Just because I’m thinking about it, and also as a form of procrastination against something else I have to do, I’m stopping in to describe a feature that I’d consider a killer app. I have no idea what it would take to incorporate it.
In Roon, as in most other jukebox apps I’ve touched, asking for ‘related music’ takes metadata into account. Joe Jackson begets Elvis Costello, Charles Mingus begets Art Blakey. As far as I can tell, metadata is sliced most completely into cultural prominence (so the Clash begets late-70s English punk bands).
Over in Plexamp, the awfully-named “Sonic Adventure” works differently. I don’t know how it does its job, but it seems to take a snapshot of the actual sonic properties of a piece of music (tempo, instrumentation, production qualities) and builds a bridge between tracks. It’s a feature that keeps me coming back and, although I don’t want to be dramatic, it’s kind of the real fulfillment of having flattened all of these tracks to indexed files in the first place.
If I start the machine brain with Thelonius Monk playing solo piano, and tell it to build a path to Philip Glass playing solo piano and then end up at Herbie Hancock, I get the most remarkable tour through my own record collection.
And I’m just saying that to me, that’s the gold standard.