bouncing around the echo chamber

nospam@example.com (Leo Franchi) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:55:04 +0000

So following the mantra that nothing is official until it is blogged about, let it be known that version 0.1.0 of my small pet project libechonest has been released. Tarball available here:

http://pwsp.cleinias.com/libechonest-0.1.0.tar.bz2 sha1: 4c4e6a478a3bd7be0121af586e635e30840fe984

What is libechonest? A small C++/Qt wrapper around the APIs provided by The Echo Nest: http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/ . And what is provided by these APIs? In few words, the same sort of information you get from Last.fm but much better and much, much cooler.

Some Amarok users who enjoy using the Dynamic Playlists feature may already be familiar with The Echo Nest, as it has already crept into recent Amarok releases. It has been possible to run a dynamic playlist based on Echo Nest-suggested similar artists and tracks for a few versions now. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the information available from The Echo Nest. They provide up to date information about artists including audio,bios, blogs, news, reviews, images, similar artists, and much more.

So libechonest is designed to make it as easy as possible to extract this wealth of information from whatever small app you are creating. Maybe the Plasma Media Center could display related images about the currently playing artist, for example, without having to figure out what images from the artist Spoon are actually about Spoon and not about a certain type of cutlery. Alternatively, a mobile app could use the beat analysis features in the API to play continuous music that fits a certain BPM to match up with your desired running cadence. The possibilities are, of course, endless

Anyway, libechonest is being developed in KDE's git repository at git://anongit.kde.org/libechonest . For the moment the public-facing site is on KDE's projects page: https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/libs/libechonest

let's get some smarts in there

nospam@example.com (Leo Franchi) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:02:46 +0000

biased playlist with both new weekly top bias and last.fm similar artists bias with track mode

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!

Amarok Blog - lfranchi

bouncing around the echo chamber

let's get some smarts in there