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I kind of overprepared for the recent Boston Music Hackday. I ended up presenting a cheerfully simplistic but surprisingly effective automatic chorus-finder, which might conceivably have some future function at work, but that was actually my 5th hack idea, after I accidentally finished the first 4 before hacking was supposed to officially start.  

#1, which I accidentally did weeks in advance, was Is This Band Name Taken?, which is pretty literally the simplest possible Echo Nest API application, as it calls a single API function and doesn't even check the result other than to see if there is one, but still got me and the Echo Nest into the Boston Herald yesterday.  

#s 2, 3, 4 and 6 (even #5 turned out to require less work than I pessimistically anticipated) all had various things to do with the Rdio API, and eventually I realized that I was actually writing an alternate Rdio client one disconnected feature at a time, so I put them together. And gave the assemblage a name. And you can try it.  

It is called Supercollector. I think this is a pretty good name for a music-management application, and I apologize for squandering it on one that I do not expect to have particularly widespread appeal. Rdio's own software is lovely, and a big part of why Rdio is clearly the best streaming music service anybody has so far made, and my construction of an alternative is intended as a minor addition, not any kind of replacement.  

That said, there are a variety of fiddly workflow-ish things I do in the course of exploring music, and Supercollector is designed to do those in a ruthlessly streamlined way. It facilitates using one playlist as a candidate list for another. It turns search results into playlists. It turns artist catalogs into playlists. It lets you poke obsessively through playlists with an obsessive minimum of extra pointer movements. It lets you move whole albums into and out of playlists. It replaces playlist tracks that have annoyingly become unavailable since you picked them. It keeps track of your places in multiple playlists at once.  

These are obscure needs, but if they also happen to be among your obscure needs, give it a try.  

 

[Obviously you need an Rdio account. I mean, in general. To use Supercollector you probably also need to have some Rdio playlists, otherwise you're going to get a big empty screen with "Supercollector" at the top.]
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