Re: [Banshee-List] Mirage - Automatic Playlist Generation Plugin

[David Nielsen <david lovesunix net>]

fre, 31 08 2007 kl. 16:21 +0200, skrev Dominik Schnitzer:
> Hi,
> After all your songs are analyzed. You can generate playlists by
> dragging a seed song on the Playlist Generator item in banshee. Mirage
> then searches its database for similar sounding songs. The 5 top-hits
> are then put in the playlist.

I appear to have some issues making that part work, I compiled mirage on
Fedora 7 against Banshee SVN on an x86_64 box and when ever I drag a
song to the playlist generator all I get is that one song. This happens
even when I use some of the same music as you displayed in your
demonstration video (Indidginus more specifically). I assume the fact
that all my music is in the FLAC format might have something do do with
this.

> This is useful in large collections, where random shuffle fails.

Absolutely it's a great idea

> Note:
>   
>   * MPG123/FAAD/OGG123/SOX are reguired because of performance reasons.
> Since Mirage needs to decode every music piece in order to analyze it
> the fastest decoders available are needed. I.e. using the gstreamer
> framework would have been really nice, but in the end it was too slow
> :-/ Even libmad is about 4-5 times slower than MPG123, just to name an
> example. Opinions on this issue are welcome!

Speed sadly isn't the only problem, by going with a GStreamer based
solution you'd be able to support any format Banshee already plays not
to mention it would make packaging Mirage easier for distribtions that
have to take US law seriously (no mp3 support allowed e.g.). 

If the numbers from my database, around 2600 songs all in FLAC is any
indication of the performance it ran the analysis in around 30 secs
(seems suspect - very suspect especially since it doesn't work), even if
performance problems are unsolvable I think I'd favor a solution based
on GStreamer just based on those to points. It's a one off action to
scan the database anyways and after that I assume you just analyse songs
that are added seperately.

> It would be very cool, if someone could try this out and give some
> feedback. I know it is far from being perfect but hey, it somehow works
> :). Patches are welcome. I am planning to improve and work on this,
> since smooth integration in Banshee and functionality like this would be
> cool.

I can't offer a patch but I will translate this mother into Danish for
you once such support is added.

- David Nielsen