New Features Requests - Music

[SoniXnSubs]

Subsonic Functionality Wishlist

Most important wishes:

- Functionality: ‘play next’, anywhere there are ‘play’ - puts new song to be played next in playlist. If you select this functionality in the playlist, the song is moved as next.
- Functionality: Everywhere an artist name, album name, song title or genre is printed/listed, there should be a link on it. I suggest the following links:
.: artist name: link to all albums by the artist (“other”-group for songs NOT in any albums)
.: album name: link to the album
.: song title: search for all songs with the same title
.: genre: view all songs with this genre or to a QBF with the genre selected and a search result below
- Crossfade between current and next song by x seconds
- Advanced Randomize playlist: Press Randomize 3 consecutive times: Spread artists evenly throughout the playlist

Other wishes:

- Search by attributes: genre, bpm, year, title, album, artist, ...
- View ENTIRE search result
- Play entire search result, just all songs, just all artists or just all albums in addition to today’s functionality
- In playlist: Wrap-around functionality. If song is first and you move it upwards, it wraps to the bottom of the list. If song is at bottom and you move it downwards, it moves to the top
- Don't scrobble (Last.FM) before x% of song is played
- How does SS want duplicate values for one attribute. Say multiple artists for a track... or multiple genres (usually it’s written x;y;z in the ID3 tag)
- Synchronize two or more players over the net. Friends can sit in different locations and share a playlist. Pressing next (any operation actually) in one player affects all linked players. This can never be 100% syncron, but almost. Good enough :- )
- Covers: Prioritize embedded covers labeled "Cover"/"Front Cover", then any embedded covers, then folder based covers
- When you randomize the playlist, put current playing track on top of list

More complex wishes:

Advanced associative play, consept, idea:
Based on current playlist: one or more songs as seed(s):
Select other songs found in collection based on:
.: Last.fm's similar artist and/or
.: Last.fm's similar album and/or
.: Last.fm's similar track
Simple: Create a playlist of x songs based on rules above
Advanced: Create a dynamic playlist of x songs as a queue where as one song is completely played and drops out of the list, another one enters, keeping the playlist x songs long at all times. Possible to add more songs manually, but don’t add dynamically unless playlist entry count drops below x again.
How similar is returned as a decimal number (from Last.FM) between 0 and 1.
Setting: How 'similar' is acceptable? (set a number)

See Last.FM API - obj.getSimilar()
http://www.last.fm/api

Grand. Luv it! Cheers!

[Castius]

That is nice well defined feature request list.

[jwroper]

Would love the last.fm addiditons!

[SoniXnSubs]

The wishes hasn't been implemented yet!!! * P A N I C ! * What's happening? Sondre? What say you? You're so silent! Trenger du hjelp med implementeringen?

[ytechie]

I just saw this list. I'm thinking of doing something about some of the items, but unfortunately, I'm busy these days. I was free from November through January. But I will think about how to implement some of these. Thanks for the detailed, and well organized list!

[hakko]

Hey, ytechie! Don't start implementing straight off, I've done quite a few of these already, especially from the last.fm wishlist. I'll put it up on github any day soon.

There's a demo here of how my altered Subsonic works, with last.fm integration:

http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet

It's not "live" though, it's merely meant to show the principles, how you can browse your library by genre, generate playlists based on an artist ("artist radio") or a genre, browse your library by related artists etc. (although the demo is very static - there's just one artist and one genre)

Busy fixing the last bugs and writing an instructional guideline on how to get it running. I'll come back in a week or so and ask for beta-testers och co-developers.

[SoniXnSubs]

Exiting stuff hakko. I volunteer as beta-tester :- )

[hakko]

Thanks. I'll drop you a PM once it's ready!

[tzortst]

Hey, ytechie! Don't start implementing straight off, I've done quite a few of these already, especially from the last.fm wishlist. I'll put it up on github any day soon.

There's a demo here of how my altered Subsonic works, with last.fm integration:

http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/demo.htm

It's not "live" though, it's merely meant to show the principles, how you can browse your library by genre, generate playlists based on an artist ("artist radio") or a genre, browse your library by related artists etc. (although the demo is very static - there's just one artist and one genre)

Busy fixing the last bugs and writing an instructional guideline on how to get it running. I'll come back in a week or so and ask for beta-testers och co-developers.

That looks amazing Have you considered mobile apps? Genres on Android would be a bonus

[hakko]

Thanks! To be honest, mobile apps aren't top priority for me (I'm more into new features and making a new web interface.. there's a long list). But it wouldn't be too hard to add new REST methods from the Subsonic server to expose "get available genres" and "get playlist based on genre x" and call them from an app. The code I've written is a separate library bundled with Subsonic so it's not tied to the current web interface.

