I'm a newish Empeg user and over the past few weeks I have been selecting various songs from my collection. Anyway I am finding it hard to get music that I like to listen too in the car.

I am not into albums and prefer to listen to the best individual tracks and a typical album may only have one or two tracks that I like. This is probably because I seem to have wierd/diverse taste alnd like music from artists like Madonna, The Nails, Gordon Giltrap, Bryan Adams, Kate Bush, Aqua, S Clude 7, The Crows, Ah Ah, Holly Valance, Kiki Dee, Michael Jackson, The Doors even Westlife (Ok, S Club 7, Aqua and Westlife take the cake, but hey, someone buys it - for our US readers this is pure pulp pop music).

Anyway the question is, how can I limit the search for more music by using the artist and track names that I already have?
deally I want to take a list of tracks, enter it into a program, have the program make suggestions by matching my likes against others of similar taste and then allow me to hear clips of the suggested tracks so I can make a determination of quality - suggestions?


BTW, Currently I note tracks that intrest me when I hear them on the radio etc and build my collection that way but it is a very slow way to do it.

Sorry, hit send when I wanted to edit my proof reading - still you'll get the jist!

There is a piece of software out there that does this. I have a trial installation of it on my PC at home, but for the life of me I can't remember its name.

Basically, it scans your entire MP3 collection and makes a database out of it. You can pick a song and hit "more songs like this one" and it'll come up with a pretty good match of it. In the limited testing I did with the trial version, it seems to do what you're looking for.

Anyone know the name of the software I'm talking about and have a link to it on the web?

I've found that it's not very good for my particular tastes, but CDnow has an album advisor which suggests albums that you might like based on other albums. I realize that you're asking for particular songs, but I'll bet that folks that purchased an album of pure pop bought it for just one song, so you might be able to extrapolate. Of course, the problem then would be figuring out what song on the suggested album interested them.

Yup, MoodLogic. I found out about it because it was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal review of the Riot, actualy. Not sure if sonic blue bundles a trial version or if the writer was just making leaps of logic.

I played with it a bit, but it wasn't worth whatever they wanted you to pay for the service from my point of view(some sort of subscription/token model i think, but i could be imagining that). I think the WSJ recomended it as a way to add ID3 tags to your mp3's, but I couldn't find a way to make it write ID3's with the trial version in the limited time I spent.

Matthew

Actually, MoodLogic is really useful. The current version will fix ID3 tags and organize into folders by artist, which is a great for a big collection. It also allows you to make playlists based on user-rated emotional attributes of your songs. Here's a link:

MoodLogic

Yeah, MoodLogic is the one I'm thinking of.

Ideally, it should suggest new music from the global database of artists based on your personal preferences and requests. Not sure if it does that or not (I only have the trial version), but it seems to do it well for a small subset of songs within my collection.

Oh, great. When I hit the "suggest new music" button in MoodLogic, it links to a web site which tells me:

"Dear MoodLogic User,

We have received great feedback and many suggestions from you on how to improve MoodLogic's Get Music feature. To incorporate these features we are redesigning this portion of our database. During the migration from the old database to the new one that supports many of your suggestions the Get Music feature will be temporarily off-line. Please bear with us while we are making this significant upgrade to service you better.

Please check the Message Panel in your Activation Center for news and updates on Get Music.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Your MoodLogic Team"

Sigh. Start/Control Panel/Add-Remove Programs/MoodLogic

Yeah, we have a deal with Moodlogic and (the trial version) will ship with every new product. I think the Riot was the first.

Rob

I have a method which doesn't work at song level, but for me to find new albums/bands etc I mainly use Amazon's "recommend" feature. It lets you rate albums you have listened to and makes reasonable recommendations.

Thanks, on paper this looks exactly what I'm looking for. I'll try it over the weekend :-)