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[and]

Maybe it could be great to be able to not link the autofill number and the master song dependency. For instance : autofill with 10 songs but use the last (n) song added for master(s) song(s) each time ?

I've been thinking about an "infinite" playmode that is mostly an answer to short queues. This is something I'm keeping in mind for later, but I'm not entirely sure how to do it. In general changing the master-artist in cases where there's a short queue could either rely on user-feedback/input or gmb could switch to a new master-artist (or gmb could simply stop playback after the "complete" queue has been played once).
These different approaches imply different user-interfaces and for starters I'd prefer to keep it lean.

There are artists who seems to be "hole" or "bi-hole" : when you fall on those artists, it will be hard to change.
For instance, at home, Thom Yorke and Radiohead, but James Blake and Nicolas Jaar are close to a bi-hole.
On Lastfm, Radiohead is close to Thom Yorke, and, far away (less than 20%), Sigur Ros, Portishead and Blur

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean with "bi-hole" and "hole", but if I understand "bi-hole" correctly you mean that only the two artists connected by the "bi-hole" will be played. That's one restriction of lastfm's similarity, I guess the only way to work around that is to lower the similarity level (you can test it with the similar-tab in the artistinfo plugin), however the percentage of similarity is not connected to the probability with which these songs will be drawn.

May be it would be better to give (local or lastfm) genre more importance (or to give user the ability to decide of the ponderation of each parameter) ?

Not sure, maybe you can apply an additional local filter on genre and lower the similarity-limit? Haven't tried myself but it's possible that they are combinable.

Stuff like more lastfm-querying to extend the similarity-parameters is definitely an option, but for later.

[what results am i interested in?]

ok, i managed to push the code for using the "similar-artists autofill" queuemode before the weekend but since the forums were down then and i was away, here comes the kinda late call for testing.

this is how the current implementation works:
* it pulls a list of similar artists from lastfm's database (no lastfm login/account needed for that)
* it respects the "similar artists"-settings of the artistinfo plugin (limited results, limit to similarity above n%) and it always only uses locally available artists
* this means that you can check the list of similar artists that your queue will be composed of in the "similar"-tab of the artistinfo plugin (with filter set to show local library results only)
* the queue will also contain songs from the "master"-artist him/herself, meaning: if you want to play artists similar to bob dylan you'll also find bob dylan himself in the queue (this is partly due to the fact that with some artists you won't get *many* useful results and therefor a very shortlisted queue)

to test the current implementation you have to check out the "testing"-branch of my github-repo (https://github.com/shimmerproject/gmusicbrowser).
here's how to do it with git (meaning: you gotta have git installed):
1) git clone git://github.com/shimmerproject/gmusicbrowser.git (this will clone the whole git tree into your working directory)
2) git checkout testing (this will switch to the testing branch)
3) perl gmusicbrowser.pl (possibly you need to switch directories first for that into the "gmusicbrowser"-folder; also: you should close all running instances of gmusicbrowser first)
4) happy testing!

so that's it.

what results am i interested in?
the code basically works and i know that already, so what i'm interested in is whether this works in a real-life situation where you'd like to listen to a certain kind of music and then use the queue-mode for that. obviously much depends on 1) lastfm's database and 2) your similarity settings, but i'd be very eager to know what works (best) for you. (maybe i can even set better default values then.)

disclaimer: obviously i cannot promise anything, so if this breaks your local library you might have to use a backup (in ~/.config/gmusicbrowser/gmbrc.bak.$date) to restore it.

Sorry for being repetetive
but Why not  try the Mirage Plugin from Banashee?
by selecting songs with similar audio properties?

my simple answer is that i already wrote a plugin that accesses last.fm's api (so i'm familiar with it) and the current implementation seemed easiest for now (it's about 30 lines of new code added to the artistinfo-plugin).
i can look at mirage if 1) the current similar-artists implementation doesn't satisfy me and 2) i have enough time to start a new project.

i'll post the call for testing in a new thread.

i invested a good night's sleep yesterday and hacked together a similar-artist queue (thanks again, quentin!). at the moment it still needs small modifications to gmb's core, but we'll overcome that in the near future.

