Generating iTunes Related-Artist Playlists

Spencer Robinson ISYS 540 Winter 2010
Executive Summary

Music fans and critics often speak about musical artists in terms of which other artists are similar. When reading about an unfamiliar artist, knowing which artists are similar to the new artist can help a listener to identify attributes the unfamiliar artist will have.

I have created an Excel-based program that will allow a user to enter a musical artist, either in the user’s iTunes library or not, and present the user with a list of similar artists. Additionally, the program searches the user’s iTunes music library for songs by the artists in the list and generate a playlist with all the songs in the user’s library recorded by artists similar to the artist the user searched.

I got the idea for this project from a similar project created by Shawn Hansen for the ISYS 540 class in Fall Semester 2009. I used one “This is how to export an iTunes playlist” instructional picture from his project, but all of the code included in this project is my own; I didn’t use any code from Shawn’s project in completing my own.

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