Song Cloud

The Song Cloud is a simple visualization of my iTunes library using the free, open-source programming language and environment Processing. Readability is secondary to the goal of showing trends via text as texture.

The iTunes library XML file is first processed with a PHP script to remove all the non useful information and produce a correctly formatted XML document (whomever wrote the iTunes xml document schematic was smoking something).

Next, the Processing application parses in the new XML document, does it's thing, then generates the cloud of song names and writes it to a PDF. The track names are arranged on the x-axis based on the date the songs were added to my library. The location on the y-axis is based on the date the song was last played. The overall size of song name is based on the play count. And lastly the color is assigned based on groupings of genres I created, the color choices are mostly arbitrary but they were assigned based on the general feeling the majority of the songs of each particular song in my library gives me.

Brown in a very prominent color because the songs that lacked a genre entry were also assigned this color, it should be noted though that the majority of the genres I listen to were not assigned to the brown grouping.

• My iTunes library consists of 6310 songs.
• 965 of those songs have over 15 plays.
• Of those 965 songs there are a total of 35884 plays. Averaging out to 40 plays per song.
• The first song added to my library was Zoot Suit Riot by the Cherry Poppin' Daddies on April 25, 2001 at 5:54 PM (my first Mac was delivered that day, and I set it up after school that evening).
• The song with the highest play count is Yesterday by The Beatles with 255 plays, 50 more than the next more frequently played song.

View a large version here.