MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hakko]

MusicCabinet is a replacement for your current Subsonic server.

MusicCabinet is designed for people with large music libraries. By integrating knowledge from last.fm, it adds the following features to your Subsonic server:

Automatic playlists.

• pick an artist, and get a playlist of popular songs by related artists.
• pick one or more genres (pop, 90s, piano...), and get a playlist of matching songs.

Browse by theme.

• pick an artist, and display your other artists that are most closely related.
• pick a genre, and browse through your matching artists.

Find new music.

• pick an artist, and get recommendations of closely related artists that are missing in your library.
• pick a genre, and get recommendations of popular, matching artists that are missing in your library.
• integrated, personal artist recommendations from last.fm.

Enhance your experience.

• add artist images, biographies, and genre descriptions.
• completely tag-based browsing, with file-based fallback alternative.
• smarter search function.
• faster library scanner.
• upgraded security with safer password exchange and storage.
• no ads, no limitations. this is free software.

I've set up a page here with more details on how it works, and how to install:
http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/

Post your bug reports, comments and feature requests in this thread!

[jdubso]

I love this mod, I would prefer mod files as opposed to a complete WAR replacement. Thanks for the awesome mod.

[hakko]

Thank you! The source code for building the WAR file is available at https://github.com/hakko/subsonic and at https://github.com/hakko/musiccabinet. Is that what you are looking for? If you need the exact changes, I guess you'd have to check out the original 4.6 source code from the Subsonic SVN, clone my git repository to another directory, and then compare them recursively using some appropriate tool.

[Aktarus]

I want to try the Mod but I received some error during scaning of my library...

[16/05/12 09:27:31 EDT]INFO SearchService Updating Lucene search index.
[16/05/12 09:27:35 EDT] INFO SearchService Created search index with 99848 entries.
[16/05/12 09:27:35 EDT] DEBUG SearchService Check if last.fm can be looked up...
[16/05/12 09:27:36 EDT] DEBUG SearchService That went well, return true.
[16/05/12 09:27:36 EDT] INFO SearchService Now updating MusicCabinet library index.
[16/05/12 09:27:36 EDT] INFO SearchService reading data from c:\subsonic\subsonic15.index
[16/05/12 09:28:17 EDT] ERROR SearchService Creating MusicCabinet index failed!

My user/password for lastFm are OK and the database software seems to run OK

Any idea of what is going wrong ??

Thank you

[hakko]

Could you please post your C:/subsonic/subsonic.log on an upload host like pastebin.com or Dropbox, or send it to me in a PM? There's more info in that file than in the About view. Also, it would be interesting to see your C:/subsonic/subsonic15.index, or the part that relates to the error given in subsonic.log (I totally understand if you don't want to send the whole index file).

And finally, in the About view, where it says Version: Subsonic, original version 4.6. Built with MusicCabinet plugin, version XXXX. Is that version number 0.5.30? People have reported all kinds of odd issues over the last days and I solved some of them. One guy had an artist name containing multiple lines of text for example, that didn't work so well. There might be that kind of issues that I haven't planned for and that I have to solve, and then I need more detailed information on what's going wrong.

[Aktarus]

Hy,
Thank you for your help ... private message is on is way with files inside ...

This is my version :
Version Subsonic, original version 4.6. Built with MusicCabinet plugin, version 0.5.30, on 15 mai 2012.
Serveur jetty-6.1.x, java 1.6.0_31, Windows 7 (227,8 MB / 247,5 MB)

Thank you again

[hakko]

Aktarus:

For some reason, every file in your search index appears twice. Have you added F:/-=Musik=- twice in Settings -> Media folders? Or have you added both F:/-=Musik=- and F:/-=Musik=-/-=Metal=- for example?

Anyway, I've updated the mod to handle this situation more gracefully! There's a new subsonic.war up at http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war (0.5.31). To get everything right, you have to stop Subsonic, replace the subsonic.war file, and start again. Then go to Settings -> MusicCabinet. It'll notice this small fix and ask you to update the database. Do so, continue from there and it should hopefully work out better!

[tzortst]

Are the genres taken from the ID3 Tags? Or are these genres from Last.fm?

Edit: Got it working, unfortunately for me it is the later

Great job on the mod, just not for me

[hakko]

Just curious, why is it bad taking genres from last.fm, not from ID3 tags?

I believe that ID3 tags in mp3 files are most often wrong or lacking, and there's only room for one tag (even though all music players have their own ways to circumvent this, meaning it's impossible to actually use that value). Also, you'd have to tag your whole library yourself, more or less.

Using last.fm, you get automatic tags with a weighting factor, like Madonna is currently 100% pop and 48% dance. I think that adds for much more sophisticated mechanisms to generate playlists and find similar artists and so on.

Anyway, sorry to let you down! Hopefully, you'll find somebody else to do an ID3 tag version for you.

[Ultraviolet]

I haven't tried this yet, but it seems to have great promise. I'm still a user of the now defunct MusicIP Mixer and love to see efforts in that vein. I do agree with jdubso however, and would like to see an option to grab the individual modded files instead of the complete WAR. Most of the people interested in this will already have quite a few mods cobbled together and would rather try to integrate this into their current environment instead of blowing everything away. I'll give this a shot though tonight and provide feedback. Thanks for the effort!

[hakko]

I definitely agree that it would be great to merge mods, but I don't see how it could easily be done from a technical standpoint. My diff tool reports that over a hundred files have been changed in my Subsonic code base, compared to the original 4.6 source code (which I guess most mods are based on).

And then, the library I've written to actually perform all the logic (like creating playlists based on an artist, or getting info from last.fm for recently added albums) isn't even counted into that.

I tried originally to keep the Subsonic code as close as possible to Sindre's version, but the more I worked on it, the more I realized it just had to be changed. For example, I changed the main window into this: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/demo/main.htm (click an album to expand it). If somebody else made some minor change in another direction, it would require a manual merge to keep both additions.

It's unfortunate and if you have any good ideas on how to avoid manual merges, I'd be all ears!

Isn't there also the same problem for mod authors when Sindre releases a new version?

[Ultraviolet]

I see what you mean hakko. I thought the playlist functionality was just sort of dropped on top of the 4.6 version, but your changes are quite extensive. If this proves stable, I'd happily use this as the "base" install and try to cobble some of my other favorite mods into this. I have a rather large collection and looks like it's going to take a couple of days to populate postgres. I'll let you know how it goes.

[hakko]

A couple of days? Wow, how large is your library?

The reason for it being so slow initially is that it scans your whole library, to get tags for all files and put into a cache. Thereafter, it fetches a lot of meta-data from last.fm (throttled to comply with their terms of service). I prefer fast generation of playlists once it's running though, I think it's worth that initial hit.

The riskiest part is probably this initial phase, once it parses your subsonic index file and fills postgres with meta-data from last.fm. This is where you might have a setup that no-one had before you, and that I didn't take into account. Please let me know how it turns out! I'm also interested in how well it scales, my library is about 50.000 tracks and the Postgres playlist generation is done in roughly 20 ms. (The web interface is bit slower though.) But I haven't tried it with anything larger and I'd love to hear how it behaves on your system.

[hakko]

And also, I will definitely consider integrating other mods into my code base if I think they are well written and fits into what I'm striving for. Let me know what you'd like to add (no promises it will happen though).

[Ultraviolet]

I'm all for a long up front scan time if it results in quick playlist generation down the road. I'll definitely be able to test above the 50k song library size... I currently have about 3/4 of my collection in subsonic. If we really want to stress test things, I can dump the rest in. I assume additional rescans will only have to process the newly added albums?