Being fascinated with music-releated apps online, I was eager to try out mog.com and found a little time yesterday to give it a spin. Mog.com seems in concept fairly similar to last.fm of which I am an avid user. It builds an inventory of your ‘digital music collection’, allows you to create a profile and blog entries, and builds charts, recommendations, and inter-used networks based on your collection and listening habits.
Installation on a mac is easy enough, with the mog software appearing as a new pane in System Preferences. It began by attempting to index the music I have stored on my laptop, which immediately struck me as a mistake. We have a mac mini with an external hard drive that we use to store all our music (around 160GB last time I checked) and I listen to that via itunes library sharing or on my ipod. Music on my laptop is almost all recently downloaded, and the laptop is just a stopping off point for tracks until I decide whether or not I want to add them to the main library.
It would of course be easy enough to install the software on the mini and have it run from there, but not everything in the library there is music I listen to regularly or would care to have included in a profile. The decision was made for me, however, when after several hours had passed, only 200 of the songs on my laptop had been processed and submitted. I dread to think how long the 23,000 songs in the main library would take to index! I decided to try playing some songs through itunes from the shared library to see if they’d show up as ‘recently played’ in my profile, but when none of them did I decided to give up.
The main things Mog has going for it are its homepage, which provides a very quick point of entry into different users’ profiles by highlighting a selection of ‘Random MOG Shots’, and its inclusion of various artist profiles which are likely to engage fans of those artists included. Nevertheless, unless there’s an easier route of entry and clearer differentiation from last.fm, it’s unlikely I’d go back.