SuggesTunes

SuggesTunes was created as a course project for EECS 395: Scripting Languages at Northwestern University in the spring term of 2006.

With the recent explosion of online music stores, peer to peer programs, and mp3 mass storage devices, iPods and iTunes have come into common public use. Users of iTunes range from computer novices to experts. Almost every person that I know in college uses iTunes, and a huge percentage of those people have iPods. Many of my friends have iTunes Libraries with upwards of 6,000 songs in them. With such massive libraries, it is very difficult for me to quickly find music that I will enjoy when I am at their houses.

I have created an application, using Python, that suggests which songs in my friends’ iTunes Libraries that I may enjoy listening to. This application is simple to use, and easy to distribute. The distribution consists of a folder containing three executable files and one dll. The SuggesTunes folder should be copied to the user’s iPod. Then when at a friend’s house, all the user has to do is plug into a computer, and run any of the executables. They each generate a new playlist on the computer’s iTunes with a title that indicates the type of suggestions being offered and which iPod they are suggestions for. Each of these playlists contains every song from the computer’s iTunes Library that may be of interest to the user, based on the songs on user’s iPod.