[Rhythmbox-devel] In the Mood plugin thoughts

[Neil Loknath <neil loknath gmail com>]

I recently compiled and installed Charlotte Curtis' GSOC project form
last year: the In the Mood plugin, which can be found at
http://code.google.com/p/rhythmbox-predictive-playback/downloads/list

Congrats on a very cool project, Charlotte!  I have been using it
intensely since installing it, and I quite like the concept of it.  It
seems that intelligent playlists are quite popular right now (ie. iTunes
Genius feature).  And, I think the trend will continue.  With that being
said, I have some thoughts on expanding on Charlotte's work.  In fact, I
am hoping that Charlotte will chime in to this and join the discussion.

Having done a little DJ'ing in my spare time, when mixing music, there
three key factors involved: tonality (or key), tempo, and genre.
Tempo's importance comes from the need to keep the music flowing; songs
with similar tempos are mixed when transitioning from song to song.
Genre is less important.  However, DJs will usually mix the same or
similar genres of music together.  Now, the tonality, or key, aspect is
where things get interesting.  When transitioning from one song to
another, if the succeeding song to the one playing is of a musically
compatible tonality, the transition will be more pleasing to the ear.
To aid in determining which tonalities or keys go well together,
something called a "camelot wheel" can be used.  This "wheel" is very
similar to the circle of fifths, which if you are musician you will be
familiar with.  Basically, the wheel is an easy reference to which keys
are compatible.

So, my thinking is that if the criteria of timbre (what Charlotte's
plugin uses to judge similarity), tonality, tempo, and genre can be put
together (or in some combination), a really interesting playlist
generation engine could result.  In addition, I think that incorporating
some type of adaptive aspect to this could really blow people away.  The
idea would be for the playlist to learn the listener's musical tastes
and adjust its selection process accordingly.  Similar to what has been
developed in the IMMS project.
(http://www.luminal.org/wiki/index.php/IMMS/IMMS). I feel that the
adaptive aspect should be something that the user can toggle on/off,
however.  Actually, it would probably be nice if the user could toggle
on/off each individual criteria.  Or, perhaps the user could use sliders
to give each criteria different weighting?

Music is a huge part of people's everyday lives.  And, I think that
anything that can be done to make music listening more enjoyable is a
great thing.  So, it would be great to get Charlotte's thoughts on this,
as well as the developers and community.  

Thanks for reading,
Neil