Amplified Journeys: One Cool Online Application

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Amplified Journeys: One Cool Online Application

Written by Rich Truesdell

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Amplified Journeys not only maps your route with turn-by-turn directions, but tells you which tunes to play.

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Years ago, when I was putting the various editorial building blocks together of what would become Automotive Traveler magazine, one of the really interesting elements I looked at was a series of advertorials published back in 2006 in Car magazine in the UK. It was a series of road trips, each with a particular musical theme, in a car equipped with a Harman Kardon Logic 7 premium audio system. My favorite? A trip from Hamburg, Germany to Liverpool, England in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Bet you can guess which band's CDs were loaded in the CD changer or downloaded into an iPod. Of course it was The Beatles.

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As TopGear has replaced Car in the eyes of many auto enthusiasts as the UK's premiere motoring magazine, due in part to it lending its name to a certain popular BBC television program, it seems that Harman Kardon has moved their advertorials over to the new top dog. In the September issue of TopGear, now available at your neighborhood Barnes and Noble or Borders, you'll find Harman Kardon's newest Amplified Journey, a tour of Berlin, a music-fueled drive around the once-divided city in a Logic 7 surround-sound-equipped Mercedes-Benz C-Class and also visited by our own Cindy-Lou Dale in the second issue of Automotive Traveler. And if you go to the news page on the Amplified Journey web site, you'll find PDFs of all four features.

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At the end of the story is the tagline "Plan your journey at www.amplifiedjourney.hk," so that's exactly what I did. Going to the Amplified Journey web site I saw a driving-directions interface, but one with a twist; it asked me what kind of music I wanted to listen to. So here are my parameters:

Start – Zip Code 92586 (Sun City, CA)
Finish – Zip Code 92328 (Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley National Park, CA)
Music type – Pop/Upbeat

The map interface is obviously from Google; fully integrated with the iTunes database. Once the playlist is generated, the songs can be purchased for download from iTunes. In my opinion, this is awesome, one of those "why didn't I think of that?" kind of applications.

But what I really found interesting was that it picked absolutely the best route to get me from my front door to the best place to catch any late season prototype testing. It even found my favorite short cut from US 395 north to Trona--my last gas stop before the land of $5.00/gallon petrol--by-passing Ridgecrest, California.

Then I took a look at the other side of the directions screen to see what tunes it suggested I buy or download to my smartphone. Here are some of the 77 selections iTunes made, tunes I already own on CD or have already downloaded, to cover the 223-mile, four-and-a-half-hour trip:

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Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow by Laura Branigan (This is from the very first CD that I ever bought back in 1984 when the first home CD players were introduced.)
Erotica by Madonna
Sand and Sea by Frank Sinatra
You Win Again by Bee Gees
Singing for the Lonely by Robbie Williams
I Need You by Eurythmics
Our Lips Are Sealed by Wild Orchid
Point of View by Blink-182

Don't like some of the selections? Click on the "i" button for more information, like the liner notes, and let Amplified Journeys and iTunes make a different selection.

As I'm currently planning a trip for next Spring from Berlin, Germany to Tallinn, Estonia, I was curious to see what Amplified Journey would pick for this trip. Here are my parameters:

Start – City/country (Berlin, Germany)
Finish – City/country (Tallinn, Estonia)
Music type – Pop/Upbeat

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This immediately presented a problem as it took me north from Berlin to Copenhagen, Denmark, on to Stockholm, Sweden, then a long ferry ride to Tallinn, Estonia. This was not what I expected or wanted as it's my desire to visit the capitals of all three Baltic Republics, Vilnius, Lithuania, Riga, Latvia, as well as Tallinn.

As I've made the drive before, back in 2004, I quickly came up with a workaround--develop two separate drives, Berlin to Vilnius, then Vilnius to Tallinn--since there's no way to enter waypoints into the Amplified Journey interface. Here's what Amplified Journey came up with:

The first part of the trip, Berlin to Vilnius, via Warsaw, Poland would be a 660-mile trip requiring 195 tracks while the trip from Vilnius to Tallinn, via Riga, would cover an additional 375 miles and would require an additional 109 downloads from iTunes. Among the pop tunes selected this time, already some part of my existing music library, were the following tracks:

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Only the Good Die Young by Billy Joel
Please Stay, Go Away by Laura Branigan
I Need Your Loving by The Human League
I Need You by Paula Abdul
If It Makes You Happy by Sheryl Crow
One Headlight by The Wallflowers
True Blue by Madonna
Adrian (featuring. Elvis Costello) by Eurythmics
Knowing Me, Knowing You by ABBA
You're Still the One by Shania Twain
Gloria by Laura Branigan

While all this is great fun, there are limitations. First is the lack of the ability to program in waypoints; a function found on other online mapping programs as well as the most basic dash-top, portable navigation devices, even those retailing for as little as $100. The next limitation is the need to be able to pick from additional music genres beyond the 15 genres offered.

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Genres I'd like to see added? Have the pop category broken down by decades, just like on satellite radio. Come up with a soundtrack category--I can't imagine driving the Furka Pass without the soundtrack to "Goldfinger" in my CD player, selecting track three, Alpine Drive, as I would negotiate the switchbacks following a mythical Tilly Masterson in a white '64½ Mustang convertible while driving a vintage Silver Birch Aston Martin DB5--as well as a category for classic Motown for my next trip to the Motor City.

And of course there's the issue of continual battles betweem the 800 pound gorilla, iTunes, which dominates the online music download marketplace, the record industry, and many artists, who will not allow their music to be sold on iTunes. It's a battle that still has to sort itself out.

Amplified Journey is a great execution of an equally great idea, road trips and tunes are like bread and butter, a perfect combination. With a little bit of additional refinement, the application is well on its way to being perfect.

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