walknote for Mac

walknote for Mac analyzes the music in your iTunes library to create recommendations for new music you might enjoy. Though its attractive and intuitive interface invites the user to explore all types of music, many of the recommendations are obvious -- that is, already in your library -- and the app crashed four times while we tested it.

The program's setup initiated and completed very speedily. After we downloaded and ran walknote for Mac, it took only a couple of minutes for it to scan through thousands of tracks in our iTunes library, generating recommendations as it analyzed our tastes. We were surprised, then, that the program's first recommendation to us, Daft Punk, an Electronica band, was in a genre that we are simply not interested in, and isn't at all represented by what's in our library. Furthermore, the program recommended that we might enjoy De La Soul, a hip-hop group, based on our interest in The Jungle Brothers, a similarly styled hip-hop band, ignoring the fact that we already owned De La Soul's entire discography. We perused through other recommendations, and listened to samples, which are streamed from either the iTunes store, YouTube, Amazon, or SoundCloud. However, each time we attempted to listen to music, the app crashed. Sometimes we got to hear two or three songs before the crash happened, but it inevitably happened.

walknote for Mac offers promise for the music enthusiast who no longer has a neighborhood record store to go to for browsing, though tweaks are necessary to make this app as useful as a service like Pandora.