Music Recognition MUST improve if Mystrands is to be a sucess
I believe that other users have complained about track tagging and I want to add my voice to the list.
Mystrands will be a good application if the track recognition worked better. I am sticking with Mystrands because of its support for Symbian, but far from satisfied with how it works. Hopefully someone can explain how it works and what might be done to improve it.
Some examples.
Today I played the new prince CD Planet Earth. I recognise that the CD is only out in the UK but it has been out for a week and over 3,000,000 copies were distributed. Therefore it is likely to have been the most widely played album of the week, even if some people only played a couple of tracks and decided they hated it and threw it in the bin (Heavan forbid).
Did Mystrands recognise it... Nope
What about Track 2 - Guitar. Not only 3 million copies on CD in the UK but released elsewhere as a free download including Verizon in the USA (huge) and O2 in the UK. Did Mystrands recognise it...Nope
Only about 50% vof the Music I play is recognised and often that is asigned to the wrong album. I have been playing lots of Fall Tracks from the Peel Sessions 6 CD box and when tracks are recognised it often lists them as belonging to other Fall Albums. Not only that but in my Top Artists for the month chart it lists "The Fall" and "Fall".
When I play my "Rumble In The Jungle" CD (Soul Jazz Records) it recognises some tracks but links them to other albums.
There are many more, but as the main point of my mini rant is that one of the main points of using the Mystrands service would be to discover new Music. Most People who play Brittney Spears would already know about Christina Aguilara or Beyonce but might like to discover some less well known up and coming RnB star. I don't think that they could do that at the moment.
This isn't just a moan, I wonder if we can do anything about it. Can users not upload and tag albums like they would do with Gracenote CDDB or FreeDB, or can Mystrands actually use them? If Mystrands has a relationship with Napster can their Track Database be used (I use Napster and some of their tracks aren't recognised by Mystrands). Part of building a community is getting users involved.
I'll finish with this. I have reccomended Mystrands and Blogged about it. In a recent post on the Nokia 3G Forums someone was peruaded to try the app but quickly summarised "I'd say that mystrands has potential, but nothing more. I'm going to be taking the thing off my blog and replacing it with last.fm version, which hasn't missed a track yet on me. Obviously they don't have a phone client, but something tells me they may well come out with one".
Shame. I wonder how many other people have dropped in, coe to the same conclusion and left without commenting?
Wavey Davey
http://beingwaveydavey.blogspot.com/
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