Itunes Genius Mix App

[Go Android!]

I LOVE Itunes. I don't even have an Apple device, yet i put all my music on Itunes.

I'm looking for an app kinda like the Genius Mix, not like Pandora, but using my own music. I just love it because I find songs i forgot about. Basically like a shuffle of songs that sound alike.

 

[eleusis#AC]

AndroGen

Apologies for the blatant self-promotion, but it may be helpful:

I'm currently developing a free Android app that does something similar to iTunes Genius, called AndroGen. It's at the early stages at the moment - my priority is to make it work across a range of different devices as it seems every manufacturer has a different way of handling music.

If you'd like to try it you can find it on the marketplace here: https://market.android.com/details?id=uk.co.eleusis.android.genius

Right now, it generates playlists from your music library based around a single track, but I'm looking to add Genius Mix abilities to it later (so you would be able to just pick a genre), once I've got it working on a decent range of phones and tablets.

If you do try it, please let me know if it works for you.

 

[irish22022]

Wow dude. I gotta say, I've been wanting an app like this for so long. Admittedly, I hate having to open up a second app and generating, etc... I really think you should think about making this open source so music app devs like power amp or whatever could just build it in to the app.

Either way, I just tried a few tracks, and most of them worked and came back with at least 30 minutes worth of music. Pretty cool.

 

[eleusis#AC]

I may well open the source up once I'm sure it's working OK on most devices.. I'm not intending this to be a commercial app. On the other hand, I don't how easy it would be for some music players to just use the code - it depends a lot on whether they build their own media library or whether they use the Android default one.

In the future, I'd also hope to allow other apps to interact with this app via something called "intents" whcih is how Android apps talk to each other - so perhaps they could call my app behind the scenes, making it look seamless to the user.

Right now though, my priorities are, in order:

1. Make this work well on a wide selection of devices (you can help by letting me know what your device is, and whether it worked well for you - the areas that seem to vary a lot are: detecting the current track, displaying the track chooser, and sending the new tracklist back to the music player)

2. Improve the number of matches for each track

3. everything else...

"Everything else" vaguely includes: looking at making it work offline (which is really hard), interactivity with other apps, Genius mixes etc..

 

[irish22022]

I have the droid x. It detects the current song most of the time. I can always view and select a track, and it always sends it back to the music player.

Working offline is something I just found out that I needed last night. I'm a bartender, and I put my phone on airplane mode to play music from. Unfortunately, it didn't work when I went to use it

Anywho, good luck to you.

 

[eleusis#AC]

Well, unfortunately it requires a brief amount of network access to download the similar track list (but only during playlist generation - once it gets past the "finding similar tracks" bit you can turn it off again).

Without having the vast resources and the userbase behind Apple's Genius, it's always going to be like this - doing it on the device itself is very hard. There was an app called Museek (which has since changed it's name - i forget the new one) which attempted to do this via genre (so more like the genius mixes), but I could never get it to work with my collection and it did spend an age downloading information when you first started it up. Maybe you'll have better luck with it.

If enough people started using AndroGen, there might be a bit more scope to do something offline but I'd need a lot more users to capture information.

Thanks for the info about the Droid X though, sounds like it's working just fine on that device which is good to know!