Music Explorer FX: A Tool for Music Discovery Written in JavaFX

So as I mentioned last week, in my exploration of JavaFX I’ve written a music discovery tool called “Music Explorer FX” (or just MEFX for short).

It’s been available for about a week now in the Java Store, but since that’s only available within the U.S. and requires registration, I’ve provided a link here. Just click on the “launch” button and you’ll be on your way.

Hopefully the application is somewhat self-explanatory, but here’s a very brief rundown of how it works.

Given a initial seed artist, which is entered in the initial search screen here, MEFX will present you with up to six artists that are similar. Click on any of these recommended artists to promote it to the center and start the process over. As you browse through artist recommendations, your old artists will be remembered along the top in the “history” that you can always return to at any point.

Once you generate a few artists in your history, you can tweet your musical journey by clicking on the the twitter icon (the singing bird) in the upper right corner.

At any point the artist in the middle (the “current” artist) will have a bank of buttons below it which you can use to jump between different modes of the application. From left to right they are:

• The search button takes you back to the initial search screen.
• The “info” button will show you various aggregated information from around the internet (e.g. news, reviews, artist homepage, iTunes link, videos, and blogs). You can click on any of the links in this mode
• The “image gallery” icon will attempt to pull down images of the artist performing live from Flickr (I’ve always enjoyed seeing live shots of bands for some reason).
• The “similar” button (visible only in “info” or “gallery” mode) will return you to the “artist similarity” screen.
• The “?” icon will bring up a basic help menu describing most of this information.

If audio is found for the current artist, audio controls will appear below the artist’s image.

The green and yellow gauges in the picture above are familiarity and hotness ratings respectively. Check out this post by Paul Lamere for a detailed explanation of these metrics.

You can run the application in full screen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right corner (full screen mode with dual monitors may cause unpredictable results). Click the icon again to return to windowed mode.

MEFX is largely powered by the Echo Nest’s public web services which provides the data for resolving the artist search, artist similarity, familiarity and hotness, any audio tracks, videos, blogs, news, links, and reviews.

Secondarily the artist profile images are courtesy of Last.fm’s web services, and the “image gallery” is feed by Flickr.

You can get more information about MEFX, including basic support information as well as more detailed instructions, at http://www.musicexplorerfx.com.

Special thanks to Paul Lamere, the Director of the Developer Community over at the Echo Nest, for help and support in getting this application off the ground. If, in using this app, you find yourself discovering new music — you have the Echo Nest to thank, not me.

Also thanks to my wife, Deb, for help with the artwork, and to my boss, Matt, for letting me run with this idea.

So anyway, if you do decide to try it, let me know what your experience is by leaving a comment or contacting me directly at sanderson att citytechinc dott com.

And if you discover a cool musical journey, hit that twitter button and share it with the world.

Enjoy!