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Plugin Provides Tagging Inside iTunes

startups.gigaom.com — New music search service Qloud allows you to organize your tracks inside itunes using tags. You can also search the entire community easily at qloud.com. There's a good flash demo here (you can also download the plugin there): www.qloud.com/tutorial/iTunes/tutorial.html

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 11, 2006

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40 Comments

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  • oOLiquidNightOo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5how does last.fm allow you to tag songs from within itunes?
  • clawoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4And there's also a nifty Songbird plugin. It's good too see open source is not left out.
    http://www.qloud.com/download_songbird_instruction.html
  • SpacemanSpiff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Dugg purely for the animated digg man on their home page.

    Oh yeah, nice concept too.
  • tobymurdock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4KSUdesigner--

    i've "undugg" my digg. you are right, i am a first-time user and am not familiar with digg etiquette. if my digging this is wrong, i hope it helps.

    as for my comments: i've disclosed in each one that i'm the founder. i think i'm being pretty transparent (i could have of course dugg with another anonymous username if my intentions were secretive). i hope this clears things up. and thanks again for your comments.
  • montiff, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3kinda cool, too bad it crashes my itunes everytime.
  • psobot, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I have to disagree wth you, KSU. It's ironic because iTunes was made by Apple, for Macs. Then ported to Windows.
  • lizie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is pretty cool. I run a lot, and am always looking for new music to keep me entertained. It's hard to just go out and find new running music -- it's not like I can search in iTunes for "music that will make me want to keep moving and not kill myself after 2+ hours of running" (trust me, if that was a search catagory, I'd use it and buy what came up) -- but after tooling around on Qloud for a bit, and searching under "Workout" or "Running" tags, I found a lot of great music that I can use to supplement my usual playlist.
  • epheterson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Figured it out:

    Go to C:Program FilesiTunes and delete the following files

    Folders:
    qloudimages

    Files:
    iTunesQLoud.db
    iTunesQLoudExRes.dll
    sqlite3.dll
    TIDCache
    UploadQueue
    Plug-Ins/iTunesQLoudSetup.exe
    Plug-Ins/iTunesQLoudVis.dll
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2But you can't browse by tags in iTunes. The only thing you can do is create smart playlists from your tags. This is good if you don't want to go through the trouble of making a smart playlist. I'd rather be able to browse my tags like this than setup all kinds of smart playlists.
  • yellowmello, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1apple needs to just add something like this to itunes and be done with it. I would have much rather had a tag system like this insted of the cover flow thing.
  • mkoby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually if you use the MixMeister's BPM Analyzer at http://www.mixmeister.com/download_freestuff.html you can then run all your Mp3s through that and it will add BPM to your songs. Then you can make a smart playlist based on the BPMs of the songs.

    This is what I did when going to the gym. I found that BPMs between 100 and 150 work best. Not too fast and not too slow but enough variety to keep you guessing.
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes the little dude is sweet, but it also tells me CLEARLY that they intended to market this thing, at least partially, through digg. That and the fact that the submitter became a member yesterday and has dugg only this story. It's nice that digg can help market things like this, but it's also borderline spam. I really do like what QLOUD is doing with this plugin, but be real, they are just taking advantage of the digg community.
  • tobymurdock, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3oOLiquidNightOo--

    thanks for your comment and feedback.

    disclosure: i'm one of the founders of Qloud.

    the point you make below we think is a key one. when you tag inside a player, it provides you the personal benefit of better organizing your library. when you tag on a website, it is neat, but it does not provide you any personal organizational benefit.

    also: we are working in iTunes for Mac (have Songbird for Mac/Linux/Win already released) and have plans for other players in the future.

    we also hope to be a "safe-haven" for user's music meta-data across players and services. the meta data gets stored on our service, and can be brought down to whatever players or services the user pleases (more on these features coming soon).

    thanks again for your feedback (always welcome at feedback@qloud.com)
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As far as looks are concerned, it's one of the nicer looking sites I've seen in a while. From what I've seen in their demo, I'm not so sure I like the look of it inside iTunes...especially where the QLOUD button is placed, it just looks kind of odd up there. Hopefully they'll get it ported to the Mac soon so I can take a more in-depth look at it.
  • curiousfilm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I've fooled around with this service and think Qloud is really on to something special. Tags within iTunes is a great concept and being able to leverage other users' tags will be huge.
  • svenjick, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Tags have no future! Let's move on to more interesting news...
  • tange1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I cant get http://www.qloud.com/ to load...dugg?
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why? You can already do this in iTunes. Create a smart playlist and set it to look in the comments field for the tags you want. No sense adding functionality that already exists. Maybe if there was a "create smart playlist" button rather than having to configure the smart playlist yourself, that might be nice.
  • mariuz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1song bird seems to be working on linux too , i will test it :P soon
  • tomakun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For me it causes itunes to freeze at the "loading itunes library" box when you start it up.
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can make smart playlists and use them on your iPod without this. This plugin is intended for BROWSING not for creating playlists...iTunes already has that capability.
  • epheterson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Great, so how do i uninstall it?
  • epheterson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1and iTunesQLoudEx.dll
  • CowTipper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you can uninstall from the windows uninstall thingy

    crashed my itunes so i had to uninstall it
  • tobymurdock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1disclosure: i am a co-founder of qloud.

