Why Playdar is important
I spent the entire day today with a ton of incredibly smart and successful people all in the music-web space. Music Hack Day officially starts tomorrow, but we got an early jump today with the Playdar Summit. Graciously hosted by The Echo Nest at their very cool offices, the Playdar Summit was a round-table of about 20 people all talking about this very new and interesting technology called Playdar.
If you don’t know what Playdar is, go check it out here - http://www.playdar.org/. Back? Not really sure what it is? You are not alone. It takes a bit for it to sink in but once you realize its power and potential, you will be amazed. Playdar was created by RJ of Last.fm fame. RJ is going about it the same way he did with Last.fm — open source, community-driven, simple apis. So what exactly does Playdar mean when it calls itself a ‘music content resolver’?
Think of Playdar as the connection between your music and the web. It is a small application that runs on your machine and exposes your music to any web site you grant access to. Today, ‘your music’ means the mp3 files you own. But it has an extensible architecture which means that anyone can write a plug-in for any music source. There could be a plug-in which finds your Spotify playlists. One that finds Youtube music videos. One that finds all mp3 files on your home network. And so on. So what’s the big deal about finding your own music?
Here are a couple of scenarios that could be interesting:
1. You go to your favorite music news site. You grant permission to the site to access your music library through Playdar. The site then shows you articles based on your music tastes.
2. You go to your favorite playlist sharing site. You grant permission to the site to access Playdar. Playdar imports these playlists into Spotify.
3. You run Playdar at home. You run Playdar at the office. These Playdars talk to each other over the web. You stream all your music from home to work.
4. You go to your favorite radio site. This site plays back music to you. Sometimes you own the songs it chooses to play. In this case, the site streams it from your computer instead of from their own servers. The site saves money on bandwidth costs.
5. You like iTunes Genius playlists. But you feel like they are not the most accurate recommendations. You visit Echo Nest’s site — a company that specializes in music recommendations. They build you a better Genius playlist from your own music.
As you can see, there are a ton of possibilities Playdar opens up. The best part of the Summit was that everyone had a different thing they wanted to do with it. The fact that it is open source and extensible means that most of these things will get built. Never before have so many music-web people been this excited about the same thing. Kudos to RJ for once again being so ahead of the game. I am really excited to hack on this tomorrow!
