Mix Master Murk

After a certain point - say a thousand songs or so, it gets harder and harder to put together good playlists of mp3s in iTunes. As I mentioned a couple of months back, I'd received a copy of the Predixis MusicMagicMixer bundled with the Roxio Boom Box suite that I had bought primarily to digitise LPs.

MMM allowed one to put together playlists of varying homegenity based on an analysis of sonic characteristics of the songs in your music library. I was sceptical at first, publicly so, and Predixis caught the comment using blogsearch, and politely emailed me to suggest that I look more carefully at how MMM works.

And it worked pretty good - especially useful for something like a dinner party, when you don't want any of that metal butting in and making your guests vomit blood. I once chose a single Neil Young song and then played the resulting MMM mix to an actual Canadian - and he loved it, the slag. It's probably handy for gym mixes too, were I ever actually to set foot in one of those dungeons.

If I have a quibble, it's that the software can be subject to the odd glitch (the 1.1 Mac version, at least, sometimes would not send mixes to iTunes while it was busy analysing my songs), and that they're not very good at keeping in touch.

In dealing with the glitch from the last paragraph, I decided to choose the "check for updates" option from the File... menu. Nothing happens, so I thought I'd head to Predixis.com to see what gives. The answer is, only a whole renaming of the entire company, the MMM application, and at least two skipped versions of the software.

Downloaded the new software, tried to enter my registration key, got nowhere. Hit the Forums, somewhat reluctantly, since I'm much more happy rooting around the manuals normally. Glad I did, though, because the PredixisMusicIP support people are amazingly fast, responsive and personable. Once it was established that I was the victim of confused caches, as well as probably (though they were too polite to say) Roxio's version of the MMM/MusicIP Player being a wee bit behind the main build, they gladly upgraded me.

Since I'd sort of wandered into their embrace via the machinations of Roxio rather than being a bona fide premium user, I found all of this rather awesome. So I still think they could so a bit of work on the communicating (there's a relaunch! Tell everyone, even the Roxio drones!), but the customer service rules.