Вторник 16 Май 2006, 17:06

On the Social Music Sites group, someone pointed me to musicstrands, which is a social music community similar to last.fm, but without the radios and without an opensource scrobbler. I browsed through it a little bit. It’s organized by tracks, not albums, so that every time you scrobble a track it tells you who else is playing that track recently, and what are some other tracks you might like. I think it also goes through your music library and once it knows what music you have on hand suggests playlists.

If you can deal with a full application on your desktop that’s not opensource and communicates with your music player, then take a look in and sign up; I am pretty sure it is compatible with last’s scrobbler, so your music tastes can get copied to both sites.

One nice feature the site offers to us last.fm junkies, however is a page called “MusicStrands recommendations for last.fm users.” The code underneath the page takes your last.fm username and spits out a list of 10 tracks that it thinks you might like. Obviously it is reading the top tracks from the audioscrobbler data pages; mine are here, for instance. The code on the musicstrands page takes those tracks and works its suggestion magic on them, spitting out a list of stuff you might like. For me, it came up with these:

• Bookmobile
• Tsaress
• Balanced On It's Own Flame
• Untitled
• Animals Of The Seashore
• Here
• The Open Sea
• Gun Street Girl
• Les Flamandes
• JEAN LUC

Out of that I already have the Tom Waits and Sanseverino tracks, and since I went to the trouble of borrowing the disc from the library or buying it online, respectively, I guess the recommendations are at least 20% accurate.

Of course, if I can get my own personal recommendations, I can also receive recommendations for anyone on last.fm, including the users with ace taste like beelzbubba, mjcrbt, superhelga and harmolodicnet. So I did that for me and 11 of my mates and wound up with a nice big list of tunes that musicstrands thinks would be perfectly appropriate for me or for my pals. Then I ran them through the word processor to add the BBCode, pasted them into a last.fm text box so I could see if they were streamable and ended up with a list of 31 streamable tracks, most of them unknown to me. These I have tagged as talking animal and pals musicstrands recos 200605 and will listen to in order to see if they are really good recommendations. I quite liked that no matter how eclectic or obscure the person’s taste was, the musicstrands code still spit out 10 recommendations. (There is a slider, too, but moving it left and right didn’t seem to make much difference to my recos.)

Here’s the list:

• Coal Black Horses
• Slow Me Down
• Spirits
• Blues In The Night
• Lust
• Ready Men
• Don't Explain
• Red Sunshine
• Like Young
• Turtle Soup (Wagon Christ Mix)
• Boble
• Zwit Rwit
• Healing Of The Nation
• The Ruler's Back
• Seance On A Wet Afternoon
• Folsom Prison Blues
• Silent Sea
• Calcutta
• It's About That Time
• Black Satin
• Tree Trail
• Little Girl Blue
• Op8
• Flesh Of My Flesh
• #807
• Lotus
• Air Raid Gtr
• July In London
• Untitled
• Sentimental Song
• Wimoweh

Happy listening!