Alphabetization: Part II

First, some good news: Song­bird is now in public beta! It’s ama­zing how sta­ble things have got­ten just over the last six months. And, sig­ni­fi­cantly, it now fea­tu­res a Play­back His­tory API, which by the looks of things allows deve­lo­pers access to the entire play his­tory of any song in a library, something that is cru­cial to the kind of deep library sca­ven­ging I’ve been pining for.

Since I last wrote, everything I see or read seems to ins­pire my half-baked ideas about the bet­ter ways we can browse our unma­na­geably large music libra­ries. After telling a friend about these ideas, he said:

Yeah, it’s actually really frus­tra­ting. I inten­tio­nally keep the num­ber of artists on my iPod small so I don’t have to sort to find things I’m currently into.

Me too.

Then there are the peo­ple who are doing a lot of (real) work towards novel inter­fa­ces like the (hypothe­ti­cal) ones I’m desc­ri­bing; Last.fm’s “Islands of Music” (explai­ned here) demons­tra­tes the kind of artist-similarity topo­logy that would make brow­sing your library a more plea­sant expe­rience; Lee Byron explains in more detail how he deve­lo­ped that Last Graph info­vis; neci­mal relea­ses a Music Recom­men­da­tions exten­sion for Song­bird that pro­mi­ses to use Last.fm’s data to find within your library artists simi­lar to the one pla­ying; and the Aurora pro­ject, part of the Mozi­lla Labs con­cept brow­ser series, depicts a radi­cal three-dimensional view of files and data with auto-clustering, which, if applied to a music library, would be nothing short of incredible.

I’ve also thrown together a piti­ful little mock-up of what Song­bird might look like when you start it up with the kind(s) of exten­sions I’m hoping for:

The two core com­po­nents depic­ted are the Start Page and the Time­line View. The Start Page I feel would be seriously valua­ble, one of the ideas behind all these blathe­rings of course being that one doesn’t always have a des­ti­na­tion in mind when ope­ning their music library. The Start Page would offer a num­ber of con­ve­nient “jumping-off” points, pulling you into your library to explore it further — by artist simi­la­rity, maybe, or by play his­tory pro­xi­mity, after just a cou­ple clicks.

The Time­line View is a zoo­ma­ble time­line, shown here zoo­med to a daily view. Zoo­ming out could show you albums pla­yed within recent weeks; then months, quar­ters, etc. These albums might be sor­ted by Perio­di­cal Impact, something I explai­ned in depth here; essen­tially they would be sor­ted not by the raw num­ber of times they were pla­yed within any given period, but by how dis­tinct they were to that period.

Even these mea­ger ideas are lea­gues ahead of what’s avai­la­ble, and I’m not even a data analyst. Just ima­gine how a library’s play his­tory data could be exploi­ted by some­body trai­ned in these things.