Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. - How do you find music in your own library? Browse by artists or playlists - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? Web interface, direct by radio and android. - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) Sometimes but not for my libarry but quite often for Spotify - Do you find music through smart play lists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? Nja - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? No - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? I have used it in other players where it was visible. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? Papers, bloggs and spotify - Heard it on the radio ? Happens - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists Charts - Similar - Tags - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? no - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? My computer or ios or android - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Spotify or similar services - Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? laptop - Do you use a subscription based service...? Spotify - Through friends ? Yes How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? More statistics use a lot let's hear what i have from 1995 ... I guess a big feature for me would be to be able to get my whole listening history in to the database. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? I'm happy with my current approach. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? mp3tag tag genre and year especially - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? Very much indeed d-depeche mode-1981 Speak & Spell-01-Dreaming of me - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? No 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? No - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? Don't use iTunes -- agb007 agb007's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=43336 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
We have now worked on the topic discussion in this thread for some time
and the current efforts has now been released to the public, see the
following announcement thread for more information:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=656713
--
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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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. - HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY? Browse by artists, playlists(static and dynamic) - WHICH TYPE OF REMOTE/INTERFACE DO YOU USE ? DIFFERENT FOR DIFFERENT SITUATIONS ? Web interface and android. - DO YOU FIND MUSIC THROUGH STATISTICS BASED BROWSE MENUS ? (RATINGS, PLAY COUNTS, HISTORY) Not at all. Play counts and history could be useful. But my squeezeserver only contains a small fraction of my played music. Since I've only had it for a month and listen on a lot of different devices. Although last.fm has quite a bit of it. - DO YOU FIND MUSIC THROUGH SMART PLAY LISTS BASED ON STATISTICS OR RANDOM SELECTION OR OTHER KIND OF AUTOMATIC MIXES ? Dynamic playlists on occasions when I come up with good search terms. - DO YOU USE ALBUM ART WHEN SELECTING WHAT TO PLAY ? Yes, I think it helps. - DO YOU TYPICALLY START SEARCHING/BROWSING FROM AN ARTIST, ALBUM OR TRACK AND WANT TO FIND SOMETHING RELATED TO THAT ? I have used it in other players where it was visible. 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? Recomendations from friends and last.fm and then onto spotify or similar to listen in to it. - HEARD IT ON THE RADIO ? No - WHERE DO YOU START WHEN SEARCHING ? TOP CHARTS ? GENRES ? SIMILAR ARTISTS SIMILAR ARTISTS OR TAGS. - DO YOU USE SOME WEB SITE WHEN SEARCHING OR DO YOU BROWSE SOME MUSIC STORE DIRECTLY ? Last.fm - ARE YOU USING THE COMPUTER, YOUR SQUEEZEBOX OR SOME OTHER DEVICE WHEN SEARCHING FOR NEW MUSIC ? My computer - DO YOU PREVIEW THE MUSIC BEFORE PUCHASING ? Spotify or similar services - DO YOU PREVIEW IT ON THE REAL SYSTEM OR CHEEP LAPTOP SPEAKERS OR SOMETHING SIMILAR ? Realsystem, laptop with headphones or computer speakers. - DO YOU USE A SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICE...? Spotify, last.fm - THROUGH FRIENDS ? Yes HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? While similar artist are good I would like my library to learn what I like and give me suggestions from that. Answering questions such as: - What songs have been played more than any other songs on the album? - What did I listen to during last summer? Navigate through timelines. - Using tags to navigate my collection, just genres are not good enough. - Using api's such as last.fm or echonest to navigate through my music using other data. - Give me all songs that does not contain the word love(Could maybe use musixmatch. Haven't looked into their data that much yet). Some of these already are possible with sql playlist. I guess a big feature for me would be to be able to get my whole listening history in to the database. 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? I'm happy with my current approach. 5. WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? Run everything through piccard and then use a small script to add last.fm tags to each artist. - IS THE FOLDER STRUCTURE THE MUSIC FILES ARE STORED IN IMPORTANT ? Split albums gives me some problems but other than that, no. - DO YOU MANUALLY ADD RATINGS TO YOUR MUSIC ? WHY ? No, When I'm listening active moste of the time I'm not at a device that let med ad raitings. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? *- Import statisitcs from MusicIP ?* No, haven't tried MusicIP yet. - IMPORT FILES, PLAYLISTS AND STATISTICS FROM ITUNES ? Don't use iTunes and alot of moving around and using different players has made me loose most of my statistics and playlists. -- anomie anomie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=43288 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Great thread! I have a couple of ideas/answers: I too love muso for its album-oriented approach; I tend to play only albums. Some better logic (or custom tag) for detecting albums and discarding singles would be good (e.g. 'Tubular Bells' has only two (very long) tracks, but it's an album, some 'maxi' singles have 8-9 tracks, but they're singles, not albums). I nearly always find what I want by searching (Google generation, clicking is too slow...), so fast search is a must (it already is, I suppose), and I love the way Squeezebox currently returns artists, albums, etc., not just tracks, so I can search for 'X' and then go directly to play the album containing 'X', or the track, or whatever. I guess I'm saying search is already good, but don't forget to make it better! I like to play music from an artist I'm going to see a few days before the gig, so with some social integration (e.g. SongKick, Last.fm), perhaps Squeezebox could do things like say 'hey, you're going to see these guys soon, want to listen to them?' (if I have their music already, or otherwise let me buy it or whatever). Finally, this one is a bit vague, but perhaps some kind of remote 'info display' -- for example, I have Squeezebox 2s and control them using IR remote, phone app or my laptop. If the Squeezebox had a video out, it would be cool for it to display on my TV a now playing screen with things like cover art and metadata (more than can be scrolled on the SB2 display, for example). Obviously the Squeezeboxes don't have video out, but what if the TV were attached to the server? Or if the server could send this now playing info to a remote media streamer (I have an Xtreamer attached to the TV) or something? -- IMGrant IMGrant's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=29979 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Hi yhatware. I think you posted on the wrong thread so we should not go on here. Could you please contact me on support(at)squeezePad.com I need to know: - what version of the squeezebox-server have you installed? - how did you save your coverart (embedded in the files I guess?) - do you have a parallel folder.jpg or similar? - maybe you even can send me one sample file? Guess this can be resolved easily once I am able to reproduce what you are seeing. -- bluegaspode Big Screen for great Boxes available now at your AppStore: *'Squeezebox + iPad = SqueezePad ' (www.squeezepad.com) *! Want to see a Weather Forecast on your Radio/Touch/Controller ? => why not try my 'Weather Forecast Applet' (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=73827) Want to use the Headphones with your Controller ? => why not try my 'Headphone Switcher Applet' (http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67139) Setup: 1x SB-Controller+Receiver (Duet), 1xSB-Boom. 2xSB-Radio Server (7.5.1) running on SheevaPlug (Ubuntu) with attached Western Digital MyBook Essential. bluegaspode's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31651 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I used Squeezepad a lot. Recently wend over to iPeng. I do have a lot of 7" singles in my iTunes library. When I play them ( they are grouped as a collection f.i. Favourite Single Tracks) you see the cover of the first track in the collection. I want to see the cover of the track currently playing. I also have some Greatest Hits albums of one artist or bsnd. I grabbed all the covers for the separate tracks which are of course also 7" tracks. Same problem here. Thevcover of the first track on the album is showed. IPeng does this correctly. I like your interface more than iPeng's but this feature wins. Please do something about it. -- Yhatware Yhatware's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=41758 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? I browse via the SB3 and Boom interface, I also do text match search in the web browser and I use the fast iPeng remote to flip through artists and albums. I sometimes use SBS random play feature, but I think that musicIP is the best thing about my digitized collection, so I let it guide me through my collection. