The Filter: auto-playlists you like for Mac, Windows, Nokia phones

The_filter

Hi, my name is Kevin and I’m a digital music addict. All day long I swim between my Zune Pass subscription, XM Radio online and Pandora. When I just want to hear music I enjoy and not worry about playlists, Pandora’s my best bet. That may change now that I saw a bit of freeware called The Filter. It works for iTunes, Windows Media Player and Nokia S60 phone devices.

After you install The Filter and register an account, you pick up tothree seed songs from your digital music library. The Filter then usesthose songs to query its central database to find similar songs in yourlibrary that other users of The Filter like. Like Pandora, The Filtercontinuously monitors your listening preferences, providing more weightto songs that you listen through to the end and lowering the "I likeit" factor when you skip out of a song.

It’s not quite looking at the music’s "DNA" like Pandora, but it’s agood second option. The fact that it works across Windows, Mac andNokia devices expands the user database all the more. If you don’t havea large digital music collection and do have connectivity, Pandoramight be the better option. For those with gigs of audio, you mightwant to give The Filter a try, although it was beta-like and wee bitbuggy for me. I did get it working on my UMPC with my Zune contentthrough WMP, but my computer slowed up considerably. I wonder how muchof a coincidence it is that The Filter’s interface looks a bunch likePandora’s? ;)

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