MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[PiX64]

hakko,

I decided to start running the beta war file not on my unraid server, just so that i could keep things separated and do some testing. I was wondering if you made modifications to the API's which are used by external programs (iSub in my case) to fetch artwork? What I am seeing is that when browsing folders from my iphone, i can no longer see the album art. When I go into the album and start playing tracks back, the art will actually then download as it is suppose to. The mini art (or thumbnail art that is used when browsing through folders NEVER shows up... just wondering if this was on purpose of if it was a bug.

[PiX64]

Also wondering your thoughts on including mini sub html5 player and what your plans are if any for allowing all of your fine work to be accessed via iSub, and other mobile/desktop/etc apps.

[hakko]

I've made quite a lot of modifications under the hood to the API implementation, since Subsonic is no longer handling files, it's all done by MusicCabinet. I'm basically turning Subsonic into a thin web layer that lays upon the MusicCabinet engine.

I'm striving to keep it backwards compatible with the official 1.7.0 API though so that people can still use existing apps. The missing iSub thumbnails is probably a bug from my rewrite of the API (I see it too in iSub now when I checked).

Including the mini sub html5 player is not a bad idea, however, it doesn't have support for all the features I've added into MusicCabinet. You should probably try to convince tsquillario to start using MusicCabinet instead of the official Subsonic server for this to happen. : )

If an app developer asked, it wouldn't be a very big deal to expose the MusicCabinet features via the API to allow apps to use them. But I don't have any immediate plans (even if I've considered it) to change the official Android app for example into having the artist radio function etc. It's the same thing there - you have to convince the author of iSub to look into it, if he/she asked, I'd be happy to write an API to use.

[vollbr0t]

I like the new "related artist sampler"-feature. But in my version it does not work. Clicking the button doesn't do anything, except for restarting the playing song.

[hakko]

Hmm. Could you stop Subsonic, delete C:/Subsonic/Jetty, start Subsonic and try again? I don't know why it doesn't work, but since there seem to be some bug in Subsonic regarding sometimes not updating JSPs, it's worth trying.

[vollbr0t]

Thanks! That fixed it!

[PiX64]

Excellent. thanks. Any ETA on a possible API fix for that artwork? thats the only thing keeping me at this point from pulling the plug on subsonic under unraid and running the complete .exe you have provided. ( I would stick with unraid but i cannot seem to find a valid java 7 build for unraid. unraid is built on slackware and a bit of a different beast.)

AFA the iSub goes, well i have worked back and forth with the dev since I started using it. So I may reach out to them and see if its in the cards. If not then I may write my own free or very cheap iphone/ipad app specifically for sunbsonic with ability to turn on subsonic musiccabinet.

[hakko]

Another HUGE problem I have is that I am no longer able to use Songbird (I have not tested any other external players yet)... When I try, instead of the set of tracks in the "play" area being sent, I get one of the tracks sent as many times as the total number of tracks in the "playlist". If I have 20 tracks selected I get one of them sent to Songbird 20 times!

I've finally addressed this. Songbird should work fine now in the new release, 0.7.7.

Any ETA on a possible API fix for that artwork?

I've fixed this as well today in 0.7.7. Turned out last.fm artwork took precedence and iSub didn't like that. Seems to work on my iSub at least now. It would be awesome if you could convince the devs to integrate MusicCabinet into their app!

.. and I also added a new feature, Genre recommendations. see viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9777&p=44800#p44800

[PiX64]

Sweet Action ill give it a whirl.

I will reach out to the devs of iSub tomorrow, and let you know what they say.

[vollbr0t]

I have some thoughts about the radio in MusicCabinet...

As far as I understand, the radio works like an OR-interconnection between the different genres. For example when clicking "instrumental" and "metal" the generated playlist does not contain "instrumental metal"-music, but music from bands that are tagged "instrumental" OR "metal". So it happens that songs from Metallica ("metal") and from Hans Zimmer ("instrumental") appear in the playlist.

I think it should be possible to use the genre selection more like an AND-interconnection. So that when clicking "instrumental" and "metal", only bands with all of the selected tags are used in the playlist. Or at least it should be possible to choose which interconnection to use, or even create configurable and complex interconnections between genres ( like: [["metal" AND "instrumental"] OR "hard rock"] ).

