Digital Gadgets

A new technology could let your computer recommend new music you might like based on an acoustic analysis of the tunes it already knows you enjoy.

By analysing the characteristics of a song – like timbre, rhythm, tempo and chord changes – then comparing it to a database of a million songs, the software can recommend similar pieces of music, and even rank them by characteristics, like their key or dance-ability.

“The goal is to be able to have as complete a description of a piece of music as a human being can do,” says Xavier Serra, director of the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. “That’s beyond the current state of our knowledge. But what we can do now is enough to develop music recommendation systems based partly or totally on the automatic generation of descriptors.”

More: newscientist.com

Electronics manufacturers, Pioneer and Samsung have both just announced that they are creating satellite MP3 players that will both store music and act as receivers for XM’s satellite radio service.

The Samsung Helix XM2go and Pioneer Inno devices will both be retailed at a pricey $399.99, but will include a lot of impressive and advanced features. Both players will have flash memory for recording radio content, as well as features to bookmark and save songs heard on XM.

These new satellite MP3 players will be a great boon for customers wanting integrated entertainment devices. The fact that both Pioneer and Samung are both building such similar devices will keep them in continual competition and likely prevent the price of such a device from getting unreasonably high.

More: teleclick.ca