squatcom.com is a service that automatically downloads music, tailored to your tastes, to a playlist in iTunes.
When you rate songs (by clicking on the stars in iTunes), the squatcom.com program submits your ratings to a central server. These ratings are used to match you with other users with similar taste, and to customize which songs are downloaded in the future. The music is freely available and legal to download from the Internet; this service just provides a way to aggregate people's opinions to help you find the music you'll like.
The installation package is currently for Mac OS X only.
- Nightly build: squatcom.com-nightly.tar.gz
- Latest point release: squatcom.com-0.1.4.tar.gz
The installation process currently requires you type a few commands at the shell using the Terminal program. It contains installation instructions in a README.txt file, but I would be happy to help you out if anything is not clear. Email me at mark-abbott@earthlink.net with any questions.
Once the program is installed, it runs automatically in the background. All you need to do is rate the songs that appear in the iTunes playlist called "squatcom.com". New songs will appear in the playlist automatically.
Please rate the songs in the squatcom.com playlist.
Your ratings are important. By rating songs, you let the program know that you want more songs, and also give us information about your tastes so we can send better songs in the future.
Initially, the program will only download 10 songs. You will get new songs only when you rate the old ones.
Actually asked questions:
If I rate a song and later change the rating, do you register the change, or both, or only the original?
The current (changed) rating is always used. The server will always know about your current ratings before sending you new songs.
If I don't rate something, does that equal a zero?
No, it means "this song is not yet rated."
iTunes does not distingish between "0 stars" and "unrated", so if a song has 0 stars, we have to assume it's not rated. So the lowest rating you can give is a 1.
In theory, will this just keep filling up my library until it explodes?
Yes.
The program will add songs to the playlist whenever there are less than ten unrated songs. So as long as you keep rating songs, the playlist will keep growing. (If it doesn't, something is wrong; please let me know.)
However, the program automatically deletes songs you rate with 1 star.
Since these songs are live, many of them have talking or applause at the beginning or end.
Right, that's annoying.
In iTunes, you can crop the songs manually by selecting the track and doing "File > Get Info > Options". If you do so, your crops will be reported back to the server and propogated out for everyone else to enjoy -- that is, everyone else's copy of the song will be cropped in the same way.
So, what is the point of rating songs again?
Your ratings are submitted to the server. The server uses those ratings to find other users with tastes like yours. Your future recommendations will be based on songs those users like.
Songs show up in the squatcom.com playlist, but after a while they disappear (little exclamation marks in iTunes).
In your iTunes preferences, you probably have the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" checkbox unchecked. This causes problems, but there is a workaround. See the "CONFIGURATION" section in the README.txt file for details, and email me if you have any trouble.
Questions yet to be asked:
I don't use iTunes. Can I use squatcom.com?
Not yet.
The project was designed from the start to make it as easy as possible to write plug-ins for a variety of music players. The server can talk to any client; the iTunes client is a reference implementation that anyone can use to write a plug-in for another player.
Where does the music come from? Aren't you stealing it?
No. All the music is legally downloaded, recorded by willing musicians.
There is a huge amount of music like this on the Internet. That's actually part of the problem this site is trying to solve. There is so much free music, it's hard to find the stuff you'll like. Traditionally, that has been the job of middlemen like record labels. In the long run, grass-roots solutions like this project may make these middlemen irrelevant.
At the moment, nearly all the music comes from two sources: the live music archive at archive.org, and garageband.com. Eventually I will add music from some of the many other sources of legal music downloads.
Can squatcom.com do X?
Probably not. But let me know what you want and I will implement it if I can.
Have I mentioned yet that you should let me know if you have any questions?