i'll do a bit more testing and cleaning up in the next days and then push it to a branch in the shimmer github-repo so you can all test it before it gets artistinfo-plugin integration, but so far it seems to work.
i will post a call for testing with instructions as soon as it's uploaded/pushed.

hey!
hm, i'm not sure that rating, playcount and year are really good indicators for similarity. imagine you add a new artist B to your library that is very similar to artist A but just hasn't been played much and therefor the similarity-rating would drop.
or wrt the year imagine bob dylans early recordings and late recordings with the band (at least in my library those two are different - and therefor similar - artists).

the genre could make sense though.

proposal: i'll start with adding a mode for similar_artists, then we try and see how well that works and then try different approaches (e.g. similar genre) to tweak it if we're not satisfied.

@mgrubert: yeah, i know that. you can see an implementation of similar artists from your local library in the artistinfo-plugin (you just have to change the setting to "only show local artists"), basically this is how such a filter would work.
i'm not saying that this doesn't work at all, but i assume that there are better ways.

thanks for the feedback, i just thought about it a bit more today.
just to throw in a few more thoughts, similar tags or similar genre would probably help. note: additionally, not *just* similar genre or tags.


so maybe some combined thing between similar artist, similar tags and similar genre could work, but it sounds difficult to think about it. if you could come up with a sensible combination i'd be happy to implement it.

hi again,
i did a very basic version of the similar-songs plugin yesterday, but i have to say that i got really sceptical as to whether this makes sense at all.

a few problems:
* similar_songs returns quite a few songs, but it's still not likely you'd get a complete playlist out of that
* how should we treat lastfm's similarity factor? (it's anything but coherent)
* keep the "master song" (the one all others should be similar to) or skip it after a while? if yes, what shall it use instead?

the only way out i could think of to deal with these problems up to now is use similar artists instead (unfortunately there's no "similar-album" in lastfm), but since artists tend to make albums that differ a lot from each other i'm not convinced this would make much sense.

i guess i'll take a look at guayadeque next, beatbox and foobnix didn't do anything else than the trivial similar_songs query from lastfm.

btw, squentin proposed making the similar-stuff a queue-mode, any thoughts on that?

hey, just downloaded it and tried it but i get "Bareword "CalculateDB" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at ~/.config/gmusicbrowser/plugins/albumrandom.pm line 336."
i don't have time to really look into the code myself atm, hope you got time to look at that.

after using it for a while, here are two feature-request for v0.2:
* if no review is found, there's a button to show lastfm info instead.
* if the widget isn't loaded/shown in the layout, there's an entry in the album-context-menu to open that pane/plugin in a new window.

hey,
just downloaded and tried it - looks great! :)
haven't had time to look at the code, but i can already say that i like the manual search-function.

i'm starting to think that these context-tabs should get meaningful icons, because slowly but surely i'm getting a tab-overflow problem here.
i mean a lastfm-icon or an allmusic-icon is ok, but it doesn't tell the user about the functionality of the thing. maybe the generic album and artist icons would be better for that. what do you think?

also: if you feel like hosting/sharing your code on github feel free to send me an email.

re: No.2: i planned to do a plugin that would create playlists via querying last.fm's similarity-database, but i haven't started yet because i haven't been able to settle on the right approach (create playlist, fill up queue, etc.). anyway, we'll see if i get around to it anytime soon, no promises...

hey,
looks great! i'll wait for quentin to pick it up and if not it'll appear in the shimmer-fork if you're ok with it ;)

hey,
i have a very specific question about the (song)treeview-implementation in gmusicbrowser. when i style the normal treeview-rows to look flat (in murrine it's setting gradient_shadows = {1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0}) the normal songlist (which is a standard treeview as far as i understand) works as expected, but songtree's selected color has a gradient.
i'll attach two screenshots to illustrate the problem.
feel free to test it with my theme in https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird

i also tried to specifically apply the treeview-style to songtree, but didn't really succeed.
anyhow, maybe this is something that could be fixed in gmb, so that i don't even have to work around it in gtkrc ;)


ps: the treeview-headers look normal/as expected.

i don't want to discourage you, but i've had really bad experiences with flash and mozembed, in fact it was one reason why i decided to leave it behind (and wrote the artistinfo plugin to get some info).