Music discovery websites like Pandora and Last FM are great when you already have an artist in mind, but what about when you want to find something truly specific to how you are feeling at that moment? That’s where Musicovery comes in.
Musicovery gives you a grid with four labels: “Calm” on the top, “Energetic” on the bottom, “Dark” on the left and “Positive” on the right. You can click anywhere within the grid to create a custom mood playlist. Where Musicovery excels is that it not only allows you to hone in on your exact mood, but it also provides a good-looking user interface that graphically displays all related songs in a color-coded web.
Pandora is limited in that you cannot see the list of upcoming songs. Musicovery shows you a large selection of related songs, and you can modify the playlist at any time. It also gives you the ability to sort music by genre, style, mood, decade and many others.
Musicovery has almost as wide a music selection as Pandora does, but it gives more music discovery options because it offers two methods of playlist creation: Hits and Discovery. By un-checking the Hits box, Musicovery will find songs from relatively unheard-of artists.
The main limitation to Musicovery is that it plays music at a lower quality than Pandora does. Pandora streams its music at 128KB/s (kilobytes per second), but Musicovery only streams at 96KB/s. That quality is perfectly fine for background music at a party, quiet studying and biking to class, but to an audiophile, it is noticeably inferior to a CD or iTunes download.
Music quality aside, I have been using Musicovery for years, and have never been disappointed with the variety of songs provided to me.
Check it out at musicovery.com. There is also a free app for iPhone.
– Hudson Lofchie
