Googlified

This post is written by Kent Dodds, he was the author of the KD Productions Blog. You can find more about him on his FAQ page.

Dear Google, this isn’t just a new feature, but a whole new program. I think that with the direction I see Google going this would fit right in. That direction that I am seeing could best be defined as:

Helping the world and its information become more organized in the least expensive way possible for the world.

This is what I love about Google and this is why I’m coming to you with this suggestion (along with the fact that I know you will do extremely well with the idea if you decide to implement it into your labs projects).

Here is the idea:

Music. Music is becoming some of the most unorganized pieces of information on the hard drive of any computer. Unless that computer happens to be run by someone like me who hates anything unorganized and spends hours upon hours making sure that it is organized. Now, whenever someone needs to find a song in windows explorer, they can’t do it, because it always has some sort of funky name. Or, if someone wants to play a certain genre on their iPod, normally they’ll find that many songs labeled with that genre definitely don’t belong in that genre. I’m talking about:

1. Filename organization (less important to many) and
2. Meta data (super important to all).

Now, I know that Windows Media Player and iTunes both have features where, if you stick in a CD that you got from the store, normally they’ll have information about that CD and it’ll label everything just fine for you. But what about music that you get elsewhere? I know, and you know that music comes from a variety of places and in most cases doesn’t come all at the same time, it comes song by song. Therefore, why not have a program (in my opinion download-able would be best) that could match up the waveform of each individual song and find all of the meta data for it and label it with that, and then let the user apply a certain filenaming system like Artist - Title.mp3 or Soundtrack - Artist - Title - Version - Year - Whatever.mp3.

Lots of programs have a renaming function already, but no program that I have ever heard of has made use of matching up waveforms to make sure that a song is what it says that it is. This is my vision. I’m no programmer, believe me, I’ve tried. Otherwise I would be at work at this myself and then sell you the idea ;D Because I know you could publicize this a lot better than anyone else and it would benefit a lot more people than if I tried to do it myself. That’s why I don’t hire someone to do it for me. Here is my idea of how this program would function (like I said, I’m no programmer, but I think this would work out well).

First of all, it needs to have all the right features, and I know that with every feature that’s added into a program, it’s nice to have an option to turn it on or off. I’ll leave the features to you because there are just so many features that I would hate to make this longer than it already is. But make sure that it has a “Bulk conversion” feature, because people have thousands of unorganized songs on their computers, consider this to be like Picasa for Music.

Secondly, this is how I envision the actual sync to work. You need to have a huge database of songs ranging from song title, to song length to the exact waveform, you’ll know why in a second. Sometimes, people will have the filename right but their meta data is totally wrong, so I think that this would be the first thing to check, and then, if they do have the correct name, proceed to the next step with that information in mind, if they don’t, proceed without that information in mind.

Next, people, unless they are audio editors, don’t even know how to change the length of a song, so I think that would be the next thing to check would be the length of the song.

At this point, if you have the correct artist OR song title, you probably have a match. Consider it like a list of songs that continues to be narrowed down with every step you take, once you have about 10 songs that it could possibly be, that would be the point to check the waveform, this is how I think that should be done:

Many songs are not already normalized so you can’t get mixed up with that. However, look at everything in relation with one another. Is there a pause in the music at this time? Is there a sudden large amplitude at this time? Does it fade in, does it fade out? Certain things like that should be checked first to continue to winnow away the remaining songs, ideally, at this point there should only be one song left and you could check the actual waveform with that song, if that does match, then ask the user if this is the song they are looking for

This, like I mentioned above would be a nice feature, and like I mentioned above, should have a disable button just in case someone wanted to leave it on during the night. However, sometimes computers can be wrong and so a log should be kept so the user can see the songs that didn’t match up as well, but were still changed or weren’t changed but matched fairly well, and then they can choose whether it should be changed or not. Like I said, I’m not going to mention all of the features because that would take too long, and I trust that you guys will play it smart and include the best features.

Anyway, I think this fits right in with your mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Please don’t just toss this idea aside. I honestly don’t care to get a mention of my name at all so long as you put this idea to good use. If you (I’m addressing the person reading this now) aren’t the one who particularly works with this type of stuff, PLEASE forward it to those who do. Don’t be evil.

The end. So yeah, I think that I shouldn’t have said anything about the fact that I couldn’t publicize cause it makes it sound like I’m just trying to USE Google for their ability to get my idea out in the world. But yeah, I hope that they actually do something, that would be great. I sent it to like 5 different areas of Google to make sure that it wouldn’t just be tossed aside. What are your thoughts?

You can contact Kent regarding to Google Music Organizer here.