Music. Yep, have always done music. Plinked around on guitars since my teens, even had some piano lessons once. Always have music on - particularly if everyone else is out, so no-one can complain that my preference is for 'too depressing' or 'too loud'... Most of the time, played via the laptop on the kitchen table, which is permanently connected to a little Denon amp and some nice sounding Monitor Audio bookshelf speakers. Not the esoteric kit I emptied my bank account on when I was younger, but hey, children and Linn equipment don't mix
Alison tolerates the Smog Instant Mix
So, it's no surprise that, in my 47 years on this earth, I've amassed a fairly vast collection of music, physically represented by about 700 vinyl platters and jewel cases that were consigned to the cellar years ago. It took me a while to fully make the jump to electronic encapsulation, mostly because it didn't sound as good, back in the day when disk space drove people to convert to over-compressed mp3. Now it's rather less of an issue - streaming services automatically upgrade low bitrate .mp3 to 256 or 320kbps and my ancient ears will never hear the difference, certainly not on this kit, in this environment. Analyse it with the right software and you can see that dropping out the top-end frequencies is not uncommon, so it's not just about bitrate - but 47 year old ears can't hear stuff much above 18kHz anyway, 15kHz if they're lucky. Shame, but that's ageing for you. Frankly, I'm more worried about the hairs sprouting from my ears than the frequency range they're capable of detecting. But I digress...
I haven't bought a physical CD for yonks, relying on Amazon for most of my .mp3 downloads and dipping occasionally into the paid variant of Spotify, since it sprung into existence five years ago. In the interest of being surprised by something different and good in my listening, I've also dabbled on and off with Pandora (no longer available in the UK), Last.FM, Grooveshark and Apple's Genius playlists, dropping the latter pretty quickly since they forced me to allow the execrable iTunes to run amok with my music collection. And they're not very good, frankly.
A year or so ago, primarily because it was so well integrated with the Amazon Store, I chucked all my music into Amazon's Cloud Player, which gave me resilience and easy access from other devices for the girls. But it costs, albeit not very much - and, conscious that Google's Play Music services had become available in the UK recently, I thought I'd give them a try. So, this week my entire music collection has been trickling into the cloud in the background. As that process finally completed yesterday, I started playing with the front-end.
There's nothing immediately more appealing than other offerings - at least, there wasn't, until I accepted the invitation to try an 'Instant Mix' - a playlist compiled from my own music, based on some algorithmic cleverness. This is, conceptually, nothing new - it's much what Apple's Genius Playlists are about - but this is different. Because it really works.
I haven't bought a physical CD for yonks, relying on Amazon for most of my .mp3 downloads and dipping occasionally into the paid variant of Spotify, since it sprung into existence five years ago. In the interest of being surprised by something different and good in my listening, I've also dabbled on and off with Pandora (no longer available in the UK), Last.FM, Grooveshark and Apple's Genius playlists, dropping the latter pretty quickly since they forced me to allow the execrable iTunes to run amok with my music collection. And they're not very good, frankly.
A year or so ago, primarily because it was so well integrated with the Amazon Store, I chucked all my music into Amazon's Cloud Player, which gave me resilience and easy access from other devices for the girls. But it costs, albeit not very much - and, conscious that Google's Play Music services had become available in the UK recently, I thought I'd give them a try. So, this week my entire music collection has been trickling into the cloud in the background. As that process finally completed yesterday, I started playing with the front-end.
There's nothing immediately more appealing than other offerings - at least, there wasn't, until I accepted the invitation to try an 'Instant Mix' - a playlist compiled from my own music, based on some algorithmic cleverness. This is, conceptually, nothing new - it's much what Apple's Genius Playlists are about - but this is different. Because it really works.
I don't know what cleverness Google has going on here - and I doubt they're rushing to tell anyone anyway - but this is doing a lot more than just matching tags or others listening / shopping habits. There's clearly some analysis of the composition of the music with which you seed the Instant Mix - that's how it works - going on, because it produces a rolling list of varied tracks that just work so well together, it's uncanny. I must have heard 30-40 tracks today that I haven't played for decades, tracks that I love - and tracks that seem to capture the mood and feel of the track or album I created the Instant Mix from. It's joyous and wonderful.
Given the cleverness, you can't help but wonder whether some control of the basis for the mix might become available eventually - it could clearly lend itself to further tweaking. And Google have a paid extension to the service, a Spotify-like streaming offering, which I now have to explore. If it integrates my collection and new music across a single mix - which it clearly could - then I may never look elsewhere again.
Given the cleverness, you can't help but wonder whether some control of the basis for the mix might become available eventually - it could clearly lend itself to further tweaking. And Google have a paid extension to the service, a Spotify-like streaming offering, which I now have to explore. If it integrates my collection and new music across a single mix - which it clearly could - then I may never look elsewhere again.
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