It’s a new technology that finds new music for you. I’ve been playing around with it for the past few days and I’m enthralled.
Here’s how it works. I’m trying to come up with a way to explain it to my friends, so this is a draft of me trying to explain it. Forgive the line-by-line nature of it:
== Indy is like a search engine, but instead of finding web pages and displaying the text for you, it finds mp3s and plays them for you.
== A band/musician has freely available mp3s on their web site and submits songs to Indy. Indy keeps a list of the URLs of those songs.
== A listener downloads the Indy software and installs it. When you open it up Indy goes and gets some URLs in its database, gets songs from those URLs and puts them on your computer.
== The listener presses Play and songs start playing.
== There are 5 “stars” on the Indy player. If the listener doesn’t like the song playing, they press the 1st or 2nd star, and Indy immediately goes on to the next song.
== If the listener likes the song ok, they can press the 3rd star. The song keeps playing.
== If the listener really likes the song, or loves the song, they press the 4th or 5th star. The song keeps playing.
== At any time, the listener can go on to the next song by pressing the Next button, but you have to give a song a star rating before it will do that.
== When Indy installs, it sets up 6 folders in the Indy directory. 1star, 2stars, 3stars, 4stars, 5stars and UnRated. All the songs are originally put in the UnRated folder.
== Once you’ve rated a song, and it ends or you press Next, the song is automatically moved from the UnRated folder into one of the star folders.
== If you click on the artist/song name in the Indy player window, you’re taken to that artist’s web site.
== You can move any song (say from the 4 or 5 star folders) to your MyMusic folder, or whereever it is you keep the songs you play normally. It can then be played in Winamp or through whatever music playback program you usually use.
== Indy isn’t really a music player. You can’t fast-forward or re-wind songs. The song plays until you go on to the next one, either by clicking 1 or 2 stars, or Next.
== The songs aren’t on the Indy servers. It’s being taken directly from the web site of the artist and put on your computer. That’s why Indy has no control over the song (hence why you can’t fast-forward and re-wind).
== Indy keeps track of what ratings you give songs, and the goal is to compare that to other people’s ratings. If listener A gives songs 6, 7 and 10 four stars, and listener B gives songs 6, 7 and 12 four stars, the Indy software figures “A and B both like songs 6 and 7. Maybe listener B will like song 10. Maybe listener A will like song 12” and goes to get those songs. The goal is to try and link your tastes with people who share similar taste, and get new music to you.
(that part of it I’m not good at explaining. I’m sure there’s a better way.)
That’s the gist, as I understand it. Comments and observations:
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It’s free to both the listener and the artist.
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It’s in early beta, so there are a lot of bugs they’re working on. It’s not even in version 1 yet (build 6 of version 0.1 will be released tomorrow). It crashes often.
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A Mac version will be released within a few weeks, and they’re also working on a Linux version. I assume that by the time they’re ready to release Version 1.0, all 3 will be ready.
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Since it’s so early, the database doesn’t have that much in it. You hear a lot of the same artists, and a lot of that is plinky unfocused electronic stuff or punky screaming vocals. My 1 and 2 stars folders have gotten quite full.
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There are some excellent artists on there. I’ve heard and rated high Happy Rhodes (yay!! amazing female vocalist), the Andreas Kapsalis Trio (an excellent instrumental group from Chicago, I’d never heard of them before), Brunatex (ethereal female vocals from Australia), the Fifi Bastard (female vocals), Groovetronica (exactly what you’d expect by the name), Ella Blame (interesting female vocalist), Thomas Becker (New Wavish instrumentals), John Lewis Grant (classical music), Floriana (Italian female singer), Samantha Murphy (rock), EHMA (solo piano), and some others that I’m not sure who they are because the name of the band/artist wasn’t on the filename, so all I get is a song title. Of those, Happy Rhodes and Brunatex are the only ones I’d heard of before, and I hadn’t heard Brunatex’s music.
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It’s VERY important, if you spend any amount of time with Indy, to clean out your folders often. Remember, the songs are being put on your computer. If you forget that, your 1 and 2 star folders especially get fuller and fuller. This will eat up your hard drive space in no time. I’ve gotten to where I’m only keeping songs that are in my 4 and 5 star folders, and deleting everything else before I shut down Indy. I also go and empty my Recycle Bin often.
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If you’re a musician who wants to submit songs to Indy, PLEASE take care in naming your songs! I have tons of songs on my hard drive now that look like this:
10_music_to_spy_to.mp3
Catch%2022.mp3
SpaghettiWest.mp3
sunshine.mp3
03_wave.mp3
t01.mp3
closer.mp3
01_cubist.mp3
Who are these songs by? I have no idea. I know I liked them at the time enough to give them 4 stars, which got them put in my 4 star folder, but now they’re just phantom songs.
The name of the artist is displayed in the Indy player window, but that’s because the artist has to include their name when they submit songs. It’s not added onto the filename itself, it has to be part of the filename originally.
The best way to name songs is something like this:
Happy_Rhodes_-Equipoise-_I_Say.mp3
That looked good in the player window (the underscores and - were invisible) and I can tell at a glance who/what the artist, album and song is.
Of course, if you don’t care if people know who you are 10 minutes or 10 days after they originally hear your song, ok.
I didn’t mean for this post to be so long when I started, but I think I got in everything I wanted to say. I heard about this in a music mailing list and that person heard about it at Slashdot. I’ve been having a blast playing with it.