Musicovery is an interesting little web app that blurs the line between interactive toy and radio. Musicovery lets you choose and explore music by mood, style, genre, decade and much more. Mix and match filters and customize your internet radio experience to suit your tastes, even if that happens to be dark energetic pop or jazz from the 80s.
Each time you change your preferences in the nav bar the music selector jumps across the screen and plays another song. Genres are color-coded and really add to the aesthetic appeal of the experience. There's a large selection of music to listen to as well, from jazz to classical, hip hop, world, rock and so much more. You can even scroll around the map and choose songs manually. For users with a good internet connection there's no lag or song loading time, so you can expect smooth listening from start to finish.
The downside about Musicovery is that songs play in a noticeable lo-fi format, reserving the better quality for paid users. Subscriptions are reasonably priced but the registration process is confusing and hints at a number of hidden sign-up fees. It's much better to stick with the free version and enjoy the thrill of musical exploration. For a really interesting experience, try unchecking the "hit" box and select "discovery". You'll unearth a ton of obscure bands you just might learn to love.
Musicovery is a great way to find new songs and play with different styles of music. It isn't really a game, but it's got the same sense of exploration and fun as any web toy on the internet.
Cheers to Gexx for sharing the discovery!
Isn't this the same as www.pandora.com?
Wow, I'm having way too much fun with this, despite the fact that the lag is driving me *CRAZY* I love the less well known bands in the 'discovery' section, some I've heard of, and am excited to see they're getting publicity, some new to me. All in all, this is an interesting idea, and really, quite amusing.
I found it faster in Firefox than IE though, and noticeably so.
Thanks, JohnB!
*is irked*
i saw "the who" which i REALLY REALLY wanted to listen too, but as i trying to mouse over to it, it went to somewhere completely diff
My typical critical review of this:
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!
Pandora is quite different you enter a artist or song in Pandora and it spits out songs similar in their "music genode" (if that's the right phrase) while in Musicovery you input a Mood and Dance level and it picks a trail of songs that fit, and does it in a more visual way.
Though I would love to see what would happen if Musicovery and Pandora had a baby >.>
Music Love Child!
They need an Indie genre.
I loves me some Indie. Especially Bright Eyes.
The only problem I had was very limited songs in the "Blues" section causing many of the songs to be completely different "Darkness positiveness and tempo". Other then that this is a great site. Harukio it is "Music Genome" which should be easy to remember because the name is based off of the "Human Genome".
I'd also really like to combine music types to have all types of music in the same "station". Their music types were kind of blurred along Blues Metal and Rock in my opinion. I also don't really like them having only Lofi and Hifi requiring a membership.
ugh, I have no idea where I got the word "genode" from, but yeah, I meant genome :/
Stupid brain...
wow, they have EVERYTHING. I had bought a set of 6 Classical Cds for one of my music classes, after attempting to download most of it from the internet but couldnt find any, and this site has ALL Of that in there. i experienced no lag either. but i wasted $96 on the cds.
If you pick from the 2 sets of choices at the top grey box (mood/dance) you will get different styles of music.
ie: "energetic" or "tempo-" will give you a play list of songs from pop, jazz, blues, soul, electronic, etc that share the mood qualities.
I really love this because I love music from every genre available, but it's a little annoying because of lag or something and it constantly freezes/refuses to play what I click on, choosing instead to change the whole playlist omitting the song I wanted! Plus it's kind of hard to find an exact song you may want but as a radio it works just fine =P Instant bookmark, even if it is a lil hard to use =)
Well, after getting it to lock up twice, I finally got it to work and it's kind of fun. I wish there was a function that allowed you to zoom out and see more of the path though. However, the overall lagging and erratic response on the navigation interfaces tend to take away from the experience for me unless you just slowly set everything you want on the outset and then "walk away" and let it play - constant tweaking leads to lockup :( . Oh, spotted a couple of typos there too. ("Metalica - Enter sad man" [snicker]) Still, may come back to this one if they refine the mechanism under the hood a bit more.
sweet!! this reminds me of some flash sound experiments i played with back back in 2002 with representing sound as beacons in 3d space rather than as 2d tracks with linear playhead.
Its nice to see someone do some music visualization with better design and music.hehe
http://www.thomasglyn.com/bd4dsf/soundBeacons2.html
How do you get it to stop jumping around and play the whole song?
Maybe it's just my system, but this toy is running TERRIBLY slow, taking probably 30-45 seconds after I click a genre. It would otherwise be an awesome toy, but this just ruins it totally.
Looks like we've hit their servers a bit hard. Before I posted the review here it was fine, now there's a noticeable lag when trying to change songs.
Scott: It changes songs every time you click something. Set the options and let it run and you'll hear a constant stream of music.
So on the days I don't have internet, I plan to not study ^^
Seriously, if my history grade miraculously rises, chances are because of this toy
If you have trouble with lag, you can always check out pandora.com, which, while it doesn't let you freely choose songs, does have a pretty good music matching system. Try it out!
This is great! everyday since it has been posted ive been listening to music on it!
Keep it up Jay and others!
You may need to delete the Musicovery cookie if you want to hear the same song twice.
agree with all the negative comments, totally unusable when it switches around whenever you uncheck a genre (or even better, misclick by a pixel and get an energetic song of a genre you did NOT want to hear) and it locks up before you adjusted it to your likings and could just let it play to wait for good songs
...Could somebody 'splain to me by what logic Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" is at the farthest right in the Positive spectrum?
It just really annoys me that every time you change something it jumps. For a start, making your settings to start with really screws with your head, and then if you want to change it a bit you end up jumping songs. It would be nice if it played out songs before jumping.
To be honest, I much prefer Pandora.
Just wanted to give you a heads up, they have a pause button now!
could any body tell where i could find ironman by black sabbath
this is really cool. i love it. if i hadn't found this game i wouldn't have found this song i really like!
its true the songs are color coded,
do you know how does the shape code works?
This site is great... everyone should check it out. All the genres are colour coded (also by hue) and the bubbles are different shapes depending on the mood of the song. I have the best rogers internet, so it works great for me. But i can see this lagging out and being slow for some people
Great site................what an amazing range of music
I've just found out about musicovery and decided to check out some reviews before I bought a premium account.
I can tell you that (at least on a good PC with a good connection) the service works great now, no lag, all the functions are there that I need and the music is diverse and just great in general!
Also about the registration problems, it could be that they changed it by now because I was able to register a premium account in under 2 minutes at $15 for three months (which translates to less than €10 for us Europeans :P). The Hi-Fi quality is great and it will absolutely replace my own (paid for) song collection for the next three months and possibly a long time after that.
Unfortunately they haven't done any upgrade in ages. Seems like the developers has abandoned it.
Thanks for sharing though!
Playing it at the moment.
did anyone else have trouble with this page's structure? as in, when i go to musicovery, i cant see all of the genres, but there is also no scroll bar. it just disappears. i can see more genres if i take away my toolbars and browser but i still cant even see them all then. its very frustrating..
That stank. It never gave me GOOD music.
i recently discovered musicovery and have been frequenting it more and more due to the frequency of commercials playing on pandora. this allows you to skip more music as well and also supplies you with a convenient mood pad. musicovery + my bb2 (boombotix) = fantastic vibrations.
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