erland;566383 Wrote:
>
> 1. How do you find music in your own library ?
>
I'm mostly playing smart random playlists through Dynamic Playlist/SQL
Playlist plugins where I'm using TrackStat based ratings to get rid of
tracks I don't like. I'm usually using the IR remote to launch a smart
playlist.
I have MusicIP installed but it's only running on a headless server it
gets kind of complicated to do something useful with it without the
user interface. It works to generate mixes and I've sometimes used it
with SugarCube to do this but the problem is that I haven't found any
way to easily get rid of low rated music or other kind of music I'm not
interested in when running MusicIP without a GUI. I know there is a some
concept for this in MusicIP but it's not available when you run it on a
headless Linux server.
Anyway, I have a number of different smart playlists which I mainly
use:
- A few which includes tracks of some pre-selected genres
- One for christmas music (which is excluded from all other smart
playlists)
- One that plays random tracks from music added during the last two
months with priority to play least played tracks first.
When I want to listen to a specific album I'm navigating to an album by
browsing to an artist and then selecting the album I'd like to listen
to. Here I often use SqueezePad (on iPad) or iPeng (on iPhone) if I
have access to either of them, when I don't have them within reach I
usually use the IR remote.
When I know I don't want a random playlist but I'm not sure what I like
to listen to, I also sometimes use the TrackStat statistic based browse
menus to find something interesting.
I'm not using the standard IR remote as I do all my IR remote
controlling through a Logitech Harmony remote control, all other
remotes besides the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad are forbidden in my
living room. The Squeezebox Controller I got during Logitech beta
testing is only used during beta testing and development/support of my
plugins.
Album art is nice on the now playing screen and even more so is artist
images from LastFM which I use through my Custom Clock applet and Song
Info plugin. Switching artist images of currently playing artist was a
huge improvement of the Now Playing screen of my Touch and Radio.
However, neither album art or artist images are important when
selecting what to play. But they look nice so I don't want them
removed, I would love to get more of them, but they aren't a factor
when finding out what music to play.
erland;566383 Wrote:
>
> 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently
> don't have in your library ?
>
I rarely find new music through the radio, neither FM radio nor
internet radio. I sometimes listen to internet radio but it tends to
just be a background sound so I never notice which artists are playing
so it's pretty useless for finding new music.
One source to find new music is and will always be recommendation from
friends, I typically get recommendations from friends I meet in person,
I've used LastFM a little bit but besides that I'm not using any online
site for recommendations from friends.
I feel that there are two periods in my life regarding finding new
music:
1. Before June 2010
2. June 2010 and later (when Triode's Spotify plugin arrived)
Before June 2010:
- I often used allmusic.com to find similar artists to what I already
have in my library and like. I also used allmusic.com for album reviews
to see if a new album was worth purchasing. I've also sometimes used
amazon.com to get user reviews of an album.
- Since allmusic.com have had a lot of problem to play music on my
Linux laptop I often ended up finding the same track on amazon.com to
be able to preview it or in worst case using bittorrent or similar
tools to get it illegally to be able to preview it. Sometimes I also
used the Spotify desktop client (which also didn't work good on Linux)
to preview music. However, the main problem in all these cases is that
the quality of the preview through laptop speaker isn't too great.
- Finally, I ended up searching for the album I'd found on a Swedish
online store where I ordered the CD if it was available. In many cases
it wasn't available because CD's tends to be released in US (and
allmusic.com) before it's available in Sweden.
June 2010 and later
- allmusic.com is still used for finding similar artists but in
addition to this I now also use the similar artists feature provided
through Triode's Spotify plugin. I also use the new music and top music
charts provided through the Spotify plugin. amazon.com is used less now
when I easily directly can preview the music in Spotify and decide for
myself if I like it or not.
- All previewing now happens through Spotify, either on the Squeezebox
or on the iPhone (when I'm not at home).
- I still haven't decided if it's worth ordering CD, the only reason
would be to own the music and to get a little bit better quality than
the 320kbps streams provided by Spotify. I haven't actually ordered
anyone since I got my Spotify Premium account in June but I suspect I
will still order CD's, mainly to get that lossless audio quality.
Seems like I have to split the post in two as I reached the 10000
character limit in the forum, part 2 coming soon...
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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