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? I discover music through friend recommendations in web forums and music services like last.fm and blip.fm. This feels more personalized to me. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? I'd like a "You might also like" feature (a la last.fm) 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? I really like my iPeng remote. I'd love to have some sort of FLAC store integration that D/L's directly into my predefined library structure. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I'd like the ability to standardize tags (i do this manually right now). I do rate my music but not regularly enough to be super useful. It's interesting to go back and see what I've rated highly. Usually it's music that musicIP has shown me from my collection that I did not know was there, so I can easily return to it later. I also like the Last.fm "love this track" for the same reason. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? All my listening is scrobled to last.fm, thats my repository for taste and statistical data. -- cphan Server: VortexBox Appliance v1.4 Remote: iPod Touch running iPeng 1.2.5 Living room: SB3 >> Alesis M1 Active MkII Bedroom: Boombox cphan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14522 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Erland in bold:- 1. HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY? Artist -> Album or Composer -> Album (using multi-library and custom browse) - WHICH TYPE OF REMOTE/INTERFACE DO YOU USE ? DIFFERENT FOR DIFFERENT SITUATIONS ? Mostly Controller, sometimes iPeng, rarely web interface. - DO YOU FIND MUSIC THROUGH STATISTICS BASED BROWSE MENUS ? (RATINGS, PLAY COUNTS, HISTORY) No. - DO YOU FIND MUSIC THROUGH SMART PLAY LISTS BASED ON STATISTICS OR RANDOM SELECTION OR OTHER KIND OF AUTOMATIC MIXES ? Occasionally random play list, just for fun. - DO YOU USE ALBUM ART WHEN SELECTING WHAT TO PLAY ? No. - DO YOU TYPICALLY START SEARCHING/BROWSING FROM AN ARTIST, ALBUM OR TRACK AND WANT TO FIND SOMETHING RELATED TO THAT ? I sometimes wish I could find related tracks, artists, composers or musicians to tracks I am listening to. But usually I am just happy to listen to what I have chosen. 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? If I already know what music I want then I first use Napster to listen and only add it to my library if I like it enough to want "hi-fi" quality or if I want to take it out on my iPod. - HEARD IT ON THE RADIO ? Definitely. - WHERE DO YOU START WHEN SEARCHING ? TOP CHARTS ? GENRES ? SIMILAR ARTISTS ? - DO YOU USE SOME WEB SITE WHEN SEARCHING OR DO YOU BROWSE SOME MUSIC STORE DIRECTLY ? - ARE YOU USING THE COMPUTER, YOUR SQUEEZEBOX OR SOME OTHER DEVICE WHEN SEARCHING FOR NEW MUSIC ? - DO YOU PREVIEW THE MUSIC BEFORE PUCHASING ? If I only have a vague idea of what I want, such as if I know the Genre but not the artist, album, concert or track, then I surf Spotify on my laptop sometimes in combination with Wikipedia (for more detail). - DO YOU PREVIEW IT ON THE REAL SYSTEM OR CHEEP LAPTOP SPEAKERS OR SOMETHING SIMILAR ? Headphones on my laptop. - DO YOU USE A SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICE...? Napster amd Spotify (free) - THROUGH FRIENDS ? This is probably my biggest way to find music I have not heard before. Either hearing it at a friends house or through recommendation. 3. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? Pretty happy with the way it works now, when it comes to music already in my library. If I feel my listening is getting "stale" I just put a player on random play list to see what pops up. 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? - WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO THROUGH THE SQUEEZEBOX/SBS OR ONE OF IT'S REMOTES ? - WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ON SOME OTHER HARDWARE ? A Spotify-like service on iPod Touch or via iPeng would be fantastic if it could play through Squeezebox. At the moment my workflow (playflow?) is 1. hear a track on Radio or at friends house, or read about in magazine/newspaper. 2. Surf Spotify and Wikipedia to learn more and preview snippets. 3. Once I have identified music use Napster to search and find (if available) and listen through Squeezebox. 4. If I like the music enough I will buy the CD and rip it to FLAC files for my own library. 5. WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? Absolute minimum. No time to be "anal" about it! For pop music: I fill the artist (band), album, track, year and Genre fields. I put the Artist in the Composer, Album Artist and Artist fields (on all tracks). I do not distinguish in pop music between the artist, band and composer. For classical music on my Squeezebox library: I fill the artist, album, track, composer (surname only), year and Genre fields. Unfortunately iTunes cannot handle searches by "composer" for -only- classical music, so on my iTunes library (MP3 files) I put the Composer in the Artist field, and the Artist in the notes (a real pain!). - IS THE FOLDER STRUCTURE THE MUSIC FILES ARE STORED IN IMPORTANT ? Extremely important as it allows me to convert easily from FLAC to MP3 as well as see what I have in backup. My folder structure is for pop and Jazz: Genre / Artist / Album /- tracks For instance: Dance / US3 / Hand on the Torch / 1. Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia) For Classical: Genre / Composer / Album /- tracks For instance: Opera / Verdi / La Traviata / 1. Overture - DO YOU MANUALLY ADD RATINGS TO YOUR MUSIC ? WHY ? No. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? - IMPORT STATISITCS FROM MUSICIP ? - EXPORT STATISTICS TO MUSICIP ? - IMPORT FILES, PLAYLISTS AND STATISTICS FROM ITUNES ? - EXPORT STATISTICS TO ITUNES ? - DO YOU USE SOME OTHER APPLICATION INTEGRATED WITH SBS/SQUEEZEBOX ? No to all of these. Hope that is helpful! -- TheLastMan Matt *SqueezeBoxes:* SB Duet (Controller + two receivers) *Server:* Synology Diskstation 107+ NAS (with firmware 2.3-1157) running Squeezebox Server 7.5.0 on Synology Package Manager *Network:* Netgear DG834GT ADSL modem/router, 2 x Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 as access points *Livingroom:* Receiver into Naim 4
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) Search using Lazy Search Browse via "Artist" or "New Music" - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? I use Moose, running either on my desktop or laptop computer, since Moose is much faster than the SBS web interface. I also use a Controller or the remote when a computer running is not available, i.e. in my bedroom. - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? No to the above four items - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? This is one area which needs improvement - more on this in the answer to #3 below. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? - Do you preview the music before purchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? - Through friends ? Some community site ? I have been listening to jazz for almost 40 years and I usually "discover" new music either by listening to an artist's new release, reading a review, hearing a track on the radio (the NYC area has a few jazz oriented stations) or from friends. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? I have two main issues with respect to browsing /searching: The first one is related directly to the Squeezebox: When listening to a compilation album one can find additional recordings via the artist field (more info->artist->(list of artist's recordings in library) but via song title. The second is more general: As a jazz listener I often would like to hear other recordings on which a particular performer plays on, for example when listening to a John Coltrane recording I might want to hear something which features McCoy Tyner, the piano player and at present there is no way to do this without massive amounts of time being spent working with custom tags and the like. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's remotes ? - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? I have no problem finding new music, I just have trouble affording it! 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? See #3 above - plus the following: While adding additional tags for things like other performers, producer, engineer, recording location, etc. would be helpful I would much prefer a system which could directly access the information already available on the web. In other words, a system which makes use of something like the "Credits" information found on AllMusic.com and somehow makes that information interactive. So if one is listening to a Coltrane recording one can find and select the drummer and be taken to a listing of all one's recordings on which feature that drummer. I know this would involve creating and maintaining a massive database but that's what computers are for. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - Import statistics from MusicIP ? - Export statistics to MusicIP ? - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? - Export statistics to iTunes ? - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? As I stated above I use Moose and I absolutely HATE iTunes, perhaps the worst music library management software available. General comment: I really dislike computer based "music" finding applications since they are often limited in their scope and ability to handle non-popular music such as classical and jazz. For example the iPhone app which "identifies" music can't ide
