GSoC: biased dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 = love

Thursday, April 24. 2008

GSoC: biased dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 = love

I think it is time to introduce my SoC student to Planet KDE

I blogged about dynamic playlists some time ago. Thanks to Google Summer of Code Daniel is going to do some magic work on dynamic playlists in Amarok 2 this summer and make them even more nifty. But let’s hear what he has to say:

My name is Daniel Jones. I study math and computer science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. This summer I will be working on expanding the idea of dynamic playlists in Amarok to allow any number or weights or biases to be applied. This will allow you to set up a random playlist that prefers tracks you haven’t heard in a while, or prefers certain bands or genres. For parties you can set up more complicated biases to get exactly the right mix of fast songs, slow songs, novelty rap, obnoxious dance remixes, and, just to avoid offending him, a couple of tracks from your coworkers awful death metal band.

And from his proposal:

An example of this would be the condition the track is longer than 3 minutes with a weight of 0.6. Such a constraint would enforce that there is a 0.6 (60%) probability that a given track in the list is longer that 3 minutes.

As far as we know Amarok 2 will be the first player with a feature like this. Rock Daniel!

Everyone please welcome Daniel to our community. I want to see KDE-hugs!

I am also very happy about Moncef, Tobias, Nicholas and Teo who applied for SoC, could not be chosen due to the limited number of slots and who want to work on their projects as part of Season of KDE now. You guys rock! But more about that later.

Posted by Lydia Pintscher in Nightrose at 13:26 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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I wrote a script to do that once. It was an ugly hack because at the time Amarok didn't really make it very easy without having direct access to the database, so I didn't contribute it back.

#1 Conley on 2008-04-24 13:45 (Reply)

My main problem with dynamic playlists is transitions. Say I've got a playlist with oh, I don't know, a sappy Carpenters song and a fast paced velvet underground song. That's fine for the playlist, but they shouldn't be next to each other. I haven't found any software that understands that

The other problem I have is that I have big collections from some musicians but having say ten times as much of one artist does not mean I want to hear them ten times as often - all the random things I've seen seem to apply their randomness at the track level rather than say choosing a genre using weighted random selection, then choosing an artist within that genre (again, with weighted random selection), then choosing an album within that artist (as before), then choosing a track from that album (as before).

But I think the second problem is more particular to me while the first one seems fairly universal.
in dynamic play

#2 Corrin Lakeland (Homepage) on 2008-04-25 00:07 (Reply)

Maybe #2 is not so particular. I have the same problem.

#2.1 Danilo Luvizotto on 2008-04-25 08:11 (Reply)

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