Multimedia object grouping, selection, and playback system

#1. Technical Field

#The present invention relates to a multimedia object organization and playback system. In particular, the present invention relates to a multimedia object organization and playback system that groups objects heuristically and allows playback based on similarities between the grouped objects.

#2. Related Art

#The invention can be better understood with reference to the following drawings and description. The components in the figures are not necessarily to scale, emphasis instead being placed upon illustrating the principles of the invention. Moreover, in the figures, like referenced numerals designate corresponding parts throughout the different views.

#FIG. 1 is an example heuristic map of music objects.

#FIG. 2 is a music object organization system.

#Music listeners may not desire to listen to a musical collection as a random collection of tracks. Music listeners may be interested in listening to one of a small number of groups of music, where each group is similar by some attribute, such as a musical or psychological attribute. Listeners may desire to organize a music collection based on heuristic music object characteristics associated with the music objects in the music collection, such as by grouping music objects that are more similar to each other than to other groups of music objects. Such a heuristic grouping may allow a continuum of music object organization based on music object characteristics associated with the music objects.

#FIG. 1 is an example heuristic map 100 of music objects. The map 100 locates music objects in an N-dimensional space, such as a vector space, starting with giving each music object a location in this space. Each axis of the N-dimensional space may be based on a music object characteristic, or combination of characteristics, associated with the music objects. The music objects may be represented in the vector space as ordered n-tuples, where n may be an integer greater than 0. Vectors in these spaces may be ordered “tuples” of real numbers. A pair of music objects, such as two classical music objects, may be located “close” to each other in the space, whereas another pair, such as a classical music object and punk rock music object, may be “far” from each other in the space.

#One way of assigning locations to each music object may include determining or obtaining a genre tag of each music object, and comparing the information in the genre tag to a two-dimensional map of genres to locate the music object. For example, a “tag” object associated with the music objects may be processed, such as by extracting music object characteristics from an ID3 tag associated with the music object. The music object's resulting location may be related to the location of that genre on the map. For example, given the example heuristic map 100 shown in FIG. 1, a rock song 102 would have the location of (1,1), and a jazz song 104 would have the location of (−1,1). Other mappings are possible, including mappings of the music objects in more than two-dimensional space. For example, additional music object characteristics may include an artist, album, composer, music object length, beat-per-minute count, time period, and/or a user-defined characteristic for a music object. The music objects may adhere to the WAV, MP3, WMA, OOG, AAC, AIF, or other music object formats. The music objects may also include streaming objects such as satellite radio objects, streaming audio objects, objects stored on a server and streamed to a device, high definition radio objects, cellular-transmitted audio objects, or other audio objects streamed over a wired or wireless connection.