Yahoo! Hacks

Visualize Your Music Collection

Use the Yahoo! Music Engine API to find out which artists appear most often in your collection.

Visualizing an entire music collection has never been easy. Whether the music is in stacks of vinyl records or in racks full of CDs, it’s tough to get a picture of all of the artists, albums, and genres that are so unique to each of us. Moving music from the physical world to the digital world of computers has helped, because digital formats can store information about albums and artists that can be extracted and analyzed.

Figure 2-82. Yahoo! Shopping wish list email

This hack helps you visualize your virtual music collection by showing you a list of artists in different font sizes: the larger the font, the more tracks you have by that artist. With this approach, you can see at a glance whether you have more tracks by Kraftwerk or The Propellerheads, and which artists you have the most tracks from.

Using different-sized fonts to represent popularity is sometimes called a tag map and was pioneered by the photo-sharing site Flickr [Hack #67] .

Tip

You can see the most popular photo tags on Flickr in this format at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags.

This hack creates a tag map–like interface for the artists in your music collection by tapping into the Yahoo! Music Engine.

Yahoo! Music Engine

The Yahoo! Music Engine (YME) is a free music player for Windows. It’s ...