dbm - On The Go Last.fm-like Playlists from Rockbox

[audio-i]

Being Rockbox “playlist oriented”, I thought there is a playlist feature that could actually be very cool.

If one’s  DAP music would have a “public tagging logic” associated (that is, according to what a large number of persons listen to, how they listen to it, etc)  it would be possible to generate playlists with music that goes great together, starting with a specific song you choose, from the very digital music player itself.

OK, itunes did it first for it’s devices (it’s called genius, and it’s of course also oriented to motivate you to buy recommended music), but still, I’ve been using it on an iphone just for the new-way-to-listen-to-your-music feature, and it’s VERY cool. It generates very coherent, yet very “creative” playlist, putting there new and old music that go very good together; often you get to listen to “forgotten” music you have, or generates great music combinations that go far beyond a simple genre filter.

Yes, something like what Last.fm does; only in this case of course it would be from music that’s in your library. So, if besides transmitting your scrobbled music to Last.fm, Rockbox+Last.fm could get to associate to the library inside your DAP (locally), the large Last.fm public logic tagging, than such playlists could be generated.

I don’t even know if Last.fm would have any interest in allowing this. I wish I could do more for this idea, unfortunately I don’t have the programming knowledge; hopefully there will be more people interested, and at some point, someone that could technically do it

[Chronon]

It sounds like a cool idea for playlist preparation.  But it's also not really a Rockbox idea.  This is functionality for some external application to generate a playlist based on fingerprinting a given set of songs.  Here's one that appears to do what you want.

Edit: Unlocking this for further discussion since it seems I misunderstood something here.

[audio-i]

The idea would be to add the functionality to Rockbox, so that such playlists could be generated on-the-go from the device. Of course generating those automatic playlists would require the appropiate logic, and Last.fm is mentioned as *probably/hopefuly* http://www.last.fm/api a feasible example for that logic to be used

Edit: I changed the thread's subject to try and make it clearer

[Chronon]

There is this old topic: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=1541.0

[audio-i]

There is this old topic: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=1541.0

I can't seem to be able to access it

"An Error Has Occurred!
The topic or board you are looking for appears to be either missing or off limits to you. "

[soap]

Try now.

[Chronon]

Oops. 

Thanks, soap!   

[soap]

I thought all users could read the archives?  Can they not?  What is the point of the archives if they can't?
I'll create a dummy account in a few hours and test if nobody answers.

[cool_walking_]

I didn't even know there *were* archives. I don't see anything like an "Archives" link anywhere..

[Chronon]

It looks like they are a subforum of "Removed Posts" to which most users do not have access.

[audio-i]

There is this old topic: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=1541.0

The idea discussed there is very similar, and also there the main problem for even start thinking about implementing such feature, seemed to be how to put the palylist generating logic in the device. That's why I mentioned Last.fm as a possibility. They have for sure one of the biggest and more complete music listeners database to make their playlist generating logic great, and the mentioned link here http://www.last.fm/api gives hope that it might be possible:

"The Last.fm API allows anyone to build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether they're on the web, the desktop or mobile devices"

[soap]

"The Last.fm API allows anyone to build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether they're on the web, the desktop or mobile devices"

Sure, so long as you are connected to Last.FM's database.  I rather doubt you would want to carry around the whole database just to make playlists (even if you had the capacity).  Since no Rockbox target has WiFi at this point in time, I don't see how that API could be made functional.

[Chronon]

Right.  The API consists of calls to a server side application that queries the database.  Just having the name of the command doesn't give us any details of how to replicate that functionality.  Without a web connection we can't invoke any of those methods and the API is useless to us.

To make this tractable one needs to have access to data to be stored in a local, Rockbox database.  Whoever works on this needs enough details about the information taken from last.fm or MusicIP or whichever source to actually devise a sensible metric for determining each track's "distance" from each other. 

[audio-i]

Not knowing really anything about the technical details, here's how *I've seen* it works for ipod touch / iphone (I don't know if also for other ipods). There is a desktop application that gathers the information from your local music files (in their case itunes) and transmits it to the public database (in our case would be last.fm), which returns information from your local music and it's correspondence to the public database - that includes, amongst other things, other users listening habits - to be stored locally.

That information is also stored in the device after syncing, and this feature (in our case the new Rockbox feature) allows to use that information to generate intelligent playlists on the go, by choosing a song to be the starting point for a set of songs that go really well together. Now, how interesting those playlists can be, is hard to explain, one would have to try it to see how good they are.. as I said, even much better than what can be done with desktop media players automatic playlists based on rules for genres, ratings, etc... and of course, the beauty of it is that it can be done wherever you are.

[soap]

If it works off-line like that - the first step would be for someone to figure out what data is stored on the DAP and how it is stored.