SubFire Radio playlist generator released

[acroyear]

A common request has been 'smart' playlists. While I can't provide the full-feature (every tag is available) smart playlists of iTunes, I did write an application that will create stations and allow you to re-visit and re-shuffle the stations on demand.

Each Station is a public/shared playlist (with a specific JSON syntax in its comment), with a list of generators, like "top songs", "album", "random songs", each based on the core fetching methods from the Subsonic API. Any number of generators can be added to a station*, and generators can be limited on how many songs it contributes to the shuffle.

Visit http://subfireplayer.net/radio/ to try it, or go to http://subfireplayer.net/subfire-radio/ to read more. Like SubFire, the radio generator app does not use a proxy or store your data on any cloud server other than your own Subsonic instance or as local storage on your browser. HTTPS *should* work (even when you have a cert exception for an unsigned cert in your browser), but I can not test it.

* or at least, I haven't found a length limit on the comment of a playlist yet.

Feedback can be left here, or in the support page specified on the documentation page.

Note: It uses some newer browser standards (fetch and promises), which means it currently only works on Opera, Firefox, and Chrome. I am working on adding some polyfills for IE and Safari.

[acroyear]

Updated with polyfills that have it working on IE 11 and Safari. Chrome and Firefox should be unaffected.

[hubba]

Thanks for this. Would prefer something like this directly in subsonic, but for now this works great.

[acroyear]

Upgraded to 0.9.
Changes:

• Weighted generation now working
• (Re)Generate All button
• Upgrades to JQuery and Materialize

http://subfireplayer.net/radio or https://subfireplayer.net/radio if you prefer.

[acroyear]

Upgraded to 0.9.2:

• Removed most "Login" links after successful login
• Stations list remains open after login or station change
• Stations cleared when logged out
• new generator: artist preserving album contents
• new generator: album preserving album contents
• Fix left-side list rendering: no wrap, tooltip text

Those two new generators work like "Music Directory Album" - they will treat the entire album as a single object when it comes to sorting and shuffling, and then expand it out into individual songs so the order of songs within the album remains intact. I find it useful if shuffling in concept albums or long classical works like Music for 18 Musicians.

http://subfireplayer.net/radio or https://subfireplayer.net/radio if you prefer.

[acroyear]

Now has much better multi-user support.

• User can only save/generate stations they created
• Stations (including those made by others) can be copied in a single click

(todo: automatically load that into the current editing card so the user doesn't have to click the left-side)

In addition, there's a new feature (0.9.3) called "Top Related Songs". This feature allows one to do something akin to "Similar Songs", only instead of randomly choosing from any song in related artists as well as the seed artist, it fetches the top-songs only from each. It includes a 'depth' feature where one can choose how deep to load related artists - e.g., if I pick "Pet Shop Boys", at depth 0 I get them and their related artists. At depth 1, I get the related artists of each of those. At depth 2 I get the related artists of the related artists again. One can limit the # of related artists to look up.

One should use depth carefully, and it may be better for station consistency and speed to just have a number of generators of depth 0 than to go depth 2 or 3. At high depth the stations can start to look all the same (e.g., The Bangles are 2 steps away from the Pet Shop Boys, so if you had a PSB station depth 2 and a Bangles station depth 2, they'd be almost exactly the same). You'll probably need to experiment with this to find what works best with your collection.

http://subfireplayer.net/radio or https://subfireplayer.net/radio .

Feedback welcome.

[acroyear]

0.9.5 minor update - making a copy will now automatically select that one for editing, and "regenerate all" now smart enough to only update your own playlists and not others.

[calismoonelf]

Are there specific login requirements? I've managed to get logged in once or twice, but after that I continually get "login failed" errors. I have been trying the following using both HTTP and HTTPS links provided.
http:123.123.123.123:4040
123.123.123.123:4040

Using the HTTPS link, when I try name.subsonic.org I don't get an error, it just sits there, but placing the "http://" in front of it causes a fail. Both fail when I use HTTP.

