Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] In the Mood plugin thoughts

[Alex Bennee <kernel-hacker bennee com>]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:05 PM, eric casteleijn <thisfred gmail com> wrote:
> Alex Bennee wrote:
>> I'm currently looking at the possibility of doing something similar
>> but using the last.fm web API to generate potential matches (which is
>> how I think Genius works on iTunes). It will be interesting to see how
>> the two compare in performance.
>>
>> I have no code to at the moment as I'm just familiarising myself with
>> writing Python plugins for Rhythmbox. However I shall post as soon as
>> I have something worth sharing.
>
> Please have a look at autoqueue[1] in that case: it's a plugin that
> already does this, for a number of players, among which Rhythmbox. I've
> also ported the mirage acoustic similarity plugin that Banshee has from
> C# to python, so in fact, it can do both the last.fm lookup *and*
> something very similar to Charlotte Curtis' plugin. (The different
> similarities can be used together or separate, and weighted to taste.)
>
> The rhythmbox plugin may not be 100% up to date with the latest changes,
> I will check if I can bring it up to date after work tonight.
>
> Of course developing your own can be a great experience too, so I'm not
> saying you shouldn't, but I like collaborating where feasible. ;)

Collaboration is the open source way :-)

I'll have a look. No point re-implementing stuff if I don;t have to.
Any particular reason it's not been submitted for inclusion?

>
> Re: Genius in iTunes: People I know who use iTunes seem to agree the
> recommendations there are pretty shallow and silly sometimes. I think
> the last.fm ones are better, and the acoustic similarity rocks even
> more, since it gives equal time to completely unknown artists, and
> completely disregards genres and other artifacts. (In last.fm a lot of
> artists/tracks are similar because they are from the same country, but
> share nothing else in common. Understandable because of the way they
> gather their data, but acoustic analysis completely fixes this effect.)

The next problem is figuring out a way to generate playlists on my
Rockbox player. I assume some sort of precalculation needs to be done.
However this is a problem for later.

> [1] http://code.google.com/p/autoqueue/
>
> --
> - eric casteleijn
> http://thisfred.blogspot.com
>
>



-- 
Alex, homepage: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/
CV: http://www.bennee.com/~alex/cv.php