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
vagskal;573816 Wrote: > Great! I will have a look at the new version. As you helped in the development/testing you qualify for a free licence too :) -- jezbo jezbo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9888 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
vagskal;566553 Wrote: > I loved muso and the way it sorted artists/albums and displayed > automatically information on biographies, reviews and similar artists > (from LastFM and Amazon), but development unfortunately seems to have > stopped. Muso development never stopped permanently, the beta version paused once or twice but it was never my intention to ditch it. In fact a production version has now been released. -- jezbo jezbo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9888 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Extremely late to this thread, but here are my answers... > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) Usually artist -> album if I know what I want. New Music if I know it was recently added. Sometimes I will use a custom browse menu of 50 random albums if I'm in the mood for an album, but can't decide what. > > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? iPeng most often, everywhere around the house. If I'm using my iPod touch for reading or gaming, then I use either the SBC (in bed) or a Harmony remote. Generally only use front panel or IR for skipping songs, changing volume, and power. If I'm at the computer where I have the SB Touch, I use the WebUI. > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) Yes, songs rated 3+ not recently played, for instance. > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? Spicefly Sugarcube and Dynamic Playlists based on some larger playlists (fast songs, slow songs, etc.) > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? Not so much, but it does make it easier to skim the long list when I use the 50 random albums custom menu. > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? > - Heard it on the radio ? Never OTA radio. Sometimes TV or movies. Slacker radio. > - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar > artists ? Similar artists. > - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music > store directly ? I use to use lala.com a lot before Apple buried it. Now it's mostly Amazon or Last.FM. I sample a lot of the music Amazon puts on sale and buy what's cheap if I think I might like it. For my favorite artists, I add them on Facebook to keep up with when they have new music coming out. I get some new music email newsletters. > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? Usually the computer to seek out new music I might like. Sometimes I'll tune to Slacker or Last. FM recommendation on the Squeezebox when I want to hear something new to me. > - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the > real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? I prefer to preview music before purchasing. Used to use Lala.com for sampling the full albums. Now I don't know any free sites where you can sample the full albums, but I still like to preview the music. I generally do so using headphones on the computer. > - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying > albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in > by browsing the service ? > - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? > - Through friends ? Some community site ? I don't subscribe to any services. I download a lot of Amazon samplers and sometimes find new artists through those after sampling more of their work. I post some of my listens on Facebook and Twitter and sometimes a friend will recommend other music through those sites. 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? I like mixes, but not so random as what Squeezebox Server provides on its own. Searching/browsing by tempo is missing currently (slow songs, upbeat songs, etc.) 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? > - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? Recommendations based on my listening history would be great. I discovered a ton of music I now love when I first learned of Last.FM. I used the last FM website for exploring the recommendations, but it would be nice to sample music more on the Squeezebox itself. 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS > today ? New music goes into a review and rate playlist and once it is rated I have to move it out of there. I add BPM and Intensity tags via J River Media Center and this puts the songs into playlists based on tempo. I try to add lyrics to the tags as much as possible. I also add a special tag for music my husband likes. He rarely uses the squeezebox system but when we are listening together it allows me to more easily play a mix that we can both enjoy without too much skipping songs. > - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? Not so much. I have it all dumped into the music share of my Home Server in folders by artist.
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
So some questions to guide the discussion: 1. HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY ? I choose albums and tracks explicitly. Mostly I browse by Artist. I hardly every use static or dynamic playlists. Our music collection has expanded considerably recently with stuff added by the children. Mostly this is stuff that neither I nor my wife would ever want to listen to, and it makes the browsing experience much harder because of all the clutter. I mean, these kids don't even rip or download whole albums - just the tracks they like - where does that come from? :-) Anyway, some means of partitioning this stuff off most of the time - not all of it all the time as they do also like good stuff - would be useful. Mostly I use the Controller as the UI, but sometimes a laptop (I work in IT so I tend to avoid computers at other times) and sometimes ipeng. 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? 1. Listening to the radio. Radio Paradise and BBC Radio 2. RP is an especially good source. 2. By using the Related Artists feature on Rhapsody or Michael's Biography plugin 3. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? - WHAT KIND OF FUNCTIONALITY IS MISSING TODAY RELATED TO BROWSING ? - WHAT KIND OF FUNCTIONALITY IS MISSING TODAY RELATED TO SEARCHING ? Some way of splitting the library into multiple, possibly overlapping collections, so that I can start by restricting the universe in which I am browsing. I don't search much but mostly I find it works fine. 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? - WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO THROUGH THE SQUEEZEBOX/SBS OR ONE OF IT'S REMOTES ? - WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ON SOME OTHER HARDWARE ? This is mostly the same as Q2. If I could do it though an SB remote/ipeng and get new stuff downloaded to the library then that would be ideal. I don't do this because most of the stuff that might be available that way, as far as I can tell, is not encoded at high enough quality 5.WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? I find tag management very tedious. I just do a bit of cleaning up from time-to-time and add gain tags. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? No -- awy awy's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7480 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Philip Meyer;572089 Wrote: > > I can see problems with this approach: > > 1. Not all music is in LastFM's library, and scrobbling is also > dependent on matching tags. > 2. New music added to SBS library won't have been scrobbled, and thus > never selected in a dynamic mix. > 3. LastFM's recommendation engine often seems to choose from a very > limited sub-set of artists. Fair enough, it's not perfect, but the quality of your tags and therefore database will always have an influence on using your library. However, it's not correct to suggest that new music that has not been scrobbled would not be added. The system would try to add whatever artist/track recommended by LastFM regardless of if it's in your library. The plug-in would then determine if the suggestion is in your library. If it is, it would add it to the dynamic playlist, if it's not, it would pick a track from the same artist, and if that's not possible, it could query LastFM again for another suggestion. I am not suggesting that we only use LastFM, but know of LastFM and it has served me well in the past. It also has the API we would need. If another service has something to offer, by all means, let's look at it. My two cents ... and my attempt at continuing this conversation ... and inspiring Erland to do his magic . -- Berg Berg's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=284 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
>What I like most about this is that based of your listening history and >scrobbles to LastFM, the plug-in queries LastFM's recommendation engine >and selects music from your own library. > I can see problems with this approach: 1. Not all music is in LastFM's library, and scrobbling is also dependent on matching tags. 2. New music added to SBS library won't have been scrobbled, and thus never selected in a dynamic mix. 3. LastFM's recommendation engine often seems to choose from a very limited sub-set of artists. ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Berg;572008 Wrote:
>
> I would love to see this type of functionality available to SqueezeBox
> !!!
>
> Does that fit in your idea ?
>
In my opinion it fits perfectly.
