I recently compiled and installed Charlotte Curtis' GSOC project form last year: the In the Mood plugin, which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/rhythmbox-predictive-playback/downloads/list
Congrats on a very cool project, Charlotte! I have been using it intensely since installing it, and I quite like the concept of it. It seems that intelligent playlists are quite popular right now (ie. iTunes Genius feature). And, I think the trend will continue. With that being said, I have some thoughts on expanding on Charlotte's work. In fact, I am hoping that Charlotte will chime in to this and join the discussion. Having done a little DJ'ing in my spare time, when mixing music, there three key factors involved: tonality (or key), tempo, and genre. Tempo's importance comes from the need to keep the music flowing; songs with similar tempos are mixed when transitioning from song to song. Genre is less important. However, DJs will usually mix the same or similar genres of music together. Now, the tonality, or key, aspect is where things get interesting. When transitioning from one song to another, if the succeeding song to the one playing is of a musically compatible tonality, the transition will be more pleasing to the ear. To aid in determining which tonalities or keys go well together, something called a "camelot wheel" can be used. This "wheel" is very similar to the circle of fifths, which if you are musician you will be familiar with. Basically, the wheel is an easy reference to which keys are compatible. So, my thinking is that if the criteria of timbre (what Charlotte's plugin uses to judge similarity), tonality, tempo, and genre can be put together (or in some combination), a really interesting playlist generation engine could result. In addition, I think that incorporating some type of adaptive aspect to this could really blow people away. The idea would be for the playlist to learn the listener's musical tastes and adjust its selection process accordingly. Similar to what has been developed in the IMMS project. (http://www.luminal.org/wiki/index.php/IMMS/IMMS). I feel that the adaptive aspect should be something that the user can toggle on/off, however. Actually, it would probably be nice if the user could toggle on/off each individual criteria. Or, perhaps the user could use sliders to give each criteria different weighting? Music is a huge part of people's everyday lives. And, I think that anything that can be done to make music listening more enjoyable is a great thing. So, it would be great to get Charlotte's thoughts on this, as well as the developers and community. Thanks for reading, Neil _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
