SonicBreakdown is a music information and recommendation system that summarizes your collection and gives you all kinds of information about it. If you have files of prominent artists you're likely to get Wikipedia articles about them, thanks to a smooth integration of Wikipedia into SonicBreakdown. The company is promoting this feature, and it is fine, but I find other features more compelling.

You start by downloading a client that, like a desktop music player, scans your computer and imports metadata from your collection. SonicBreakdown scans the entire computer, rather than asking you for the location of your collection, slowing down the process somewhat. But my 60GB collection was fully scanned within about 20 minutes (I let it run in the background).

After the initial scan, clicking on the SonicBreakdown icon in the Windows system tray opens a Web-based interface to your music collection, expanded dramatically to include a list of all artists and bands, day-by-day upcoming concert information for those artists, news links, video links, and listings of upcoming TV appearances. Damn—I missed Etta James on Austin City Limits last night. But I won't miss that sort of thing again if I keep my eye on SonicBreakdown.

Music collection lilsts are shareable, and also hideable. Sharing your list enables RSS feeds devoted to news of your artists. In all cases you have access to genre-specific RSS feeds.

All in all, this is the best massaging of my music collection I've seen in quite some time. Now, if SonicBreakdown were to create a stand-alone music player with this explosion of information built into it—that would be something to really shout about.