iTunes Visualization for Artists

I was going through some old bookmarks and stumbled on Wordle, which is used for generating “word clouds” based on the number of times a word is used. Kinda like a tag cloud, but with a few more options. After trying out a few fun things like President Obama’s Inaugaration Speech, I wanted something with more words, something that would really put the Wordle algorithm through its paces. 

My iTunes library (18,000+ songs…1,000+ albums) seemed to be the perfect candidate, and here’s what I came up with:

iTunes Visualization for Album Names

iTunes Visualization for Year

iTunes Visualization for Words in Song Titles

Wordle has quite a few options to play with like fonts, colors, and the number of words you want to display. If you would like to create your own iTunes visualizations, here’s the recipe:

1. Export your iTunes library by clicking on “Library” –> “Export Playlist”.
2. Save the file as a text file (.txt) on to your desktop.
3. Right click on the file (iTunes default is to name it “music”) and open it up in Excel or other spreadsheet program
4. The .txt file is tab-delimited. Let your software open it up and when it looks like a bona fide spreadsheet, click on the column that you want your word cloud to be based on. 
5. Copy & Paste the column into Wordle and click “Go”.
6. That’s it. Play with the options in the toolbar above the artwork to get the look you want. 

Really, you can use any text you want…famous speeches by dead people, your favorite passage from a book, or just a list of things that you randomly make up…Wordle is a fun tool to play with.