--
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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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Oh Erland, how exciting is this :) So, first, let me say that I have been using a Slimp3 or SqueezeBox devices for a long time and have a large music collection (72000 + tracks of all kinds of music) and have been trying to find the perfect system for some time. During this quest, I have seen and played with a lot of options and there is nothing I like more than SqueezeBox ... but there is one thing that I have been wanting and been meaning to look into for some time. I used for a couple of years J. River MediaCenter (have no worries, I'm back from the dark side ) and there is a few things that that community does well, but the very best plug-in they have that would go along the lines of what you are suggesting is the LastFM Auto-DJ which uses LastFM to build a dynamic playlist from your own library. This is a great way to discover, or at least rediscover your own music. Here's a short description from their own forum post located here - http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?PHPSESSID=c19d3c1be0d7c1a4056d86ab6029f2ee&topic=47579.0 "Looks up the currently now playing track on lastFm and searches for similar tracks that are in the music library. Based on the track list returned, this is cross referenced with the MC database and then recently played tracks are removed. The tracks are weighted according to the match given to them by Last.Fm and track is selected. Tracks by artists who have recently been played can be weighted negatively, preventing them being selected unless there are no other tracks. A track will be added to the Now Playing list that is hopefully similar to the last track played. This operates on the last track on the now playing list, hence instead of looping or stopping, a new track will be added." What I like most about this is that based of your listening history and scrobbles to LastFM, the plug-in queries LastFM's recommendation engine and selects music from your own library. The source code is even posted which might be a good starting point. Of course as a non-coder, this seems like a monumental task to recreate this from SqueezeBox but it might not be as difficult if the original code is clean and efficient ... yeah, right :) I would love to see this type of functionality available to SqueezeBox !!! Does that fit in your idea ? -- Berg Berg's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=284 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Hi Erland. Here's how I do it: 1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) I have different libraries per type of music: Classical, Jazz, Blues&Rock, Other (mostly Pop). Within each library I usually search by Genre (for example "Jazz Piano" within the "Jazz" library) then Album (use of "shallow" menu), or first Artist and then album. I like to vary the sort options to discover new things, for example by release date or alphabetically. - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? iPENG on my iPod touch (originally I purchased the iPod just for the iPeng although since then I have discovered a myriad of other uses). - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) No, never. - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? No. - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? YES, album art is very important to me. - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? Yes. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? Internet radio. - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? Genres and similar artists. - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? Most of the time directly - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? My computer - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? I preview it wherever I can prior to purchase, however I wont add it to my library until I have heard it on the real system. - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? No. - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? Not really. - Through friends ? Some community site ? Sometimes. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? I would like more sorting options, easy to apply. Maybe also a randomize function allowing to change from time to time the order of the albums (like they do in some stores). I would also like to see more album art from my iPeng, if more jpegs are available (like you do when you go to a store). - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? Google-like functionality (i.e. find items that are not exactly spelled in that way etc.) 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? Havent thought of it. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? I dont use additional tags because I need to keep compatibility with my iPod, since I am using it in my car. Classical music is a pain, as documented in many places. - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? Yes, for finding the original music file in windows. - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? No. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? No -- Aristides Aristides's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=40096 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Here is an idea that would be neat to see; a playlist generator that uses the Last.FM 'top tracks' for an artist. The idea being that you could (in trusting in the wisdom of crowds) quickly get the most popular tracks for a number of new / unknown artists in a new playlist. I normally use Last.FM, Pandora and Amazon to discover new bands and often it is a challenge evaluating and giving a fair hearing to all the new music I have. I wonder if this is possible - I would be interested in using such a feature. -- KDCgrp KDCgrp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19889 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. At the moment I tend to browse albums or artists. However with a large collection one tends to get not too far through the alphabet. By genre tends to be too specific. 2. Reviews in newspapers or aeroplane inflight channels have given me some interesting finds in the past. Also, listening stations in music stores. 3. A random browser. i.e. picks a list to browse at random or maybe based on played statistics (e.g. not played recently). 4. When listening to internet radio, a way of recording the tracks that interest me. At the moment if something grabs my attention I put it on my amazon wish list. -- aapthorp aapthorp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4739 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > > So some questions to guide the discussion: > > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? > - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or > track and want to find something related to that ? > > > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? > - Heard it on the radio ? > - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar > artists ? > - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music > store directly ? > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? > - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the > real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? > - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying > albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by > browsing the service ? > - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? > - Through friends ? Some community site ? > > > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? > > > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? > - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? > > > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS > today ? > - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? > - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides > those supported by SBS ? > - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? > > > 6. > Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make > it easier to find interesting music ? > - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? > - Export statistics to MusicIP ? > - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? > - Export statistics to iTunes ? > - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? > > > 1. i use custom browse with the artist per letter option and include/exclude genres. Occasionaly i use the lazysearch plugin. I also use the dynamic playlist plugin to just let it play music with a certain genre(s) I used to use the MusicIP and Sugarcube plugin and i loved that combination, however i switched to a sheevaplug as a server and MusicIP is not supported for the sheevaplug (I really miss this option) Just using the remote control. 2. via newsgroups on the internet 3. i'm happy with the functionality provided by the plugins i use 4. happy the way it is now, maybe it would be nice if more musicservices would work in europe. however i would not take a paid subscription. 5. i organize files in /genre/artist/album/track whereby genre is just classical/jazz/rock/children i add the MusicIP tag with genpuid, hoping that one day i can start using it again. 6. don't use statistics or ratings don't use itunes either i have about 17000 music tracks and play them via a SB3, couple of Booms and a Radio. -- raven22 Setup: 1 SB3, 3 Booms and 1 Radio. Server: SheevaPlug running SqueezePlug V2, SBS 7.6.0, Tonido (streams .flac in webbrowser) raven22's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16511 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I've decided it's time to start doing something based on this thread, so
now we need people with development experience.
If there is anyone reading this thread that have development
experience, is inspired and want to participate more actively to
realize some of the things mentioned in this thread, I'd like you to
send me a PM or mail. If you use mail, please write your forum account
name in the mail so I know who you are on these forums.
I'm especially interested in someone that have experience of GUI
development in some language supported on both OSX, Windows and Linux,
I would prefer something more modern than perl but if you only know
perl that's fine too. I feel that experience of designing GUI's are
more important than actual development experience, so don't hesitate to
contact me if you have only worked with GUI design but don't have any
experience with development.
I'm also interested in someone with huge experience of classical and/or
jazz music that likes to participate more actively in the process, maybe
not as developer but as someone who can look at draft ideas of
information models and do analysis regarding which search/browse
functions we need to support for these music categories.
Hopefully there will be a huge interest to participate and in that case
we might not involve everyone now immediately, we need to setup some
rough design/architecture first, but I can promise that we will do our
best to make sure to find some part eventually to everyone who is
interested to participating as developer.
To everyone else who doesn't have development experience, keep posting
ideas in this thread that would improve the music discovery experience
and we will pickup all the good ones that are realistic to implement.
Eventually we will get to a beta testing phase and then we need all of
you as beta testers.
To everyone that haven't posted an answer on the questions in the
initial post in this thread, please post your answers.
