Predixis MusicMagic Mixer dynamically creates playlists of music you like

How large is your music collection? 20 GB? 40GB? 80GB? I have seen people with entire hard disks dedicated to music. But how much of your collection do you actually listen to? We usually tend to play the same songs we like over and over again. The 80 GB collection is only something to brag about.

How wonderful it would be if we could tell the music player what kind of music we want to listen and allow them to prepare a playlist from our collection. Predixis MusicMagic Mixer is such an audio player and library manager that can create playlists dynamically depending on the kind of music you want to hear. If you’ll recall, Mufin Player has similar capabilities but Predixis MusicMagic Mixer gives you more control in playlist creation. 



When you add your music collection to the library, it will analyze each song and store that information somewhere in their files. Each song takes between 5 to 10 second to analyze, but the good thing is you don’t have to wait while it’s analyzing your collection. We can start playing once the songs has been added to the library. The analyzing happens in the background.

After the library has been prepared, you can see your entire collection neatly organized into 3 windows one each for Genres, Artists and Albums. Load a song you want to listen to, right-click on it and select “Create Mix” or click the Mix button on the toolbar. Immediately the player will create a playlist of songs that has the same tempo, the same rhythm, the same feel. The number of songs in the mix can be adjusted; the default is 12. Instead of the number of songs you can specify how long the playlist should be or the total size of the songs. For example, you can create a playlist 2 hours long or 200 MB of song size. The flexibility is beautiful. 



Didn’t like some of the songs included in the playlist? No problem, you can refine it further. Select the song you didn’t like, right-click and click “Less like these” to remove them or right-click on a song you like and click on “More like these” to include more songs of similar tune. You can then save the playlist as “Moods”.

If you dig into the preference you will find more options: adjust weightage of artist style and variety when creating mixes, exclude particular songs from mixes or set to always include some others. There is also a music discovery engine that can bring you to more songs from Amazon, but that didn’t work for me.
Predix MusicMagic has essentially allowed me to rediscover my music collection. I won’t be using it as my primary player, but at times when I can’t decide what to listen, I’m going to allow Predixis MusicMagic Mixer to make the choice for me.