What do you think about it?


Another thing: it would be great to have the "add last"- and "append"-function in the radio (and genre-radio)!

[Ultraviolet]

Woohoo! Loving the Genre merge functionality. It's going to take me a while to clean up this mess from the last.fm fat-fingered community, but well worth it.

+1 to vollbr0t suggestion about the Radio functionality. I think that would unlock an additional piece of generated playlist intelligence: the ability to span genres. Of course, I imagine the AND would produce no matches for a great number of genre combinations so I'd probably vote for the option to toggle between AND and OR.

One other suggestion that may be running into UI territory (I know you wanted to hold off on that for the time being): I would love to see the rating/star in the playlist frame as well. I think that's the most intuitive place for it since I don't know what I want to rate a track until I've actually listened to it. I take it the single star correlates to last.fm's "Loved tracks" feature? I would love to see a 5 star rating system, but I haven't seen any last.fm component that would make that possible--I just wanted to throw that out in case I was missing something.

[hakko]

The radio is currently some sort of OR+AND. Tags fetched from last.fm come with a count per artist - an artist can for example be 100% pop and 75% disco.

Let's say artist A is 50% sludge and 70% drone, and artist B is 100% sludge.

if you search for sludge, artist A gets a score of 50, and B gets a score of 100.
if you search for drone, artist A gets a score of 70 and B gets a score of 0.
if you search for sludge and drone, artist A gets a score of 120 and B gets a score of 100.

The scores are then weighted so that for sludge radio, songs by B would appear much more often (but A would appear sometimes). For drone radio, only A would be played. For sludge+drone radio, A appear more often but B will be pretty frequent too.

This is how it works right now: https://gist.github.com/3389980. If you have idea's for a better query I'm all ears! I wrote this in the beginning of the project and haven't touched it since (except for adding genre merge into it recently).

I think it would be good to add a more advanced "Playlist generator" feature where you can specify a lot of criterias, like "give me top rated singer songwriter songs, female artists, from 1960-1970, that I've never listened to". It's totally possible (all that information is in the database) and it would be really handy. It's just a matter of finding spare time for coding it (which is fun and rewarding). And creating a nice interface for it (which is not my favorite job).


Starred tracks are supposed to correlate to "Loved tracks" at last.fm (I mean to integrate them in the future). There's not any immediate plan for a five star system on top of this, sorry. And yes, I'm kind of staying away from changing the playlist frame. It's the worst part of the UI and polishing it instead of replacing it isn't very appealing.

[Ultraviolet]

Thanks for the explanation on the radio algorithm. And as far as the 5 star rating is concerned--Since MusicCabinet revolves around revolves around last.fm integrations, I don't see a point if last.fm just does the "Loved"/single star feature. Typically I think more granularity is better when it comes to ratings, but the single star system works for me.

My UI wishlist is probably 200 items long and to most require a "blow up and do over" approach rather than adding something little here and there so I understand you not wanting to start in on that.

Now to the last release. The one thing I would still love to be implemented with the Genre merge feature is the ability to assign an alias that is different from either genre being merged. For example, I have "1950s" and "50s" which can easily be merged into one category, but I also have just "20s" and just "1990s" (no "1920s or "90s"). So no matter what format I chose, I can't have consistent 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s etc. or 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s etc. format. It's going to jump around between the two year types. Just to clarify: this would just impact what is displayed on the genre page for consistency and legibility sake.

[PiX64]

@hakko,

I just wanted to let you know that I reached out to the Developers of iSub today, and will let you know what they say. feel free to pm me and ill give you my personal email so we can directly communicate rather than forum posting.

[hakko]

Ultraviolet:
I'm pretty sure the radio algorithm can be improved though. For example, it could hand out a higher score to artists that match all tags, instead of just summing up scores per tag. I haven't given it a lot of thinking as I rarely use it nowadays.

PiX64:
nice! to get in contact, just drop an email at musiccabinet@dilerium.se which is my catch-all address for this project. (It notifies me on forum updates here, Github updates etc)