Is there an Android app that is open source right now? Everything I've written is up on GitHub and I'd be happy to help whoever takes on writing an app. Especially if it's open source and not-for-profit, it would feel a bit weird to see somebody else try to make money from what I'm giving away for free.

[SoniXnSubs]

The SubSonic and MusicCabinet integration you show off looks great and promnising. Is there a standalone version of MC as well or is it ment to plug into other music servers (Subsonic, squeezebox?, others). Fantastic idea (been readin over at github). Been looking for stuff like this for ages :- )

/J

[hakko]

I've been looking as well, and since I couldn't find anything I decided to write it myself.

There's no standalone MusicCabinet, it's only meant to be bundled with other applications. I've set it up on my end so that Subsonic calls MusicCabinet once every night to update it's database of local artists, albums and tracks. When it's done, meta-data is fetched/updated from Last.fm for those artists / albums and stored as well.

I've then added scripts to iTunes (which I use locally), adding new menu items. I can now select a track inside iTunes, and click "artist radio" from the menu I've added. It fires a question to a local shell script that asks the MusicCabinet database for a playlist, based on the selected track, and creates that playlist inside iTunes. Like the Genius function, but it works for everything that's on Last.fm. Works for genres as well. Very exciting!

[SoniXnSubs]

Nice :- ) So just to get it straight:

You have your local music collection of 53k songs (got that from the demo site (mine is similar)), it's indexed in SubSonic (SS), and when everything is updated in your local database (MC) and ready to be used... is a part of that update to check the suggested tracks from Last.FM (LFM) against your local collection (SS) - and drop the suggested tracks you don't have? I would imagine it is, otherwise you couldn't play the tracks from the suggested playlist, right?

I use Subsonic to play the tracks. Could this functionality be used from within SubSonic? The setup you talk about doesn't, but your demo site suggest it could :- )

Just to ruin your plan Initially put x songs in your playlist. For each of these, query LFM and get the two (y) highest ranked songs (that are not already in your playlist) and enqueue them. For each of these tracks, do the same as well... reminds me of an atomic explosion... but set a roof on how many tracks (z) could be in the playlist. As one song is played and drops of the queue, add another at the end... The number y and z should be configurable :- )

Squeezebox has a somewhat similar functionality, but it's based on random amongst selected genres... so you're constantly punished for bad tagging :- )

[hakko]

Yes, you can generate playlists inside Subsonic. And play them.

When I started writing this whole project a few months back, I went for the "get similar tracks for song x from last.fm, and make a playlists of the ones I have". It worked.. but it was slow, as I did the last.fm API call on-the-fly. It took a few seconds to get a playlist and that was annoying. Also, the playlists seemed to get predictable after a while.

Therefore, I changed tactic. This is the current set-up to generate playlists, based on an artist:
- fetch related artists from last.fm, for each artist found in library
- fetch top tracks from last.fm, for each artist found in library
- fetch personal scrobbles from last.fm
- for each track you have in your library, mark it in the database with personal play counts (from last.fm) and global rank (is it track #1, 2, 3 etc based on global play count)
(this is done nightly)

When creating a playlist for artist x:
- other artists are ranked based on their similarity to artist x.
- the tracks found by other artists are ranked by a function weighting personal play count and global rank
- tracks for the playlist are picked by random, but the randomness is based on artist similarity and track rank calculated above
- there's an upper limit on how many tracks are picked from a single artist, so the playlist gets varied

This means that closely related artists appear more often, their top tracks appear more often, but it's not always the same tracks. Works pretty well. (If you've tagged your library correctly - otherwise the last.fm match won't work)

I've read your proposal for constantly filling the playlist with more tracks.. I'll think about it, but it's not possible right now. It's a good idea for a feature though!

here's the database query for artist radio! it's documented in the code. https://github.com/hakko/iTunes/blob/ma ... laylist.sh

[MadEvil]

Hey, ytechie! Don't start implementing straight off, I've done quite a few of these already, especially from the last.fm wishlist. I'll put it up on github any day soon.

There's a demo here of how my altered Subsonic works, with last.fm integration:

http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/demo.htm

Busy fixing the last bugs and writing an instructional guideline on how to get it running. I'll come back in a week or so and ask for beta-testers och co-developers.

yes great work! Genre and Radio view are very nice Are you plan to migrate to the new 4.7 Branch? but first i want to be a beta-testers
I build it from your Page, but have trouble to get errorfree with data schema, but works nice.

best regards