TO EVERYONE THAT HAVEN'T POSTED YET:
First of all, I just like to say that this thread turned out to get
really interesting, so people who haven't posted yet, please post your
thoughts to the questions in the initial post. If you are interested in
music discovery related features, I want to hear your thoughts. If you
don't want to post in public for some reason, send me a PM or mail with
your answers and I'll not tell anyone who I got them from.
Don't be scared of repeating what someone already has said, you don't
have to read through the whole thread, just read the questions in the
first post and post your answers and ideas.
TO ANYONE THAT'S WONDERING ABOUT THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS:
At the moment I'm only proposing that Squeezeboxes need improved
features related to music discovery, the purpose is to make it more
interesting to listen to your own library and make the purchase process
when getting new music easier and more interesting, at least the process
until you have decided what to purchase. The actual purchase (after you
have decided what to get) is probably out of the scope at the moment
because that involves more work than I reasonably think can be done as
a community effort.
The idea with this thread is to start by gathering the needs/ideas from
as many people as possible without going into technical details, I plan
to continue the process later on with a thread more focused at how to
do. However, I'd like some more people to post in this thread first and
I'd also like everyone interested in helping to digest all posts and do
some analysis. Basically, let's do the analyzing of the whole music
discovery area before starting to implement individual features.
I would like this thread to continue being focused at how people want
music discovery to work and not at technical/architectural
implementation details, but I'll give the people that wonders some
answers below but I don't plan to start discussing them in this thread,
there will be time to take that discussion later on in a separate
thread.
I've thought about a total re-write of SBS several times but I don't
think it's the best option. Also, I do realize that if Logitech barely
is able to maintain it with 5 full time developers there is no way
myself and a few other community members can do it on their spare time.
Also, possibly parts might need to be rewritten/changed but definitely
not everything. SBS is really good at many things it's just that music
discovery related features never has got enough focus.
We have a lot of plugins already so I don't think we just need another
plugin, what we need is to think about is the whole music discovery
functionality area and decide how to solve the different parts to make
them work together as a system.
Some things might be suitable as an additional plugin and other things
is suitable to add the core SBS products and with the right patch it
might be possible to get Logitech to add it. Other things might be
suitable to add to already existing plugins.
Regarding my own plugins like SQL Playlist, Custom Browse and TrackStat
I think they are all starting to reach a state where a re-write is
appropriate. The main reasons being that:
- When I started to do them they were developed as a temporary solution
until Logitech had done something permanently.
- It was the first perl code I've ever written in my life which means
that some parts are rather messy.
- I had only use Squeezebox'es for a few weeks/months when I started to
develop them, I have a lot more experience from the Squeezebox products
today.
What I want to be the result of all this is a more permanent solution.
If possible I would also like more people to be involved in the
development, working more together instead of individual developers
working alone and barely talking to each other. I also have some hope
that Logitech resources at least can be involved in the integration
points/API's, I would prefer to do this together with Logitech even
thought they probably mainly want to focus on other areas than music
discovery. I can say that I've had some really positive unofficial mail
conversations with some of the Logitech developers and it feels like
there is a chance to do something together as long as it doesn't
conflict with their own work/ideas. However, I don't think we should
expect to get more than a few development/QA hours from Logitech.
Still, it's really important to take advantage of their experience of
the system and their knowledge about parts that they need anyway for
their own focus area (whatever that is).
Finally, to anyone with knowledge or resources to setup cloud based
computing or central servers, feel free to start to think about what
you can do in all this. My personal feeling is that there is a lot of
metadata about music involved in all this that would be even better if
we shared it and improved it together. There are already central
solutions available for this with open API's, for example LastFM and
Musicbrainz and possibly some others. There are also commercial pretty
expensive solutions like allmusic.com which from what I've heard mostly
focus on B2B integrations besides their web site, unfortunately this
will make it harder to have any discussion with them with only
community representatives. The preferable solution would of course be
to use something that exists instead of developing something new, so if
you are interested in helping in this area it's time to start thinking
and investigating possibilities. As I mentioned above, we will continue
discussions regarding the technical aspects in another thread after some
more people have posted their functionality related thoughts in this
thread.
Online sources that makes it possible to preview music before purchase
is obviously also a big part in this, for example Spotify but also
integration that makes it easy to find music on sites like YouTube when
starting the discovery process through a Squeezebox. So if you are
interested in helping and are interested in a specific online source
where you can preview music, please start investigating what
integration possibilities there are.
*And finally, please let's not start having the technical/architectural
discussions in this thread, it's going to be easier to analyze this
thread if we keep it only focused on the functional needs*
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910
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