Talked with Cook about turning pTunes into an independent work project and using his Phd student's classification code to help with genre determination. He seemed somewhat interested, but in the decided that it wasn't gonna happen because:
1. The classification code is basically done, it's unlikely that I could improve on something George had been working on for 5 years. What remains is more of database-ish and metadata stuff, which isn't really his focus.
2. He's busy anyway with three classes and lots of other kids to advise.
Then I went to see Kernighan, and pitched pTunes from a web service angle (i.e. using other web services like freedb and Amazon to get extra information and in turn exposing my dataset as a web service). He seemed pretty interested, and very willing to serve as my advisor. This is probably the route that I'll choose, because adding an extra project (e.g. if I were to do the projector/whiteboard stuff with Szymon) to my workload would mean that something has to give.