Jeremey's Weblog

Gabriel, Two Portraits

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Pandora

This is really, really, really awesome. Pandora is a radio-station front end to the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous detailed music profiling tool. Basically you give it one or more songs or artists that you like, and it begins playing music that it thinks you might like. You can thumbs-up/thumbs-down a song or skip to another, etc. The cool thing is that it does not use any "usage pattern matching" or "collective popularity" kinds of algorithms, it uses around 400 distinct musical properties that a team of musicians has analyzed for each song. So it doesn't just recommend popular music that other people bought, but instead it recommends actually similar music, based on the music itself. Very cool!

I'm gonna go broke on iTunes now.

iLife '06

This may sound like the usual Apple-faithful drone of praise, but holy cow, the new podcast studio feature of GarageBand is amazing. That alone is worth the price. I'm producing some training videos right now for new workers overseas, and I recorded a video walkthrough of some of my code (using Snapz X Pro, which is also awesome and way worth the $69). I created a new podcast project in GarageBand, dragged the movie file onto the video track, and GarageBand imported it, separated the audio track, and expanded the window to show a video playback section and the controls for the audio track. Built-in are several variations on male and female noise-reducing plugins, one of those and a quick dose of a notch filter at 1kHz, and my audio track sounded 100 times better.

iPhoto's full screen mode is outrageously good - translucent panels of controls appear when you mouse near the bottom of the screen, and a translucent filmstrip of your images appears when you mouse near the top, else you just have your photo. You can bring up the translucent adjustments or effects panels, as well as use any of the other editing tools, such as retouching. Even just for viewing, it's very nice. The effects panel is new and very nicely done. And photocasting is genius in its simplicity.

iMovie's new animated "themes" are a really cool. They take your basic home movie to a whole new level. They're more like built-in animated overlays and sequences that you can configure than they are themes, though each "theme" has a set of sequences that have a similar look to them. They definitely make your home movie look alot more produced. Very cool.

iWeb looks pretty basic but very nice so far, but I've only tinkered with it for a few minutes. The templates I've looked at are very nice.

Happy Keynote Day!

Ah, the joys of the Keynote season... culminating today on Keynote day. It just warms the heart.