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

[Neil Loknath <neil loknath gmail com>]

Hi Charlotte, 

I would hardly call your plugin a "failure."  Of course, it would be
great if it were kept up to date. ;)  However, if anything, you did some
interesting development in a new area of interest.  A lot of different
things in playlist generation are coming up these days, and it's always
good to experiment.

I'd love to collaborate on a project.  But, right now, I'm awfully busy
with school.  So, I wouldn't want to commit to something that I wasn't
sure I could dedicate some time too.  

With that being said, I may follow in your footsteps, Charlotte, and
write a proposal for GSoC to work on a playlist generator that is tempo
and tonality based.  Even if I don't get accepted, I will probably
tinker with it in the summer.

Beatmatching tracks would also be an awesome feature!  However, I'm not
sure if Rhythmbox could handle that easily.  I guess it would require
that ability to start a song at a specific position within the song at a
specific time during the current one playing.  In addition, as you say,
Charlotte, the beats would have to be aligned and, perhaps, small
inaudible time slices taken out of the faster song to get a perfect
match?  

Anyway, it would definitely be an interesting project.

Neil

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 21:47 -0700, Charlotte Curtis wrote:
> Hey guys!
> 
> I'm the "In the Mood" plugin writer, which you might have noticed
> hasn't received any attention at all since SoC ended and I started
> grad school (for which I apologize - it's not nice to be in the SoC
> "failure" category, but somehow school takes up a lot of time).  For
> that matter, I apparently haven't been reading this mailing list a
> whole lot either, but at least I'm only a few days behind on this
> discussion.
> 
> On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 9:04 AM, eric casteleijn <thisfred gmail com> wrote:
> >
> > > I did some snooping around, and it seems that there hasn't been much
> > > development around playlist generation based on tonality.  Most of the
> > > work is based on timbre.  If anyone could shed some light on the reasons
> > > for that, I'm all ears.  Anyway, I think that a playlist generator based
> > > on tonality and tempo would be really cool.  I will have to continue
> > > researching to determine the feasibility, however.  I know the Serato
> > > Scratch DJ software implements some reliable BPM and key analysis
> > > features, so it must be possible.
> 
> I agree, tempo and tonality would be awesome.  My original plan for In
> the Mood had adjustable song-matching controls, so that you could
> specify an automatic playlist based primarily on tempo, timbre, etc.
> I instead took the lazy approach of using an already developed
> algorithm for feature extraction and matching (the Marsyas framework).
>  However, I don't think it would be *too* difficult - currently all I
> do is calculate the Euclidean distance between two feature vectors
> (which contain mostly timbral information, but also some other stuff),
> so maybe something could be done like telling the program only to
> compare the BPM info when "tempo matching" is chosen.
> 
> > I think it may be harder/computationally more expensive to extract than
> > timbre information. I know it can be done though. Perhaps you can have a
> > look at echonest, which does this, and a *lot* more:
> >
> > http://developer.echonest.com/
> >
> > the downside to that is again depending on a 3rd party service, although
> > their web API, like last.fm's is free to use for non-commercial use. I'd
> > like to do something with it still, perhaps as an additional similarity
> > scoring mechanism, but I'm also very interested in automatically mixing
> > songs together based on beat detection, which echonest is very good at.
> > Anyone who wants to collaborate on such, drop me a note.
> 
> Echonest looks pretty awesome, too bad I didn't run across it when I
> was working on SoC!  I like that it uses acoustic features rather than
> last.fm's system of relying on tags, and relying on a 3rd party
> service can't be much worse than relying on a time-consuming analysis
> procedure.  Automatically mixing songs is a whole new challenge, but
> it would be pretty cool... I guess you would start by choosing a
> similar song, then maybe looking at the gaps between beats and
> aligning regions of reasonable similarity that are within ~20 seconds
> of the ending/beginning of the songs?  Hmm... I really can't commit to
> any projects at the moment, but I'd be interested to hear how it comes
> along if you do get going on it.
> 
> Anyway, fun stuff, and I hope I can help out in the future,
> 
> Charlotte