Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Noise or How I learned to love the state of the Gnome audio software

[eric casteleijn <thisfred gmail com>]

> > I have used last.fm suggestions supported by various players, but this
> > dynamic playlist support leaves something to be desired. What I have
> > found is that all suggestions lead to mainstream artists/songs and at
> > some point stops offering suggestions of my obscure music.
>
> I agree.  The user-generated nature of last.fm's relationships between artists
> (and it's tagging) seems to distort the information it gathers.

At the risk of going off on a tangent here: I half disagree:the 
track/artist  similarity data from the webservice has really improved a 
lot over the last year. I think they have honed their algorithms to 
alleviate some of the problems with what I call the 'Bob Marley' effect, 
where everythy continued similarity look upeventually leads to artists 
like Bob Marley or the Beatles, since they are so near-universally liked 
and played.

In the plugin I recently ported to Rhythmbox, I further reduce this 
effect by locally caching similarity results, which allows me to do 
reverse lookups, and keeping a list of backup songs, so I can backtrack 
out of dead ends.

In short I think the data is great, and allows you to do very cool 
things, but it requires a bit of thought. The same goes for the tagging 
in last.fm. IOf you expect that people sometimes make mistakes or even 
commit wilful 'vandalism' by mistagging, the data can be used in 
interesting ways: It is possible to use the web API to  get at your own 
personal tags only, which means you lose the social network aspect. The 
top tags for a track/album/artist will generally make sense, since 
mistakes and tagspam get filetered out.

The only thing that works poorly is looking up all the songs for one 
tag, especially if it is controversial one like a genre tag, and expect 
the results to conform to your definition of that tag only. Quod Libet 
allows me to put arbitrary tags on songs and selections of songs, and I 
use this feature to create interesing (to me) groupings, which are then 
synchronized to last.fm, so I have the same playlists available online. 
There are many other uses imaginable.

Sorry for the rant, and *no* I don't have last.fm shares or anything, I 
just really like their webservices API ;)

--
- eric casteleijn
http://thisfred.blogspot.com