    we plan on being able to use tags to create smart playlists that then can be synched on to iPods. my guess would be 1 month away.

  • Soave, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Can I make smart playlists and use them on my iPod using this? I assume no, which pretty much sucks. Nice idea, but eh.
  • bebouchard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've been wishing for this functionality for a long time so I was excited to install the plugin, but had the same problem others have reported. itunes wouldn't work after the install, so it kind doesn't matter, eh? Nice idea, but try again.
  • oOLiquidNightOo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4windows only, which is kinda ironic.
  • CircusDog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I would advise against using MixMeister's BPM Analyzer. It can't handle the MP4 (AAC) format at all. Not only that, but when I ran it on my music library, it deleted most of the album art. Some MP3 tags were rewritten correctly, but most were not. Luckily, I have a backup.
  • aspirinetu, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2why does that site looks so incredibly gay?
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3If it was a product made by Apple, that might be ironic, but this is just a plugin for iTunes. It says "coming soon" for Mac anyway. It takes time to develop things for other platforms. Get it to the masses (windows) first and then port it to the the other operating systems that are in the minority. Developing it for windows first makes perfect sense.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1looks like another web 2.0, which will try improve the current biggy.I must say that that results somehow appeal to me more that the last.fm ones.I guess there is enough place for both to live and both to expand, it just makes music lovers lifes a bit nicer
  • beercat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It's been a while since I've used the comments in iTunes, but what I didn't like was that I had to try to remember what comments I had already created/used, to keep them consistent. If it's been a while since I last added comments, it can be hard to remember if I created one called "running"... or was it "high energy"... or was it "workout music"...

    I haven't yet looked at this plugin, but it would be nice to be able to have a list of the tags you've used previously so you can just select one or create a new one.
  • yowguy, on 10/21/2007, -0/+0Can anyone help me unistall the qloud thing from itunes on a MAC!
  • tobymurdock, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2v666--

    thanks for your comment. disclosure: i'm one of the founders of qloud.

    really glad to hear that the experience appeals to you. we are trying to build an experience where the discovery is through search with 1) user control, 2) immediate gratification and 3) a consistent UI experience. what we have is a beginning and we are already working on a new UI.

    feedback always welcome to feedback@qloud.com. thanks again.

    and KSUdesigner: thanks for the kind comments on the graphics. we appreciate it. and are working to improve.
  • PhantomTrain, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4Why allow yourself to be limited to JUST using iTunes in the first place?
    With last.fm's plug-in, you can tag a track by listening to it via WinAmp and Windows Media Player.

    Plus, they even have a "radio station" you can listen to, by hearing similar artists or songs with similar tags.

    Oh, and they have the community thing as well.
  • dbldwn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0You can already "tag" songs in iTunes, I do it all the time. Add the words you want to use as tags to the comments of the song properties, then set up smart playlists using comments >> contains. You can't share comments over the web, but who cares?
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2I think it's a gimmick, with a great launch idea (Hey, let's use Digg as our advertising engine. Everyone in the world will post a blog about it, it'll be on Digg 4 times in the next week, and Google hits will soar through the roof).

    The Flash interface is a pain in the neck to use, and having users add random tags to music defeats the metadata layer built into the file (ID3). While ID3-libraries are still imperfect (though iTunes has progressively gotten more and more complex since it's release, using the standard and a reasonably good implementation of ID3), they're still a _hell_ of a lot more reliable than some completely unstandardized database format and randomly tagging words to files.

    All this turns out to be is MusicBrainz 2.0, The Worsening. (anyone who's ever used that database knows how bad the user-submitted tags to that database are).
  • KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1After seeing all of tobymurdock's comments all over the place, I won't even call this borderline spam, it's plain outright spam, and I've marked it as such. Tobymurdock also just joined today and has only dugg this story. I was very interested in this plugin, but seeing the way you are trying to take advantage of digg is a big turnoff and I'm losing interest really quick.
  • PhantomTrain, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4Too bad it's been done before...
    *cough* http://last.fm

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