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Nokia's MixRadio on Windows Phone detailed, powered by The Echo Nest

Nokia's MixRadio on Windows Phone detailed, powered by The Echo Nest

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MixRadio is a differentiating feature on Nokia's Windows Phone smartphones, but it is also the music suggestion engine behind many music services, including iHeartRadio and eMusic Radio.

By Dieter Bohn / @backlon

Source The Echo Nest

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MixRadio Nokia Lumia 800
MixRadio Nokia Lumia 800

The Echo Nest, a music suggestion service that serves as the back end for a wide variety of music apps, announced today that it is the brains behind one of the differentiating pieces of software on Nokia's Windows Phones, MixRadio. If you missed it in our Nokia Lumia 800 review, MixRadio is built into every Nokia Windows Phone and offers suggested playlists based on genres. Music streamed from MixRadio is free, but users can still purchase songs and even find concert recommendations from within the Nokia Music app. MixRadio also allows users to download up to 15 hours of music for offline playback.

While Nokia provides the music catalog of over 15 million songs, The Echo Nest comes in on the "music intelligence" side, using the same suggestion engine that powers iHeartRadio and eMusic Radio to craft personalized music playlists based on a user's preferences. The Echo Nest claims to have some pretty powerful software behind those suggestions, analyzing the attributes of 30 millions songs as well as crawling the web to read and interpret what people are writing about them.

If you're not able to pick up one of Nokia's Windows Phones, there's a good chance that one of the over 200 apps built using the platform can run on something you are using already. If you are looking at a Nokia Lumia 800 or Lumia 710, it's an interesting alternative to Microsoft's Zune ecosystem.

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