--
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))
erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910
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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) Don't do this often but its 50/50 browse via artist then album then track or search via track title > > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? > Usually use old-fashioned remote and web interface when I listening & working on laptop at the same time (web interface is nicer to use) > > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) > No > > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? > VERY much so. More or less all my music listening is via a custom sql playlist I've created which plays songs so that it prioritises unrated, higher-rated and least-played songs. I manually rated songs as each played over a long time. I find this an excellent "one-button" to make sure you mostly listen to your favourite music and newer music but also allows you to occasionally hear everything. This is the "killer app" for me. > > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? > No > > - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or > track and want to find something related to that ? > No 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? > > - Heard it on the radio ? > Definitely - specialist shows > > - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar > artists ? > don't usually search for new music like this - but the odd time via similar artists: album/bio info would mention similar - recommended - artists > > - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music > store directly ? > emusic.com, itunes > > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? > computer only > > - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the > real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? > I do - just on laptop/desktop speakers > > - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying > albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by > browsing the service ? > don't use any subscription service - not in that sense anyway. Subscribe to emusic so I buy albums I want from that. Otherwise buy from itunes. If neither of those have it, I buy the CD from play.com or somewhere & rip it. > > - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? > - Through friends ? Some community site ? > answered above more or less > > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? > I'd like the custom sql playlist I mentioned above to be automatically supported: a dynamic playlist can be generated by setting a few sliders (for rating, play count and time since last played) for how important each of these characteristics are when selecting which tracks to play > > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? > - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? > I'm not really concerned about making it that easy to link SB to searching for new music - what I would really like is if buying & adding new music to your library was easier. Right now there's lots of steps: download/rip, convert to desired format, tag, rate, etc. Ideally a buy-and-add single step would be available. (Maybe a global configuration that says what target format you want your library in & where tags should come from) > > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS > today ? > - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? > - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides > those supported by SBS ? > - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? > auto-tag from web using MediaMonkey no non-standard tags folder structure is important: artist/album manual rating is v. important so I can listen more often to music that I consider to be good > > 6. > Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make > it easier to find interesting music ? > - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? > - Export statistics to MusicIP ? > - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? > - Export statistics to iTunes ? > - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? > Don't do any of this. Thanks, Brian. -- briank -
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY ? About 50% of the time, I know what album I want, and get there via Artist/Album. If it's a "various artists" compilation thing, I go directly to it by Album. Perhaps 40% I use a playlist. Most of my playlists are created with a specific mood and/or genre in mind, so I can pick one that suits me pretty easily. On rare occasion I use the standard Random play by genre. Even more rarely, I use the Search, if I want to find all the different recordings of a particular song or something like that. The other 10% or so of my listening time is not from my own library, but from the Internet; almost all of my "outside" listening is from XM or Pandora. I have Duets and a Boom, and I also use SoftSqueeze on occasion, usually with wireless headphones when I'm not near any sort of receiver. I use the Controllers to control the Duet Receivers and SoftSqueeze, and sometimes for the Boom, but usually when I'm using the Boom it's near enough that I can use the front panel or the IR remote. It's very rare for me to use a browser to control my Squeezeboxen. If I'm sitting at a computer anyway, I am more likely to use J. River to play music directly on the PC, say in my office. To browse, select and play on the SB devices, the Controller is a much better way for me to go. I don't use any custom add-ons for browsing, and haven't felt a need for them. I know my library pretty well, and can find what I want very quickly using the standard My Music browse features. (My library is just over 1000 albums. I can see where a much larger library might necessitate other search/browse options.) 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? I discover new music primarily from three sources: Stuff I hear on Pandora or XM, and recommendations from friends. On rare occasion I might listen to samples from an album recommended by Amazon. I don't listen to broadcast, commercial radio stations, either over the air or on the Net. My wish list of albums I haven't yet got generally numbers around 250, so there's not much danger of running out of ideas for new music for awhile. I've pretty much always heard at least a track or two before I buy an album. This doesn't always guarantee I'll like the entire album once I get it, but I can usually be sure I'll like at least some of it. 3. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? I'm very satisfied with the standard browse/search/select funtionality in the existing Controller and Boom interfaces, so I haven't really felt like I'm missing anything. If I happened to read a suggestion for a new method that I thought I might find useful, I'd express an interest, but since I have never even felt the need to install any custom search/browse add-on, I must be pretty happy with the way it works out of the box. 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? Having such a large backlog of music I still don't have, I'm not hurting for new sources of music. 5. WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? When I rip a CD, I always check the tags dbPoweramp grabbed. About 98% of the time, I have to fix spelling, punctuation, genre or something. I'm very meticulous and fussy about my tags. I've never found a need to use any non-standard tags or anything that SBS doesn't currently handle. I suppose the only area that I think could use improvement is in the classical stuff, but I can't imagine that ever getting a wide enough user base to make it much of a priority. Folder structure is important only to me, obviously not to SBS (well, apart from the all-under-one-master-folder restriction, which has never been a problem for me). I organize the folders in a fairly standard way (MainFolder/FileType/Artist/Album), to make it easier for me to find a particular album or song from outside of SBS. I do keep my FLAC (vast majority of my library) separate from MP3 stuff, and I also keep a parallel library of all the FLACs converted to MP3 for use in portables and so forth. I don't do ratings; I know what I like, and if I don't like it, it probably isn't in my library anyway. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? Don't use statistics or ratings. I do use J. River as a player on PCs, and it uses the same library that SBS does. It keeps in sync via its normal scans. I also use it pretty much exclusively to create and maintain playlists, which I then export as M3Us, run through a text editor macro to convert the path structure, and save into the SBS playlist directory. Then I just do a rescan of the playlists in SBS. -- Dogberry2 Dogberry2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18883 View this thread: http://forums.slimd
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. HOW DO YOU FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY ? Usually My Music > Albums (which are sorted by Artist / Year / Albums, so it's a lot like browsing by artist), and sometimes My Music > New Music. - most of the time I use the SBC, but sometimes also web ui and player menus (be it Boom's front panel, Touch's touchscreen, or IR remote). - I don't use ratings, play counts, history at all, and don't really have any interest in doing so - I use MusicIP _a_lot_ - I do use album art when selecting, mostly because it's faster - Yes, often I search/browse by artist and want to find something related to that 2. HOW DO YOU USUALLY FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO GET BUT CURRENTLY DON'T HAVE IN YOUR LIBRARY ? - friends, music press, Internet radio, Pandora, Napster, Last.fm - Artist stations, similar artists, etc. - I use Napster and Amazon web sites. I also often read up on artists at allmusic.com - I use both SBs and computer to search for music. - When possible I "preview" music on Napster, on my main systems, for days or weeks before purchasing. In this case "preview" means playing the whole album, not only clips. I buy the CD when it's something I think I'll want to keep, at true CD quality. 3. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE ABLE TO FIND MUSIC IN YOUR OWN LIBRARY IN THE FUTURE ? I don't use search much in my own library. It's only 6k tracks, and I know most of what I have. What I've forgotten I usually rediscover via MusicIP random playlists. What browsing functionality is missing today? A "similar artists" or "similar music" type function that pulls up a list of suitable albums and artists. Something like MusicIP that generates a browse list instead of a playlist. That would be great! 4. