muscat includes the following elements.

• the "now playing" thing
• utility (PHP, Winamp2 plugin) that posts identifying information about whatever track is playing in Winamp 2
• web elements (PHP) to display the "now playing" information on a personal web page
• music attributes tracking (client-based)
• utility (PHP) for Winamp 2 (minibrowser-based) for displaying and saving a brief list of key track attributes; attributes are, for example, mood-based or style-based ratings of the music
• utility (Perl) for creating and running Winamp 2 playlists based on user-specified attributes which the selected tracks should match
• [attributes are re-configurable, i.e. the user can decide what attributes are most significant and modify the code (easily) to use those attributes]
• [upcoming enhancement: selection based on how recently a track was last played]
• the muscat data model (server-based)
• a highly-normalized set of datbase tables (PostgreSQL) for cataloging detailed music attributes
• web-based interface (JSP) for viewing and editing these attributes
• future enhancements:
• multi-user capability (so that a single catalog can serve multipler users, with a consolidated set of musical content)
• data-mining
• attribute-based analysis
• determining typical dependencies between attributes (e.g., the attribute "annoying" is pretty much the same as the attribute "grating", except when the genre is X)
• profiling user judgements (e.g., jazz music is always rated as "annoying" by user X)
• making preference recommendations by comparing judgements between users
• "fingerprinting" users based on their judgements
• signal-processing tie-ins
• correlating user's subjective attribute judgements with objective signal-based attributes
• building systems that automatically predict / decide "subjective" attribute judgements
• utility ideas
• tool to extract and synchronize ID3 information between two catalogs (writing ID3 data onto [MP3?] files)

some ~immediate next steps:

• resurrect a server-hosted track information database
• tie in to ID3v2 tag reading / editing
• allow for import/export of ID3v2 tags to/from the main database
• effectively can be used as an "ID3v2 merge" tool, between clients of the database
• perhaps hook up to freedb somehow?
• formalize / improve (cache?) album cover URL feature

candidate "music attributes" (hopefully useful in personal cataloging)

• energy
• darkness / brightness
• annoying
• angry
• [attributes similar to those describing people]
• [attributes similar to those describing ______]
• [may be useful to think in terms of polar opposites (not necessarily exclusive opposites, though)]
• [think of alternative "attribute sets" that are useful to categorize music in different scenarios (e.g., picking music for work, picking music for other people to listen to, picking music for public performance, etc.)]
• [probably will have different "families" of attributes, e.g. those that describe the music's effect on me (mostly what i use right now, actually), those that describe the music's overall "quality" (as this guy used), etc.]