Bringing Mobile Map-Based Access to Digital Audio to the End User

Private as well as commercial music collections keep growing in size and diversity. With an increasing number of tracks and the resulting complexity users quickly face proplems in handling their collections in an adequate way. At the same time, new business models of online vendors arise and the inherent industry interest in new ways of distribution channels and devices becomes immanent. In this paper, we show alternative ways of interacting with large music collections, based on the Self-Organising Map clustering algorithm applied to an audio feature representation of audio files. We therein focus on the presentation of full desktop applications as well as applications for mobile devices like PDAs and Smartphones with the goal of bringing Music Information Retrieval technologies closer to end users. Further, the presented interfaces give an outlook to means of access to other types of media in streaming environments, e.g. video.