...just not presented in this 3D kind of way, which looks cool but is a bit unwieldy for more than casual use.

iTunes gives you "Listeners also bought..." with each album listing. While not exacty what MusicPlasma does, I find it interesting to kow the kinds of other music people find interesting along with the one I may be looking at. Sometimes it is very similar, but many times it leads to something that is related but incredibly different and intriguing.

iTunes also now lists "iMixes" particular albums are found in, giving another level of listener feedback: people who like an album or song might like one of the others on one of the lists.

Add to that the "Celebrity Playlists" where you canfind out what your favorite artists listen to or are inspired by, and I think you get a pretty organic sampling of music. I'm not sure how MusicPlasma assigns artists ' links to one another, but if it's machine-driven, I may not care for it all that much...

That should be built into the Mac OS. If we had a Database File system, it would be easy to make a program with graphical links between files- mindmapping rocks.

Love the idea, but has anyone accessed this site with Safari? I can't get the site to work with Safari, but it works fine (if slow) with IE. Either way, I can't agree more that something like this should be implemented with ITMS.

Dean, true enough, there's some of MusicPlasma in iTunes, but what I find intriguiging is the graphical relationships between artists. You see stuff that follows your path of music discovery, and you can get an instant feel for what an artist may be like. In all of the options you've mentioned you don't see the relationships as easily. It would be great if I click on an artist and it puts me into iTunes with a list song and some of those features you mentioned, then give me the option to go back to MusicPlasma to checkout different relationships.

Guest: The picture you see was taken from a Safari window, so at least I didn't have a problem with Safari.

Vern Seward

I remember using a technology preview from Apple that allowed you to visualize search engines (or was it websites?) in exactly this kind of 3D view. I dont remember what it was called, but my Mac in the mid-nineties was terribly groaning under the weight of the data it had to process

It was called HotSauce. You can find info about it here:

http://www.eclectica-systems.co.uk/complex/hotsauce.php

Thanks for the feedback, Vern. I see where you're getting at. I'm not fully convinced the 3D cool factor trumps a 2D branching structure for real readability, but I do see there are some difference between what this is and what iTunes has now. I am interested in seeing how the relationships are made, since, like I said, I think the user-styled feedback is more interesting to me than what may be a cataloguer's opinion or something (if that's how it is done)...

It's definitely a cool waste of time

This is way cool!

I too would like to know how the links are determined in MusicPlasma. The examples mentioned above by Dean could be almost random in iTMS, what if I decided to buy a classical album and a trance album, that migh fool the system. If MusicPlasma makes connections by actual music style it might be much more helpful.

If you type Paul McCartney, the closest link is Yoko Ono????

I vaguely remember reading something about Hotsauce a loong while ago. It could be that the technology behind MusicPlasma originated with Hotsauce. If so, did Apple patend it, and will they dust it off and use it again in iTunes?

I hope so, because it would add more differentiation between iTunes/iTMS and other music services. As the competition heats up, and it will, Apple will need to pull out every trick it has in its magic bag to keep the WOW-factor focused on iTunes and iPod.

Dean, I'm not disagreeing with you about user feedback; I think it's a great feature. I'm just saying that a integrated MusicPlasma-style "browser" would be another great feature. I see no reason why they both couldn't coexist in iTMS.

Vern Seward

Quote

Anonymous wrote:
If you type Paul McCartney, the closest link is Yoko Ono????

Now that's comedy.

It was difficult for me to stump it with little known band names, harder than I would have thought.

It did tend to bog down my system after a while, getting slower and slower to respond.

Quote

Alphax wrote:
It was difficult for me to stump it with little known band names, harder than I would have thought.

.

Huh? I stumped it with The Kinks. The Kinks. You know. They covered that Van Hagar tune?

Anyway, I agree on the waste of time part of the equation. If you really want to discover possibly obscure music by similarity to what you already know, rather than see how a small subset of what you know might be linked in some bandwidthhogging eye candy, check out sites like Allmusic.com.

musicplasma now appears to have disappeared - shame