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND NEW MUSIC YOU LIKE TO BUY/GET IN THE FUTURE ? Through SB, computer, reading reviews in newspapers and magazines, friends' recommendations. On SB, it would be great to have a similar artists type function that would work both within my library and outside my library. I think Pandora (seed it with something from your library), Napster automix, last.fm, and probably Rhapsody do this pretty well (though each slightly different), so for SBS it would require doing something better. 5. WHAT KIND OF TAGGING/MANAGEMENT DO YOU DO ON NEW MUSIC YOU ADD TO YOUR LIBRARY TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND STUFF LATER ON ? The tags I add are "handled" by standard SBS, but they aren't part of standard browsing. Such as COMPOSER, though I don't think I'd use that much. - I almost never use BMF, but folder structure is important to me for overall file management. - I don't use Custom Scan. I don't manually add ratings because they would change too much over time, it's too much work, and it's not very helpful to me at all. 6. DO YOU SYNCHRONIZE THE DATA IN SBS WITH SOME OTHER APPLICATION TO MAKE IT EASIER TO FIND INTERESTING MUSIC ? I don't use any play statistics. I do use MusicIP fingerprints extensively. -- aubuti Nothing high-end, but music anywhere I want it, and it's '100% wind powered' (http://www.cleancurrents.com/). MSI Wind desktop (Ubuntu 10.04) feeding: Living room: SB Touch + SBC > NAD C325 BEE > Vandersteen 1; Kitchen/Dining: SB2 + SBC > AudioSource Amp100 > 2 pair of Polk RC60i; Basement: SB2 > JVC JA-S44 > ESS Tempest LS8; Bedroom: Boom and SB Radio; Backyard deck: Duet > AudioSource Amp100 > Polk Atrium 45; Kid's bedroom: SB3 > Klipsch ProMedia 2.0; In limbo:SBR http://www.last.fm/user/aubuti/ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
The following 2 topics are on top of my whishlist: 1) Much better way to create and manage playlists 2) Handling of more than one library (ex.: separation of pop and classic) -- boxowl SB3 Classic Squeezebox server on Ubuntu 9.04 server boxowl's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16016 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Thinking a while about this, I'd like 2 things most: Getting targeted recommendations from friends. Not just knowing what we each like and are listening to, but being able to send a message saying, check this out. They know what I like and I know what they like. Friend recommendations are by far the most likely way to get me to stop and listen carefully to something new. Easy personal ratings. Every playlist I have has either a rating filter or specifically looks for unrated songs so I can make them show up in the rated playlists. -- mikelee999 mikelee999's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17310 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Further info/ideas... I often play albums, but get to an album to play in different ways. eg. either by browsing new music, artists, genres, years. By listing random songs/albums and choosing an album to play based on something from the results. Trackstat/Dynamic Playlist provides a lot of good ideas for finding music to play, but not in hierarchical structures, so navigating through the lists is awkward. I have built some custom menus, but often have different ideas for how I'd like to find something. eg. "List only albums that I haven't listened to in over a year", etc. I often want to browse music from players in new ways, but would have to go to web UI to configure a new menu first, so I find alternative ways based on what I have already configured. Instead, I'd like something a bit more easy to access from player UI's. e.g. to be able to a) select a sub-set of music (i.e. choose 0, 1 or more filters) - such as a particular music library, or something like custom skip filters, or TrackStat menus. b) choose a hierarchy for browsing the results. eg. any combination of artists, genres, years, age since adding music to library (in months or weeks), rating, play counts, etc. Could be one level or multiple levels deep. Maybe not totally dynamic; could pre-create a list of possible hierarchies to choose from. c) choose a sort order at each hierarchy level. d) store configured menus as menus for easy access next time. i.e. I'd see it working with some form of context menu. eg. under "My Music > Browse", have a list of previously created menus. Within a menu, use context menu options to change filter, hierarchy and sorting (for the current level in the hierarchy). Changes would be persisted for this menu, and provide a way create a new menu (perhaps menu name could default to name of " by ", but allow it to be manually renamed). Example filters: No filter Not Played albums Albums with 5* Rated songs Added to library within last n months/weeks by Music Library Not compilations/guest appearances Example hierarchies: artist>album genre>album genre>artist>album year>artist>album Example sort orders > Title Date added Year Rating Last played Should be much easier to configure than Custom Browse menu editing, and accessible on any player. ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) A VARIETY OF WAYS REALLY, YEARS, NEW MUSIC, ARTISTS, DECADES, RANDOM MIX ETC. - REALLY DEPENDS WHAT MOOD I'M IN, PROBABLY NEW MUSIC & CURRENT YEAR ARE THE MOST USED - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? iPENG IS MY MAIN CONTROLLER, PLAYER INTERFACE (RADIO, BOOM & DUET) THEN THROUGH PC INTERFACE WHEN ON THE COMPUTER (LIKE NOW!) - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) YES MY GIRLFRIEND & I HAVE A 4&5* PLAYLIST OF ALL TYPES OF MUSIC THAT WE LIKE, WE RATE TRACKS AS WE GO AND ITS A GREAT WAY OF GETTING A RANDOM PLAYLIST ON THE GO WITH SONGS WE LIKE (ALTHOUGH SOME DEBATE ON WHAT TO RATE TRACKS AS!!) - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? I HAVE MUSICIP INSTALLED BUT DIDN'T USE IT AS MUCH AS I THOUGHT I WOULD, I THEN HAVE SMART PLAYLISTS FOR 70S, 80S, 90S ETC. - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? YES - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? NOT REALLY, HAVE A WIDE VARIETY OF LOOKING FOR MUSIC 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? OCCASIONALLY, I LISTEN TO BBC 6MUSIC AND GET TIPS FROM THAT - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? I TEND TO GET A LOT OF NEW MUSIC FROM MUSIC MAGS AND WEBSITES ALSO TIPS FROM FRIENDS - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? AS ABOVE, GO TO SITES LIKE PITCHFORK, DROWNED IN SOUND, GIGWISE FOR NEW MUSIC TIPS - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? YES WEBSITES - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? I HAVE A NAPSTER SUBSCRIPTION AND USE THAT TO TRIAL BANDS - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? I USE NAPSTER BUT STILL BUY CDS AS I WANT MUSIC IN LOSSLESS FORMAT AND TO HAVE A PHYSICAL COPY FOR THE CAR/BACKUP - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? ANSWERED ABOVE ! - Through friends ? Some community site ? AND AGAIN :-) 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? SOME WAY OF LINKING TO MUSIC I HAVE IN MY LIBRARY TO MUSIC FROM AN ARTIST ON NAPSTER IN THE SAME PLACE, SO IF I CLICKED ON 'THE KILLERS' IT WOULD BRING UP MY LIBRARY TRACKS AND THEN LIST NAPSTER ETC. ALBUMS UNDERNEATH, SAME WITH NEW MUSIC IT WOULD LIST THOSE OUT UNDER YOUR MAIN HEADINGS RATHER THEN HAVING TO GO INTO NAPSTER. THIS IS SOMETHING THAT COULD BE SWITCHED ON/OFF AS NOT FOR EVERYONE - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? SEARCH IS FINE FOR ME 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's remotes ? YES THIS WOULD BE GOOD, SOME WAY OF HAVING MUSIC RECOMMENDATIONS/NEW ALBUMS BY ARTISTS I ALREADY HAVE IN MY SQUEEZEBOX WOULD BE GOOD. FOR EXAMPLE TODAY I BOUGHT AN ALBUM BY JOE BONAMASSA, I HAD AN ALBUM BY HIM A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK BUT MISSED HE HAD A NEW ALBUM OUT IN MARCH THIS YEAR, IF SB HAD SOME WAY OF TELLING ME THAT ARTISTS IN MY LIBRARY HAD A NEW ALBUM OUT THAT I HADN'T GOT THAT WOULD BE GREAT - ALSO TO RECOMMEND NEW MUSIC DIRECT IN THE INTERFACE - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? YES SIMILAR TO ABOVE 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I USE VORTEXBOX TO INITIALLY TAG MY ALBUMS THEN MP3TAG TO CLEAN UP - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? NONE, JUST USE PRETTY STANDARD TAGS - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? YES, ARTIST/ALBUM - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? AS EXPLAINED ABOVE, I RATE SONGS THROUGH IPENG/PLAYER TO USE IN PLAYLISTS 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? - Export statistics to MusicIP ? - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? - Export statistics to iTunes ? - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? USE MUSICIP BUT NOT AS OFTEN AS I THOUGHT, DON'T USE ITUNES OR ANYTHING ELSE -- socistep socist
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? > - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or > track and want to find something related to that ? > A few more details up on this specific question ... As several others apparently do, I often browse by "most recently added" (last day/week/month). With social networking (via Spotify and Facebook?) and an ever-changing list of artists/albums/tracks/playlists "recommended by" friends, I suspect I would like to do the same (most recentely recommended), and then use Spotify to preview. As for remote control: I use two programmable Philips Prontos, an old monochrome NEO (TSU500) for the kitchen and a newer TSU9400 for the living-room. I do not (yet) use any WiFi plugins for the remote (don't remember why not, I did try), but with this type of plugin, you can get album art on the remote while browsing. Kind of cool, but nothing I think would use actively to find what I'm looking for. I think one could have some serios fun with a programmable, WiFi-capable remote that connects to SBS, Spotify and facebook. Still, the remote might not necessarily be the key; a good SBS setup would do most of the stuff, and the remote would simpy navigate the menus. The important thing is that the menus are "remote-friendly" in the sense that you can navigate by distinct identifiers (eg. item #5 or item "XYZ")and not depend on scrolling thru visible menus with an undefined point of entry. Also, most remotes are not very user-friendly in terms of entering text. Hence I seldom use the remote to "search for" anything, rather to browse and select. Compared to a computer, the remote is the mouse rather than the keyboard. I usually do all the setup from a computer (pre-defined searches etc), and arrange the menus in a "remote-friendly" way. -- peert peert's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
And here comes the second part of my answers.
erland;566383 Wrote:
>
> 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the
> future ?
