let's get some smarts in there

one of my longstanding goals as an amarok developer has been to expand the way that amarok helps you explore your own music collection, and discover your own music. for those of you who will be attending campkde a few days (my flight leaves tomorrow am...) i'll expand on this point quite a bit more in my talk on sunday. but here's a nice little precursor that shows the sort of features that I think media players should be able to do.

most people who use amarok are aware of this "dynamic playlist" framework, and I hope that a good percentage of users understand what it's for. for those who don't, basically, it allows you to modify the composition of The Playlist (right hand side) based on a set of pluggable criteria. historically in amarok 2.x these criteria have been things such as "artist name == FOO" or "playcount > 5" etc. I think 2.2.0 was the first release (or was it 2.1.0?) that had a lastfm similar artists bias--that is, amarok would try to play similar songs by asking last.fm what artists were similar to the currently playing one.

now that i've pushed another option to the last.fm similar bias, and added a completely new bias, i'm getting closer to helping amarok help you play music you want. so what's new?

playing-history based bias
if you've been a meticulous user of last.fm (which is easy thanks to the seamless amarok integration) you know that last.fm knows a lot about your listening history.

every so often I sit back and realize how much my music tastes have changed over time. the music I listened to 4 years ago i rarely hear today. but is that because my tastes have really changed? or is it also because i've simply forgotten some of the more obscure bands I was listening to? well, now you can tell amarok to play you music that was in your "weekly top artists" list between any two dates in your listening history.

that's right, so when you remember that you listened to a ton of electro-punk last july but can't remember all the bands, just set up the dates and let amarok rip. a trip through history lane indeed

new track-based similarity
for those who have used the last.fm similar artists bias, you've probably noticed that on the whole it's not super accurate. that's because it just asks last.fm for similar artists---and if you happen to like an artist that covers a wide variety of genres, this can get pretty inaccurate.

anyway, last.fm recently introduced a new track similarity function---you can ask it for similar songs to any given song. this, of course, is much more accurate. it's also harder to find matches (the odds that you have the exactly correct track in your collection is lower), but that's the tradeoff you have to make.

in any case, there is now a combobox that lets you choose between artist similarity and track similarity when using the bias.

enjoy!