum.cgi
• now-playing.vbs (for Windows)
• now-playing.app (for Mac OS X)

You'll need to edit the scripts a bit so they're pointing to your version of getAlbum.cgi on your server, but that's about it. These scripts are working well for me, and they didn't take very long to put together. And hey, who else is going to play Toots and the Maytals back to back with Ladytron? These types of idiosyncrasies need to be put on display!

Since talking with Gabriel at MusicStrands the other day, I've been thinking more about how we share our musical tastes with others. I was making the point to him that there should be a way to quickly relate the type of music you're interested in without forcing people to wade through months of listening data like the current social music services require. For example, you can see that my top two artists at Last.fm are Bob Marley and Mozart based on frequency of plays, but that doesn't mean that my top two genres are Reggae and Classical. (I wouldn't place those as my top two if someone asked me.) You have to wade through the entire list to see that I also like classic rock, indie rock, electronic music, and lots of other genres.

What I was trying to say to Gabriel, but couldn't quite articulate, is that there should be a Myers-Briggs style scoring system for musical taste. When I see that someone is an ENFP, I have one instant measure of their personality. If you could do the same for music, you'd have a way to instantly relate your musical interests. I'm not sure what the criteria would be—maybe I'm an ISAE (indie structured ambient electronic), or MECR (mainstream eclectic classic rock). And this would go hand in hand with a service like MusicStrands because they can analyze the last 1,000 songs I actually listened to. With the score in hand, I could paste it into the dozen or so social network sites I belong to, giving people a more nuanced look at my preferences than my top 5 bands or something.

The iTunes Signature Maker is one stab at this concept. This application wades through your iTunes collection and creates a short audio signature based on the music it finds. When listening to others' signatures I guess you could listen for electronica vs. distorted guitars, but it doesn't really give you a sense of music preference. This is more of a fun hack than a useful way to share your musical identity. It'd be much more accurate to analyze what you're actually listening to, and then do a bit of categorization based on meta info about those tracks.

Today I chatted with someone from Musicstrands and found out a bit about the company. They're based here in Corvallis, Oregon and employ somewhere around 30 people locally. It's fun to learn that a little piece of Web 2.0 is being built right here in my backyard. I use their competitor Last.fm (my profile), but I don't feel too bad because I've been sending my listening habits there since Audioscrobbler appeared several years ago. Sharing music seems so natural that I bet iTunes or YME will ship with more social features (like those MusicStrands provides) in the future.

If you want to see what Musicstrands is cooking up, check out MusicStrands Labs. They even have a tool for people like me that gives music recommendations for Last.fm users. (Thanks in part to the Audioscrobbler API, I assume.) Also fun: MusicStrands patents.

Mike Doughty is on tour, and he's posting some great tour photos on his blog, Mike's Blog. Each night he has everyone in the audience hold up their glowing cell phones as he snaps a pic. Check out the pictures on My Hectic Week in Rock. Cell phones are the new lighter. He'll be in Portland this Wednesday.