For her master’s thesis at MIT, a Anita Lillie developed MusicBox – an interesting application designed to visually map out your music collection.
MusicBox analyzes the meta data of your music and categories the music based on a variety of attributes. Using this information, it creates a visual map of your music, which you can use to navigate your collection. Check out the MusicBox demo above to see it in action.
Here’s a screen shot showing the main features within MusicBox:
Lillie hopes to make a simplified version of MusicBox for the iPhone. You can get the full scoop on MusicBox from Lillie’s thesis (pdf).
What do you think – does MusicBox’s approach to navigating your digital music collection seem like a useful advance?
via TJ at Califaudio
This is a pretty cool concept for an interface for sorting through a song collection… especially the larger and more diverse the collection. I like the ability to turn off sorting criteria (artificial factors like “genre”).
One thing I didn’t see in the video was a way to turn off display of certain subsets, like certain elements of the genre category. If you have a really big collection, you could face thousands of little colored circles in the main display, and it would be useful to be able to remove certain elements.
Maybe that feature is in there… I’ll have to dig through her thesis and find out.
Still… cool interface… interesting way to create various themed play lists, based on progressions of harmonic content or rhythms.