I haven't gone looking for it on the site, but I have yet to see any music database have these things anyway.
People have various ways of picking songs "at random", or at random with a particular tag (for example: jazz). This is beyond that. Whether any of this is of interest to your project, I don't know. In the past, I even wrote up an older version of my thoughts and then couldn't find any place to publish the darned thing. :-) The volume you want a song at, often changes for different purposes. Possibly a good example is providing background music to let someone (a baby?) sleep. Another is to keep say the 10 percentile volume level above some minimum (background noise?). I think most times people store the "volume" of a song (usually as a tag in the song header?), they are storing a RMS (2 norm) value. In the situation of someone sleeping, it is probably the maximum instantaneous volume (infinity norm) that is important. Another common value is the mean absolute value (0 norm?). Some applications are interested in how fast the beat is (aerobics or spin classes come to mind). Quite often, when instructors for those classes are planning a class, they have an idea of how they want the beats per minute to vary over the class. Hence to pick a 2:30 minute song at 80 bpm, followed by a 1:45 minute song at 120 bpm, ... would be of interest. To do this, one needs to have bpm stored some place (and possibly some measure of dispersion on the bpm value). I remember once listening to Radio Paradise, they played a series of songs about coffee. Hence a search on song titles, and or lyrics, are sometimes of interest. Perhaps you want to listen to music where an alto saxophone is part of the instruments being used, or maybe you hate piano. There are a few albums, where all the songs are part of a story (Imaginos of Blue Oyster Cult comes to mind). If in picking songs at random, you happen to pick one that lands in the middle of one of these theme albums, do you play the entire album beginning to end, from the song in question to the end of the album, or just the song in question? If N songs later, another random choice falls in that same album, what do you do? Anyway, a few ideas to chew on. Maybe they have occured to some of you before. But is your database the place where this kind of information can be stored? Should it be stored there? Gord _______________________________________________ Libre-fm mailing list [email protected] http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/libre-fm
