LastMix 2.0 adds the possibility to seed mixes based on Last.fm tags. As
none of the music services I know does handle the concept of "Genres"
well, I decided that Last.fm's tags came closest: tracks on Last.fm can
be tagged with keywords which can be genre-like ("rock", "80s") but
totally unrelated, too (eg. "female"). LastMix now allows you to start
mixes based on such keywords. In order to do so I added a Protocol
Handler to accept URIs like this:
Code:
--------------------
lastmix://play?tags=80s
lastmix://play?tags=80s,rock,hair
--------------------
As you can see you can use multiple tags to create the seed. Such a URI
would create a list of five tracks. With Don't Stop The Music enabled
this should allow you to automatically create "genre radio" style mixes.
Assign such a URI to a Favorite or Preset, and you can start the mix
with single press of a button.
To give you an idea of how this might work, there's a new LastMix menu
item in the My Apps menu. It lists the Top 200 tags from Last.fm in
either alphabetical order or by popularity.
As always there are a few limitations... unfortunately:
- Tags are not Genres: tracks can have multiple tags, which can easily
be cross-genre. Take eg. aforementioned "female": this could give you
female fronted death metal, as well as the acoustic female
singer-songwriter in the same mix. Be up for some surprises :-D.
- While you can add multiple tags, they're not combined: above
"80s,rock,hair" would not be logically combined with an AND operator,
but would pick the seed from any track being returned for any of the
three tags. Unfortunately there's no way in Last.fm's API to apply
multiple tags to one query.
Enjoy the music!
Michael
http://www.herger.net/slim-plugins - Spotty, MusicArtistInfo
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