I've tried from inside and outside my home network.

It may be something in the way I have set my server situation up, because I've never been able to get SubfireTV to work right either, acroyear worked with me one-on-one and he got it to connect to my server fine...but I never could. That being said, I have changed versions and OS since then for my subsonic server.

Thanks for reading.

[acroyear]

discussing in PM. will summarize here what we find.

[acroyear]

Found the issue: simple bug (if the server doesn't actually have any playlists or none public/shared with the user that logged in, it would hit a null). Fixed and deployed.

[calismoonelf]

Awesome work! Thank you so very much. This will very, very useful to me!!

[acroyear]

I've decided to call the 1.0 "GA" release of SubFire Radio, the playlist generator.

Fixes:

• Sometimes editing a generator would actually create a copy that needed to be cleaned up
• Switching from Album to Artist generator would sometimes not accept a selection after hitting 'Choose'
• MusicDirectory and MusicDirectoryAlbums now supports ratings 1-5 (a min to a max range). Note: if either min or max is set, then unrated folders ("0" stars) will NOT appear. Does not work for artist/album ID3-based generators.
• Hitting enter in the login screen does the logical (goes to next field, or if password enter, tries to log in)
• If you leave on the trailing '/' on the server:port address, the login will now still work
• A failure to log in or initialize properly will no longer lose the login credentials
• A "review" button will allow you to view the generated playlist immediately

Security reminder: SubFire Radio talks directly from your browser to your server via CORS. At no point is any traffic routing through subfireplayer.net and I am not logging any activity except basic fetches to the web page itself; not even google analytics. Login data is stored on the browser as 'local storage' and is not send to any site except your own server. Users using the service require the Can Create Playlist feature turned on.

http://subfireplayer.net/radio or https://subfireplayer.net/radio if you prefer.

[acroyear]

New features, found by clicking the vertical "..." icon on a station:

• Station tagging - for use in sorting stations in SubFire (coming soon)
• Max song limit (I don't recommend more than 900, as when I got to more than a thousand, the server slowed to a crawl trying to handle it)
• Block Artist Count

Block Artist Count is a way to make a "block party" or "two-for-tuesday" type of station. It will group the songs by artist and pluck the number there before moving on to the next artist. If there aren't enough songs for an artist, it'll just include what it has before moving on. You can also set it to '1' to ensure that no artist has two songs in a row (until your generators run out of songs from other artists, of course).

http://subfireplayer.net/radio/ or https://subfireplayer.net/radio/

SubFire for Chrome and the Web will generate based on Max Song and Block Artist. The Amazon/Fire version is not yet packaged, so you'll have to use the generated playlists for now. I'll package the Fire version when I finish the station sorting by tag feature.

[mrjacobrussell]

could these features just be added to subsonic. seams the artis radio is very limited.

[acroyear]

1.1.1 released - a minor update.

Adds support for "existing station contents". Basically, if you have a station that is more a "smart playlist" that is able to completely load all of the songs it specifies in its rules, you can use that as a generator for other stations. It treats the other station as a playlist and just pulls in the last generated contents.

E.g., I have a complex "Markus Reuter" ambient station that lists all of the different "Artists" he plays as/with (Ian Boddy, Tim Motzer). There are about 9 generators in there total. I then also wanted to include that list in a general SoundScapes station with all of Robert Fripp's works, plus a few ambient things from Patrick O'Hearn. Before, I would have to make a copy of the Reuter station and then add the others. With the new feature, I can just say "load all songs from the Reuter station" as a generator, simplifying the new station and also helping it to load faster.

Note that because it treats the playlist just as a raw set of songs, the block-party and album-order settings from other generators won't transfer. In the long run I would like to have a "re-generate this station and add its contents" feature, but that takes a little more work than I have time for right now given my target of rewriting the SubFire UI for 2.0. No worries.

http://subfireplayer.net/radio/ or https://subfireplayer.net/radio/