Through a series of events that I'm not 100% sure I could duplicate (even if I wanted to), I lost all my playlists in iTunes. I never really thought much about my playlists because I don't tend to make them for specific events, just more based on my mood ("Frumbly" and "Perk it Up" are my two current favourites) or if I have a block of work to do ("Cut and Paste" and "Inbox Cleanup" see some fair rotation).
But after the big loss, I had to start all over again. This is one of the reasons I like the new Genius feature of iTunes 8 - where you can create a playlist of items in your library based on one of your songs. I've used it a couple of times and it works pretty well.
I'm blessed to have some great playlist makers in my family. Bill, Rose's dad, made a f'awesome playlist for our wedding rehearsal dinner. Great combo of jazz and world music! And Rose herself made one for the dance after our wedding cabaret. She polled blog buddies and her gay man friends to create the best wedding reception playlist ever.
Unfortunately, these skills have not yet rubbed off on me, so I was delighted to discover Amplified Journeys, a new application from harman/kardon (maker of audio and cinema home systems). Amplified Journeys will create a customized playlist for your roadtrip - just enter your start point, destination and preferred genre.
I used our recent trip from Vancouver to San Francisco with the Folk and World music genre as a test case.
Amplified Journeys generated a playlist of 222 songs. I actually had about 20% of the songs in my library already, recognized another 40% of the music and was unfamiliar with the remaining 40%. I spot checked 10 songs from the unfamilar music - 2 I really liked and would buy, 3 I thought were OK but wouldn't purchase and 5 made me want to poke my eyes out. I did notice that as I got closer to San Francisco, I liked more of the music. According to Amplified Journeys, the interior of northern California is a musical wasteland - best traveled with music like "The Lemon of Pink" (best song name ever - but alas, one of those that made me want to grab an ice pick) from The Books.
While there were 222 songs, there were only 44 different artists (and way too much Jandek) which I found surprising but the range was pretty good - from Tara MacLean and Great Big Sea (two of my favourite Canadian artists) to Phil Ochs and Joan Baez to the McGarrigle sisters, Phish and Värttinä.
Here's the playlist it created in XML format.
You can export the playlist from Amplified Journeys and then import it into your iTunes. If you have links to the Music Store enabled, you'll be able to find and purchase the individual songs. I do wish there was a way for it to find the ones that were already in your library (not sure if this would be an iTunes feature or not).
In addition to having a playlist generated around the directions of your trip, Amplified Journey will also generate one based on landmarks as well as on bands that have an association with places on your trip. When I tried these options, the ordering changed, but the artists and the songs mostly stayed the same. Plus, the maps didn't seem to work - so this part of the app may be more beta than other parts :)
The next step, of course, is for Amplified Journeys to make these playlists social. Whether by allowing me to share them on my Facebook or Last.fm or by having some interesting integration with Dopplr. That could be pretty neat.
In any case, Amplified Journeys was a fun and easy way to generate a substantial playlist and discover some new artists. To me, it's also a perfect marketing project for an audio equipment company. Harman is an international company; presumably they have access to international music databases and can highlight some little-known interesting local artists. I look forward to seeing what they do with it next.
(h/t to ChipChick)