…Laura Izibor. Think of an Irish Joss Stone crossed with Alicia Keys, only with more catchy songs.

Have you been watching Michael Palin’s latest travel around the world programme? It’s the usual stuff you’d expect following on from 80 Days, Pole to Pole and the Pacific one I can’t think of the name of. Not quite as epic, as he’s just covering Eastern Europe, he’s also looking a little older and doesn’t seem to have quite the sharp wit from a few years ago.

Anyway, the content is fine, but the opening sequence. It looks like it was done in Powerpoint! Cheesy floating jigsaw pieces, dodgy lift music and some ugly typefaced title text. Maybe they had some work experience kid in and he wanted to try all the effects?

The best US TV gets this stuff so right. Some US programmes can have fairly innocuous content, but given enough style and a slick soundtrack they can be so much more spectacular. A friend said I should watch Gossip Girl as, “the soundtrack sounds like your CD collection”. So I did, it’s a fairly standard teeny drama about rich kids. Kind of like Dawson’s Creek mixed with Dallas.

It’s not clever and funny like The OC, but it looks shiny and expensive and glamorous. The soundtrack is really great. It’s a mixture of top 40 stuff and more edgy indie tracks. First episode included: Peter Bjorn and John, Aqualung, Cold War Kids, Justin Timberlake, AIR, Lyrics Born, Timbaland and Amy Winehouse. I might just listen to the next episode rather than watch it. British TV would be so much better if they really thought about this. Putting a few tracks (with no thought at all) in Hollyoaks doesn’t count.

** If you do watch it, don’t you think the main star looks like a young Cat Deeley?

After seeing John write about Tangerine a couple of times, I thought I’d try it out. It is a beautiful little app. As well as being able to create some dynamic playlists, it’s interesting just to browse through your library by BPM or beat intensity.

So what was my hardest hitting, thumping beat of a song? Maybe something from The Subways? A Timberland production? Or maybe some Underworld? No, it’s Britney. Love that girl.

You can also see JoJo and Holly Valance strangely near the top. My library isn’t all teen boppers, honestly.

When you view a soundtrack, you get loads of little dots to indicate if you have the track in your library or not. If you click on the little dot, you should now get taken to the song in the iTunes Store (assuming you have iTunes and the song is in the store). It currently takes you to the UK store, which wont be so much use for people in the US, but I think you can still preview the song. I’ll try adding the US store next.

There aren’t any APIs to the iTunes store, or their affiliate programme (which is so complicated I gave up worrying about if it’ll even work). So it’s done in the mother of all hacky ways, screen scraping two different sites and merging the results to a browser redirect. I’m surprised it ever worked, it makes me shiver just thinking about it, but I just couldn’t see an alternative.

Next task is to work out the songs that aren’t in the library BEFORE they get displayed, stop those annoying “Sorry, couldn’t find the song in the store” messages.

The first version of Soundtracker didn’t actually do anything all that useful, other than letting you upload playlists and browse those that other people had created. I’ve just uploaded a new experimental version that is starting to add some more useful functions.

As well as uploading soundtracks, you can now upload your whole iTunes library (File - Export in iTunes). Once you’ve uploaded a library, when you browse a soundtrack, you’ll get an indication of which of those tracks you have on your machine. The idea being that it’s easier to see which soundtracks you could play.

Uploading your library is done from the You page once you’re logged on. It’s still an experimental uploader at the moment, but generally works without problems as long as you’re library file isn’t much over 8MB. It’ll take a couple of minutes to upload, but you shouldn’t need to do it too often. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

You can also now comment on other people’s soundtracks, as long as you’re logged on.

Features to come next:

• Suggest soundtracks most suitable for your library.
• Download a soundtrack.
• Suggest a song for someone else’s soundtrack.
• Support for non iTunes players.
• Last.FM integration.
• iTunes Store Integration.

I’m forever going on about playlists and soundtracks, so it seemed about time I actually did something with them. LastFM is great, but it doesn’t really do anything substantial with the idea of soundtracks. It seems a pretty big area given that lots of people buy singles online now, rather than albums.

I don’t always like the idea of playing songs randomly, so I have a couple of hundred playlists that I’ve created in iTunes. They’re generally for specific activities or occasions. I have one to help me sleep on aeroplanes, one for cleaning, some are for certain weather conditions and some for more more obvious things, like Christmas. They take a reasonable amount of effort and thought to create, but they do seem worth it. I get to feel super smug when I start my iPod up just after take-off, select the “Flying Across The Atlantic” playlist and “Leaving on a Jetplane” plays.

I have a few ideas of what I want to do with soundtracks, but the first bit is just to collect and organise them. It’s definitely the mundane bit, but it needs to be done, so I’ve started writing Soundtracker.

Originally, it was just going to be for me, but it seemed as easy to allow anyone to upload and describe their soundtracks. So that’s what you can do. At the moment it only accepts iTunes playlists, exported as XML. Now the bare bones are there, I can spend time making it do more interesting and useful stuff… but I may end up just making it look prettier instead.