14 DAY TRIAL // I love iTunes, from the first moment I ever saw it, I knew that is was 'right'. The way it displayed the songs in the database was so natural and familiar, it was as if I had always worked with music this way. Despite it being so great it still has some shortcomings, which personally I have never felt, but which others have pointed out to me over the years. One of these is the shuffle function, which has an uncanny tendency to play many songs from the same artist and album, sometimes even playing even the same song several times. Personally I like to listen by album and rarely use the shuffle, so although I have noticed this tendency I was never really annoyed by it.
However, I am sure that there are many people out there who live by the shuffle and who find this quite disturbing. The introduction of the Party Shuffle came a long way? besides providing a better more varied mix, it also lets you tweak it to your heart's desire. However, the party shuffle is still nowhere near to an actual mix that has similar songs in it, most of what gets in there being randomly pulled out of the library.
MusicMagic Mixer is a program that is designed to create mixes of songs that are similar to a song you initially pick.
An advanced shuffle? No, not really. Although MusicMagic Mixer does choose random songs, it does not pick them from the entire pool of available tracks, instead, it makes use of the information it gathers from analyzing the songs. It doesn't use genres, or any information stored in the track per say, unless you want it to. Rather than this, it looks at the 'fingerprint' of the song and selects songs that actually sound similar to each other.
Making mixes You have two options to create a mix. One is the instant mix button that is located in the status window, which is a rather bad place for it. This will create a random mix, and by random I do not mean a list of random songs but a list of songs that sound the same, but what they actually sound like is random.
The second method involves selecting either an artist, or album or track, and using that as a basis for selecting similar songs.
At this point I must say that I have seen similar claims from other programs that have not really delivered, so I was skeptical about the ability of this program to select tracks that sound similar. But it does make a pretty decent selection, and with minimal tweaking you can get great results.
Of course, the program relies heavily on your music collection and if you have a large collection of classical music and one or two pop songs, it will obviously not be able to create a mix based on one of those pop songs. This goes without saying.
Getting the best results The unassisted output from this program is pretty good by itself, but most often than not, there are always one or two songs in there that just have no place in that mix. One or two is not so bad you might think, and indeed it is not, but I did most of the testing and mix generation using a 12 track mix setting, so if you are working with more tracks than that, you can be sure that the number of black sheep will increase.
Fortunately, fine tuning a mix is a simple affair. Just right click on the culprit and you can choose replace song, to get rid of it and have it replaced with something more appropriate. Another option you have is to select 'Less Like This,' meaning that the currently selected song, and others that are like it will get taken out of the mix and be replaced with others. Same goes for 'More Like This,' which will get rid of songs that unlike the one selected and replace them with more appropriate choices.
Since these commands only apply to the current mix, you can fiddle with them until you get the perfect mix without it ever affecting other future mixes.
Where is my music? Unfortunately, the program does not support all the files available out there, and if you have DRM protected tracks, the program is not going to be able to analyze and work with them. There are some forums on which you can find information on how to hack-enable support for various unsupported formats but since the average user will not be getting their hands dirty, they are not such a big help.
The Good Actually makes decent mixes of songs that sound similar to each other, simple to use and easy to tweak until you get great results.
The Bad Besides not supporting a number of file formats, it requires analyzing all those songs in your library which can take many hours depending on your Mac's speed and the size of that library.
The Truth One of the few programs that actually delivers on the promise that many make. The results are not always perfect, but any hiccups are easily remedied. Could make a few steps towards supporting more file formats, but, unfortunately, when it comes to DRM, many songs will be inaccessible.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
