SmartDJ: An interactive music player for music discovery by similarity comparison

We present a user-friendly method that employs acoustic features to automatically classify songs. This is achieved by extracting low-level features and reducing the feature space using principle component analysis (PCA). The songs are then plotted on a song-space graphic user interface (GUI) for manual or automatic browsing. The similarity between songs is given by the Euclidean distance in this lower-dimension song space. Using this song space, a prototype application known as the “SmartDJ” has been implemented on the MAX/MSP platform. This prototype application enables users to visualize their music library, select songs based on their similarity or automate the song selection process using a given seed song. We also describe, in this paper, several features of the application including the smooth mix transition feature which provides an enhanced experience for the users to perform song transition seamlessly.