Trax

Better Mp3 Organizing Through Visualization

Motivation“Organizing CDs or records is a *lot* more fun than

organizing computer files; that's just a proven fact!”– Chuck Eddy, Senior Music Editor, The Village Voice

• My humble attempt to help poor music obsessives out

• Create an editable and browsable map of the genres & styles of an mp3 collection

Design Goals

• Who is it for?– Music enthusiasts (not for the casual fan!)

• What actions does it aim to support?– Browsing through interrelated genres and

associated artists– Creation of playlists– Labeling of mp3s’ genre, and other

information

• What dataset will it function on?– Any large set of mp3s– Test dataset: my own mp3 collection (~7000

tracks, 50+GB)

The Visualization

• Key concept: most songs exist within multiple genres (eg, Rock & Post-Punk)

• Build graph of genres, with links between genres that are associated with the same song

• Force-Directed layout based on number of mp3s within a given genre

Final Product

Demo!

Pros

• Spatial position of nodes reflects real-world genre relationships

• Wide range of filtering and viewing options to manage size and complexity of graph

• Playlist creation is easy

Cons

• Requires large initial investment of time to sort and label all mp3s

• May not be able to link all genres together (creating outliers & islands)

• Sometimes hard to find particular genre with all genres showing (search would be nice)

Peace.