What is MusicIP?

MusicIP is much more than a conventional Playlist Generator. MusicIP is a clever piece of software written in the 2000s that analyses and fingerprints your local music library to try to understand the makeup of each music track. So instead of endlessly scrolling through your library, trying to find something to listen to, you can simply select a track (the seed track) then based on MusicIPs understanding of your library, generate a playlist of tracks that blend together. This is far more than a genre based mix, as it will select tracks that are similar in composition.

History of MusicIP in a Nutshell


MusicIP was originally called MusicMatch and was aimed at b2b and b2c. However during the later period of the 2000s MusicIP decided to focus on b2b and ceased any obvious development in 2008 and was later sold to Sony.
The product can still be uplifted from its free version to the premium version by using a serial key which unlocks all functionality, see section "How to Register and Unlock MusicIP".
On their website http://www.amplifindmusicservices.com/ they still offered a download version 1.8 (Windows) however the actual last version they released as a beta was Version 1.96b which can be found on this site and has a number of bug fixes from the 1.8 version.

Note: If you intend to scan your music files on a Windows device and then later use the database file m3lib on a Unix device, only use Version 1.8. Version 1.96b made changes which don't seem to work properly on Unix. However if you only ever plan on using Windows, Version 1.96b is recommended.

Is MusicIP still relevant in the world of clouds, iTunes Genius etc


Strangely enough MusicIP may well have been ahead of its time. Music in general now has a much greater audience than it had in the previous decade and it seems every consumer product in the world now has a bolted-on mp3 player!
MusicIP is pretty unique in its amazing analysis and fingerprinting of tracks which are covered under various Intellectual property patents. Its track selection is almost freaky sometimes, finding subtly matching tracks that other products such as Apple Genius currently don't find. Unfortunately the decision to release a free version of MusicIP seemed to kill its revenue stream and it moved to focus purely on the b2b market.

PUIDs, GUIs and Wonderful things


To analyse a track can be a CPU heavy task similar to video encoding. Its methodology of how it does the analysis is along the lines of taking the track and converting it to wav, thereby providing a "baseline" for the track regardless of its format. Then it scans the first couple of minutes of the track and does magic stuff to determine the feel of the track. Once analysis is complete it produces a fingerprint which can be saved in the tags of the file so it doesn't need to be scanned again.
However MusicIP had a trick up its sleeve to shortcut this requirement to analyse a track that has already been analysed before by other users. Simply put it will generate a PUID which is a quick track lookup fingerprint, it then compares this PUID against known tracks in its library held in a data centre somewhere and if a match is found, it adds all the analysis to the track without having to go through the heavy analysis process mentioned earlier. Unfortunately with the closure of the MusicIP servers this process no longer works but is kept here for historic interest.

But all is not lost! MusicIP can work in an offline mode

MusicIP does not need to be connected to the internet to fingerprint or provide track selection choices. You only need to fingerprint a track once. You can use it on holiday or when you aren't connected to the internet and it doesn't bombard you with tracks you don't have in your library.
In addition, with the ever increase of CPU power its very feasible to fingerprint your entire library in a few weeks, taking approx. 5-10 minutes per album and once a track has been fingerprinted, save the fingerprint inside the tags means it never needs to re-fingerprinted again. If you move tracks to a different location, rebuilding the MusicIP library from the fingerprints saved in the tags of the files takes just a few minutes.

MusicIP GenPUID


MusicIP GenPUID is a command line driven version of MusicIP and can be used to create fingerprints just like the GUI. However with the closure of the MusicIP servers, this method is no longer available.

Next Page... MusicIP GUI and Headless