>
Spotify is a key komponent for me as it make it possible to preview a
specific track/album directly on the Squeezebox with decent audio
quality.
Information as the one provided by allmusic.com is also going to be a
critical component, specifically I'm interested in similar
artists/followers/influenced by plus the list of released albums
together with reviews.
Sites like YouTube would also be a great source for previewing if we
ignore the quality issue. Even though video is nice I'd actually be
very happy if I was just able to play the audio part of a YouTube
video. If that isn't possible, it should at least be easy to provide
youtube links in the web interface, can probably be done already today
with Custom Browse if you like to.
Anyway, I feel that there a number of different ways I'd like to search
for new music.
The passive process:
- Turn on something and let it play music you like, you would basically
just have to start the journey. Basically SugarCube combined with
Spotify, select a track you like to start with and let it take you on a
journey of artists similar to the one you selected.
- The intention in my case of the passive process isn't necessarily to
find something I like to buy, the main idea is just to make the device
play music I like which I haven't heard before.
The active process:
- The first scenario is that this starts from my own library. I listen
or browse to something I like and wonder if there is something else out
there that sounds similar to this artist/track. The perfect scenario for
me would be the Biography plugin integrated with Spotify to make it
possible to find and preview artists from similar artists, followers or
influenced by relations. I think this is the way I'm going to find most
music I want to purchase as CD's.
- The second scenario starts with browsing a top chart of what friends
or all people in my region/country listen to. In this case I'd also
like to preview it directly on Spotify or similar source that provides
streaming audio of requested tracks.
I'm a bit sceptical if any of these active processes can be performed
on one of the Logitech provided Squeezebox interfaces. The web
interface probably has the best chance since it has the largest screen.
However, my hope is that we will see this kind of functionality on the
iPad Squeezebox controller applications. SqueezePad/iPeng and similar
applications on an iPad would be perfect for this.
In addition to this I'd also like a system where I could remember
recommendations from friends when I'm not at home. For example an
iPhone app where I can note a recommendation from a friend and when I
get home I can easily find that recommendation on my Squeezebox and
preview it through Spotify plugin. It would be kind of nice if friends
could also send a recommendation directly to me and I could easily
preview it on my Squeezebox using Spotify. For anyone that wants to say
that LastFM partly does this, the issue for me is that LastFM doesn't
support streaming in Sweden.
erland;566383 Wrote:
>
> 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to
> your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ?
>
I've experimented a bit with custom tags but in reallity I only rip my
music where I adjust the genres, add musicbrainz id tags and replay
gain information.
The folder structure is not important at all but I prefer to have one
directoy per CD as this is what gives best result in SBS scanner.
I used to add ratings through TrackStat but during the 1-2 years I've
only set ratings on tracks that I don't like and want to avoid being
included in smart playlists. So it's more like I select what to skip
than specify what I like. However, as mentioned above, if I could get
reliable ratings automatically that I just could adjust, I'd love
that.
erland;566383 Wrote:
>
> 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to
> make it easier to find interesting music ?
>
I export statistics (ratings, play counts) to MusicIP
I export statistics (ratings, play counts) to iTunes to make the iTunes
smart playlists work that decides what to synchronize with the
iPad/iPhone. This was a bigger issue with a 6GB iPod mini than it is
today with the 16GB iPhone (soon to be 32GB). I'm not really using the
ratings on the iPhone they are only used to be able to select what to
synchronize between iTunes<->iPhone
--
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))
erland's
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
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 act
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
pfarrell;567182 Wrote:
> I believe that it can be implemented fairly easily with only one
> additional field in the sound/track table, and one in the album table.
> This field is just a big space for text, that we use to store the
> unique fingerprint of the song/track/album. Perhaps we would want to
> have the same field in artist/group/etc.
>
> But the key design change of SBS is that they have to stop nuking the
> DB every time they do a scan. Its critical that the DB be considered
> important.
>
> The rest of the recommendation engine can be run out of either separate
> tables or a separate schema of tables.
>
I've started a separate thread to try to take the database information
part one step further, so anyone that feels like the SBS database needs
to be enhanced to handle more information (from tags or from a locally
managed database that survives rescans) please have a look in the
following thread:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80991
pfarrell:
Since it sounds like you have already analyzed your needs regarding
this, I'm very interested that you participate in the above linked
thread. The same is also true for other people focused at classical or
jazz music as my feeling is that the missing information is mostly
related to those music categories.
--
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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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Philip Meyer;567244 Wrote: > >I may be kind of special in that while I love to see cover art, have > >tagged all my albums correctly to show it and also want to see it > while > >browsing I don't like to SELECT music based on the cover since I find > >that rather confusing (I often don't recognize music based on the > >cover). CoverFlow is something I tend to show off but never ever use. > > > See - we do have something in common after all! ;-) Unbelievable ;) Does this mean I'm getting professional in my music selection habits? -- pippin --- see iPeng, the Squeezebox iPhone remote, at penguinlovesmusic.com pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
>I may be kind of special in that while I love to see cover art, have >tagged all my albums correctly to show it and also want to see it while >browsing I don't like to SELECT music based on the cover since I find >that rather confusing (I often don't recognize music based on the >cover). CoverFlow is something I tend to show off but never ever use. > See - we do have something in common after all! ;-) ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
This is a good idea. I agree that the innovations in this area have been lacking as of late. Here are my responses: 1) As with my iPod, I navigate the browse menu via genre-artist-album. This mimics the way I would browse my CD/LP collection back in the day. I use either the Controller or the SB Touch. I also use the "New Music" menu a lot to quickly get to albums I've recently added to my library. I have used Moose in the past which I find very easy to use in this situation. The only mixing I generally use is MusicIP. Occasionally I'll add a few artists and shuffle those together. 2) For new music, I use either Pandora or Slacker. Once I come upon an artist new to me, I'll consult their available catalog from Amazon and look the band up in WikiPedia. I'll read Amazon reviews on different albums. 3) I like the idea of smart playlists that could be based on listening stats. 4) Being able to find new music through the Squeezebox would be best - why introduce another piece of hardware? 5) I keep the tags basic (artist/genre/year/album/track number/track title). I also keep my genres pretty basic, for instance I do not have my jazz genre broken down into bop, hard bop, swing, fusion, etc. One day I might change that, but for now it seems like too much of a project. I like the folder structure to reflect the tag data. When I update my tags, I also update the location using a tool like Media Monkey. 6) I used to use the iTunes plugin to update and maintain stats, but it became too cumbersome once I moved to a Linux server. I find that I'll look at my stats on Last.fm occasionally to see what I've been listening to a lot lately. I'm a big fan of MusicIP and turn to it when I'm not in the mood or don't have the time to choose music but have a vague idea of what I want to listen to. I'd love to see improvement in that area, even if it means moving to another service. -- maggior Rich - Setup: 2 SB3s, 4 Booms, 1 Duet, 1 Receiver, 1 Touch. