Just wanted to let everyone know about Synapse AI's incredible music management system called The Brain. It's available built into their own media player which you can download, or as a plugin for Winamp 2.x. What it basically does is watch you as you play songs, and learns about your patterns, and guesses what kind of music you want to hear, and plays songs when you ask it to. So there's a learning period involved, ranging from 1 day to 1 week depending on how much music you listen to. But early this morning I was hearing Miles Davis' Freddie Freeloader in my head, and started up The Brain. It played Freddie Freeloader. I was spooked.

I've been using the Winamp 2.x plugin but a closer examination of the site today has convinced me to download and use their media player. From the site:

This component works in conjuction with the SmartName module (codename: Black Jesus) which looks at each individual song [...] The dynamic library, powered by the Black Jesus Algorithm, will organize all of your music into accessible and logical groups for easier use.

How can you say NO to a media player with a Black Jesus Algorithm?? I should point out that it doesn't access the net for a huge central database of songs in order to find out what kind of song it is, neither does it require you to sort the songs out into genres like Jazz/Rock/Pop or whatever. It just learns and calculates probabilities based on your usage patterns. You can even ask for stats (which it generates on an HTML page served from a localhost: webserver) and it will show you the song ratings it has determined.

[edit:]
Unbelievable, this player just sounds better the more I read about it. It has a console that understands natural english commands, so you can type in "Play my 3 favorite Marvin Gaye songs" and it will do it! And Stacy just installed it (I can't because I'm in the library atm) and the Black Jesus Algorithm has put her Lou Reed songs with Velvet Underground songs. Without being connected to an internet database! It's voodoo! I'm afraid!

And the following is from their FAQ:
Synapse doesn't work. You guys are morons.
False. Your mom is a moron. We created Synapse; we are programmer gods. Do you understand that you're dealing with the best media player here? The best. If there's a mistake it's your fault.

Just kidding. If it doesn't work, don't give up. [...] We encourage you to email us. Preferably Mark since Adam is lazy and won't get back to you. We'll try to help you out. That's pretty good support for freeware, isn't it? Average email turn-around: 37 minutes.