Tangerine Enters a Crowded Market, Pwns All
Over the last few weeks I have talked about applications and services that enhance iTunes, such as Qloud’s tagging plugin and Soundflavor’s iTunes add-on. Get ready to welcome one more application to this group, Tangerine. Tangerine is most similar to Soundflavor in that it can create playlists for you by analyzing the songs in your iTunes library. The main difference being that Tangerine is launching with a Mac version and will remain Mac only.
We came up with the idea after I noticed that I was spending a good 30 minutes to come up with about 30 tracks for working out. I would repeat the process fairly often and I was getting tired of it and tired of listening to the same songs over and over again. So we developed Tangerine to automate that process. The app should pay for itself for some people. It should be really handy for Nike+ users and if you’re not, this app may motivate you to get one because there’s nothing like running to the beat of the music to keep you motivated.
The UI
From the few minutes I have played with Tangerine, I can say outright that the interface is impeccable. Tangerine has a fantastic icon and a clean iTunes-like experience. It immediately displays your iTunes playlists and allows you to browse through your library. When generating a new playlist, the bottom portion of the interface shows you each song as graphed according to length and BPM, making it easy to grasp what kind of playlist you are building.
Tangerine is beta software and that explains why it was sometimes hard to get a song to play even when clicking it multiple times. Also, the little “LCD” area gives you no indication of what song is playing which can get rather confusing when you are listening to a song and clicking around through your library. I did, however, like the feature of the graph area which lets you resize the graph as I’m calling it. It’s hard to explain but it’s the same slider found in iPhoto.
Overall
All in all I was wholeheartedly impressed with Tangerine - something I had only heard about until very recently. To me, an application’s first impression, graphics, and design are as important as functionality, usability and features. Tangerine excels in both areas with a pristine user interface and a progressing feature-set. I can’t say which I like better at this point as Soundflavor has yet to produce a Mac version of their client and it serves a slightly different purpose/exudes a different feature-set. Download Tangerine for yourself over at the Potion Factory blog. What do you think of Tangerine?
I love it, yet another handy application with a wonderful UI. It’s crashed a few times for me (I submitted bug reports), but very promising for a beta app.
“Tangerine Enters a Crowded Market, Pwns All” excuse me sir. How excatly does it pwn all when its only a mac product (5% of the US Market and 1% of the world market). Seriously mac fan boys need some reality check. I am not anti-mac but your title is very misleading.
Just because it’s Mac only doesn’t mean it can’t be better than the other competition. Soundflavor is a PC only product at the moment. Tangerine is Mac only. If you ask me, that’s a fair lineup. BTW, Macs are 6.1% of the US marketshare.
My pompous title was my way of showing how I felt about this product. Catchy titles are how I intrigue the reader.. and look it worked; you commented. =)
Just downloaded it and it does not find my iTunes Library. Maybe it’s because my Libraray is stored on an external Firewire-HDD.
Paul, does it work based on BPM only or it takes under consideration other factors too? For example, the Filter (Windows only, for the moment) is said to use data from AMG.
I tried this out and kept wondering why most of my songs were missing… I found out later at Potion Factory that, because of DRM, songs purchased from the iTMS are excluded from the analysis.
Nice review, Paul.
It’s amazing. The best application I’ve seen in several months. Simple, clean, pretty and resolutely useful.
“DUDE777 Enters world of comments, Paul pwns him”
This is wonderful (and sadly, it’s the only one I’ve seen that is Mac-compatible).
I’m a self confessed anal mac user, but I’m not convinced that Tang’ is the best on the market. It did crash for me, and while I do plan to use it when I finally bother to go for the gym or start that half-marathon training I always said that I’d do - I find that for everyday playlists for music listening - then the filter currently rules the roost. (I use it at work on the wack dell)
There does seem to be an influx of these things don’t forget Last.fm and Pandora which are similar.
I’ve tried Tangerine, Soundflavor and The Filter and find the latter to be the best. I can’t wait for their Mac version - they’ve been saying it’s coming soon for quite a while now. I keep most of my music on my Mac Book.
Hi,
Thank you for blogging about Tangerine! We would like to send you a license for Tangerine! but we couldn’t locate your email address.
Please contact us. Thanks.
I have downloaded Tangerine, but it crashes from the get go. I have yet to successfully open it. I have reported bug to Apple and Potion Factory. Kind of frustrating!