A Mirage made of music

Mirage 0.6 is now available, bringing interesting new features and bug fixes.

Mirage is an extension for Banshee, the media player you all know and love. It analyzes all the songs in your music library and is then able to evaluate the similarity between any particular songs, just by looking at the acoustic signal.

Mirage was originally created by Dominik Schnitzer as a part of his master thesis (Mirage - High-Performance Music Similarity Computation and Automatic Playlist Generation, pdf). I won't even try to pretend that I understand half of what is going on during the acoustic analysis and the similarity calculations, but I can tell you that there are matrices and Fourier transforms, amongst others.

Analyzing a song shouldn't take more than a few seconds, but of course if you have a music library with several thousand tracks, those seconds can add up to become quite a while. The good thing is that you can stop the analysis at any time, restart later, and Mirage only analyzes tracks that were not already processed.

When the analysis is finished, you can then select one or several tracks, drag-n-drop them to the "Playlist Generator" source and Mirage will automatically create a playlist of similar songs. The playlist will be refreshed automatically and will adapt itself as you listen to the songs or skip them.

This release introduces a new and experimental "duplicate search" feature : go to "Tools > Mirage Playlist Generator" and select "Duplicate Search". Mirage will then go through your whole music library and if any two tracks are very similar to each other, they will be added to a "Mirage Duplicates" playlist.

So go ahead and try it !