MusicIP Mixer Help - Power Tools

Power Tools are advanced features of MusicIP Mixer, and require you to have an active registration key.

You can enable Power Tools from the Preferences dialog. When you enable Power Tools, a new menu will appear with advanced options, and several other new options will be added to some of the context menus.

Power Tools Menu Advanced Search Anchored Smooth Shuffle Compare Caches Embed Images Fix Artists Freestyle Mix Mark Duplicates MIP URLs Morph Playlist Ratings/Tags Save As Binary Mood Scan Playlist Spice Playlist Validate Audio Waypoint Mix

View Menu Choose Artist View Mix Menu (right-click on Mix button) Current List Artist Menu (right-click on an Artist) Related Artists Power Search On Screen Searching

Advanced Search

This brings up an extra search window you can use to search artists, albums, or songs. This lets you choose songs to add to the current selections, or to replace the current selections.

If Power Tools are enabled, you can activate the advanced search with the Ctrl+F shortcut.

Anchored Smooth Shuffle

This tool operates on the current playlist, performing a smooth shuffle. The difference between this and a regular smooth shuffle, is that certain points in the list are fixed. (Either the first track, or the first and last tracks, or just the last track).

Compare Caches

The user selects a second library, and we create a third library which is either the songs the first two libraries have in common, or songs in the second library which are not in the first library. This lets you see which songs you share with friends, and which you do not.

Embed Images

This tool operates on selected songs (or all songs if none are selected). If a song does not have an image, but we do have a folder image, then that image is automatically burned into the associated files. The last popup indicates how many songs were modified.

This is especially useful if your MP3 player can show album artwork. Using this tool will make sure your images are available on your player, if you have them stored as files.

Fix Artists

This tool operates on the artist metadata. Each case where two artist names represent the same artist will pop up a dialog. This will show radio buttons with each spelling, so the user can pick one they prefer. The buttons are "Apply Changes", "Skip For Now", and "Bad Suggestion". When the user is done with this pass, we will bring up the automatic tag editor with all the appropriate changes to be applied. The settings will be remembered. Additionally, any Bad Suggestion cases will be sent to the server, so we can update our artist info if necessary. The source of data for this power tool is the server.

Freestyle Mix

This is a special kind of mix. This will start the playlist from your initial seed song, and create a playlist which gradually moves through the available songs. Which direction it moves, and where it ends up, are completely random - if you want to stick within a certain set of music, select a filter before using the Freestyle Mix menu.

Requires 1.9

Mark Duplicates

This tool operates on the duplicates list. All but one from each set of duplicates will be selected. You can then press Ctrl+D and remove all duplicates from your disk. Yikes! Please make sure you want to do this before proceeding. Note, however, that the Power Tool will only select the songs, so you can run it without risking anything. In general, higher quality rips will be preferred to lower quality ones. Songs from an album will be preferred to single songs. When in doubt, we'll pick one randomly!

MIP URLs

This menu lets you interact with the MIP protocol. Use the Register Protocol menu to enable the MIP protocol, and Remove Protocol to disable it. The Create MIP URL command will create a URL which represents the currently selected mix (you must select a mix to use this command). You can share this URL with others to let them create similar mixes from their own collections (this will require them to have the MIP protocol enabled on their version of the mixer).

Morph Playlist

This tool operates on the current playlist. It will create a new playlist which sounds as much as possible like the current playlist, but does not use any songs from the current playlist.

Ratings/Tags

This tool saves all your ratings to a single binary file - filenames, fingerprints, and ratings. You can export or import. This lets you back up your ratings to an external source. Note: Ratings are associated with fingerprints, not metadata. On import, all songs matching the print will be rated. However, only songs which are not already rated will be updated during the import (no existing ratings will be overwritten).

Save As Binary Mood

This tool saves the current playlist as a .m3mood file - this can be stored in your Moods folder to create Mood Mixes. Since this file contains all the necessary analysis information to make mixes, it can be used even where the original songs are not available. This provides a way for you to share your favorite moods with your friends.

Scan Playlist

This tool is only available if the embedded player is enabled. This tool operates on the current playlist. The songs from the current list will be played in order, in scan mode (just a portion of each song). This lets you quickly find a song which you can only identify by sound.

Spice Playlist

This tool operates on the current list of songs. Effectively, it applies the mix algorithm to the current playlist instead of an automatically created playlist. This can be used, for instance, to make a 20 track "Rock" mix, or to filter out all duplicates in a list of songs. The Mix Exclusions are also applied.

In the "Ignore Size Limits" mode, the mix size will be ignored - all songs which satisfy your conditions will be used.

Validate Audio

This tool operates on the currently selected songs (or all songs if none are selected). Each song is tested for validity - i.e. can we decode the entire signal, and does the length match what we expect? We also check whether are any large gaps of silence - these typically indicate hidden tracks, or other tricks more appropriate for CDs than MP3s. The validation results are stored to a text file, which you choose before validation runs.

Waypoint Mix

This tool operates on selected songs. This will make a playlist which starts at the first song and ends at the last song. If more than two songs are selected, they will be sequenced linearly into the paths. The total mix size will use the usual mix settings.

There are two different types of waypoint mixes: rigid and loose. Rigid will try to find exact songs at the transition points, which may cause some weird pop-ins. Loose will make looser mixes around the waypoints.

View/Choose Artist View

Using this option, you can control whether the middle "Artist" view contains Artists, Composers, Conductors, Lyricists, or Orchestras. This depends on the metadata in your music files.

Mix/Current List

Right-clicking on the Mix button lets you choose specific filters to use for making mixes. If you choose the "Current List" option, the mix will be made using only songs in the current song list. You can use this to make lists using just a few songs from your collection without having to create a filter.

Related Artists

If the Mixer has information about artists which are related to the current artist, and Power Tools are enabled, then you will get an extra option "Related Artists" - selecting this will show artists which are related directly to the artist selected. In particular, aliases for the artist will be selected (Billy Joel and Joel, Billy). Also, if there is a direct relationship between two artists (i.e. John Lennon and The Beatles), then the other artists will be selected.

Disclaimer: This tool uses information stored on the main MusicIP servers - if there is a relationship not showing up in your collection, it's probably because this relationship is not yet stored on our server. You can send email to support@musicip.com to let us know about new relationships you would like to see in MusicIP Mixer.

Note: This is different from the "Similar Artists", which shows acoustically related artists.

On Screen Searching

Power Searching lets you type simple expressions to find specific sets of songs. You can find out about Power Search on the Power Search page.