After the other threads with respect to itunes sucking.

Songbird got directly mentioned so I thought I'd give it a burl... What a steaming pile of crap. Quite possibly the worst podcast support known to man. *If* they keep developing it, it might be good in a year (or so).

So I tried some other ones (since itunes seemingly got bagged by a few people). Most of the major ones are fine. And if you had a non-ipod player would probably be more suitable then itunes, but I didn't see any functionality I was missing ?

So then I got the latest release canidate for Picard it now has built in support for genre tagging using folksonomy and a plug in for genre tagging using last.fm (needs a qgl last.fm group !) making it even easier to have good tags.

At which point I stumbled on to 3 very interesting products.
MusicIP Mixer
The Filter
Sound Flavor

Prolly old news to everyone (queue casa and "old)
But basically you give it a "seed" song that you want to listen to now and it generates a playlist based on that. Playlists (atleast for me) can be a bit of nightmare once you have decently sized collection.
All 3 did a decent job, but MusicIP was the standout for me. Intergrates with iTunes and when I click a song shows a preview of the list its going to make if I like it I can hit make playlist rename it to whatever, and made better playlists imo.

ps. Sure to be nuked for a poor subject.

Thanks for the pointer to MusicIP Mixer. Just tried it out, very nice. I had been using The Filter but was largely unimpressed.

haha what... sounds like it's good, but then I installed it, and so far it's absolute s***:) I did a mix with Bernard Fanning's Songbird, and it chucked in Eminem's Bitch Please! lol

I'll keep mucking around with it because it sounds promising. Did you install the iTunes plugin? Or is there some drag/drop thingo you did?

No, I haven't installed the iTunes plugin. In MusicIP, once you've created a playlist, right click on the playlist on the left hand side and select the "Copy Playlist to iTunes" option.

As for the mixes it does - yeah, it's not perfect, but it's much better than The Filter.

You can refine the playlists it generates by right clicking on songs and selecting "more/less of this".

I installed the itunes plug in and the app.

Then opened itunes (didn't even load the other program).

It seriously will take days to go through and look at every song. It started off crap but now is quite decent. It also does a fair bit of processing until its all up and running (I would go to the preferences tab and set it to low priority or the lag will bug you).

You can tweak it a bit ie. weight it more on artist style then track style, increase variety, genre locking (its on the preferences tab). In the paid version you go nuts and decade lock exclude certain songs and do all sorts of things.

Some songs have made crap lists (Paint it black for instance) and other made pretty awesome ones (eg. Message in a bottle).

http://www.last.fm/ does a great job at this sort of thing too (give it an artist/tag/username and it'll play music based on community smarts).

Here's my radio station, based on music I listen to - http://www.last.fm/listen/user/danfarsy/personal
each of my song plays is picked up by an itunes plugin, so that + community smarts = the best music ever for me. That's how it's meant to work, anyway.

cue