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeBoxServer 7.5.0, MusicIP, and SqueezeSlave. Current library stats: 33,060 songs, 2,656 albums, 484 artists. http://www.last.fm/user/maggior maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > It's getting painfully clear to me that it's not the primary focus area > for Logitech, at least not during the last year or two. I don't think there's been any new functionality for browsing/playing music from your own library in a hell of a long time - perhaps the last feature added was Random Play (which is pretty much useless if you want exclude some genres anyway). > I should say that the Logitech developers are doing a great job with the > amount of resources they have access to, so this isn't any critique on > them. Absolutely - work has been done on other areas, supporting new hardware, etc. > However, if we want something to happen it feels we need to take this > into our own hands. Yes; I feel that killer SBS features are likely to come > from third-party developers/plugins only. > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > If I know what I want to play, I either browse by artist, or Search. If I don't know what to play, I start to play random music through Dynamic Playlists, so I can tailor the music to be played. Most of the time, this is using a plugin that I've developed (heavily based on the good work done with SugarCube), which produces mixes via MusicIP. I tailor MusicIP filters to play not rated music, or music not recently played. Thus I don't generally end up listening to the same music, and it encourages me to rate my library. > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) I tend to use Browse Genres depending on mood (eg. late at night, I browse ambient music only). I tend to Browse New Artists (Custom Browse menu) to find something that I've recently added. I tend to use Browse Years, but only to find something that I've ripped for this year/last year. > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? Mainly SB3 or Transporter IR Remote. It's the fastest, less irritating method. When I am at my PC, I use WebUI for browsing/playing music, and occasionally SB Touch for controlling playback (pause/resume, power off, volume control) of a Boom player in the same room. > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) Yes, but I am still in a ripping/rating phase with my library, so I tend to find unrated/new music, unless I'm in the mood for something I really like (eg. rated 4-5) - I never search for average or worse music, but those rating are used to prevent playback during random play. I play lower rated music only if I select to play a full album (eg. don't skip the average tracks). > Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? No. Artwork only used for > display during playback. > Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track > and want to find something related to that ? I often browse to something else based on a track that is currently playing. Eg. play random tracks, then when something is playing that takes my attention, I'll browse to music related to it (eg. play the whole album, or play another album by the same artist). > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? I discover new music via podcasts (through iTunes->iPod Nano playback), Last.fm radio, rss newsfeeds from blog sites. I don't often listen to normal radio stations. I try out music from artists I'm not familiar with via Spotify, MySpace, last.fm. > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? iPod Nano at work (podcasts) or my PC for Spotify, Last.fm or MySpace. Occasionally use SBS for Last.fm (search similar artists, etc). > Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? For some quite specific music tastes, eg. for Electronic Music/Ambient music, I use Electro-ambient Space (http://www.electroambientspace.com/). > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? > Search for similar music to current selection. eg. use MusicIP to find music that is like a selected artist/album/song. For example, I like to play albums. I may play random songs, until something I like plays, and then play that album. I'd like to pick an album, and browse music that is similar to this, then play a specific album from the list. > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > I add some custom tags: original artist, tags related to live music, such as the specific performance date, venue, location. I'd like some additional tagging, eg. to identify different mixes of songs, albums. i.e. where I have different versions of the same music, eg. an original album and a remastered album, or bonus tracks on an album. I'd like to see better handling of singles and compilat
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
audiomuze;567167 Wrote:
> SoundHound app. It's really worth downloading the freebie to check it
> out - the demo is fully functional for recognition of 5 tracks per
> month, and it'll give you a good idea of what's on offer.
>
I already have the payed version on the iPad and IPhone and like it and
I really want access to the AMG data.
The difference of SBS compared to SoundHound is that SBS have a GPL
license which I suspect can make this more complicated, there is a
reason Logitech handles all subscription based services through MySB
instead of only using GPL based SBS.
audiomuze;567167 Wrote:
>
> The point I'm trying to make is that Rovi's licensing cannot be that
> prohibitive if a user can get perpetual access for a once-off payment
> of five bucks. At the very least its worth formally investigating.
>
I suspect it's the app that gets access, not user. The SoundHound app
probably sells pretty good so the company behind it might have done a
one time investment plus having some subscription based agreement.
However, don't worry it's on the list, it's just that I've talked to
other people who have tried so I'm not too optimistic unless someone
comes forward with a lot of money, but it's definitely something that
is worth investigating. If there is anyone with experience of these
kind of commercial discussions or want to help, please send me a PM or
mail.
Anyway, let's handle future discussions regarding possible AMG
licensing through PM or mail or other private channels.
--
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))
erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124
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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - I buy/acquire new music quite often and thus use "New Music" as the most common entry. Sometimes this leads me to want to listen to other albums by the same artist for which I either drill down the menus with the remote or use iPeng. - Otherwise I often go for a specific artist or genre via the remote or iPeng. At times I use the browse mode as a sort of random function picking a letter and flicking through the artists that hit. - All music are tagged before it enters the DB and I'm especially picky about genres where I've defined a set of genres that I use. - I never search for music and very seldom browse for albums/tracks; mainly artists and genres. - I also use custom-made Dynamic Playlists when I'm in the mood to hear certain types of music (selection of genres), specific years or specific ratings. The reason for using Dynamic Playlists is that I have a number of filters for all of my playlists (above a certain rating, specific time limits, etc.). - I never do manual playlists as I mainly listens to full albums (or use Dynamic Playlists). - I do tag all my music, including album art, but have never used album art to select music. Possibly because I mainly use IR remote and iPeng to control SBS. I do not think I would ever use a cover flow functionality myself, but could see the point if guests were to flick through my collection. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - I subscribe to a few music magazines (Gaffa, Soundvenue) and use their corresponding web sites as well. Then I have a number of web sites that I browse regurlarly (Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Metacritic, etc.) and then I subscribe to a few newsletters from music stores (Boomkat, Bleep) and lastly I subscribe to eMusic. Some music I buy because it's a certain artist, most because it was somehow recommended by one of my 'trusted advisors' and some because of random browsing looking for "similar artists" or similar. - Whenever I come across something interesting I usually post a note to my Evernote account. Approx. once a month I review the notes and decide which to get from eMusic, buy from a store, etc. As part of the review process I sometimes 'screen' the music on my laptop, either to prioritize or to see if I like the music at all. - I only buy albums or ep's, never single tracks and rarely buy albums because I've heard a track on the radio or seen it on the charts. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - Basically I'm quite happy with the current options when it comes to finding specific artists, albums, etc. - Even though my music collection is not as big as some of the other contributors to this thread (1250 albums; 15000 tracks) there is still a lot of music 'hiding' in there that I never get to hear. I would like to be able to find "similar artists" and select music suited to a certain 'moods' - and I do not want it to be based on myself doing a lot of tagging. - If possible it would be cool if such a playlist could incorporate both my own music and tracks I do not own, e.g. provided via some of the internet services. It should be optional whether I just wanted my own music, a mix or solely new music on the playlist. - When it comes to buying new music a nice feature might be an ability to 'flag' interesting stuff (to my Evernote account ...), although my own listening habits are probably not suited for this as I do not necessarily have a remote, iPhone or computer next to me when listening. I can't imagine I would ever want to buy music via SB. I would prefer it as a separate process. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? - All music about to enter the DB is tagged/checked with mp3tag. I always modify the genre tag and check the other (standard) tags; I never add tags of my own. In my mind tagging is essential to managing your music collection. Likewise my folder structure is also very structured, possibly because I'm a bit old-school, but also because it would otherwise be hell to tag/re-tag with a tool like mp3tag. - I rate all my music manually and thus consider TrackStat my most crucial plugin. I use ratings as filter in my Dynamic Playlists and just likes the process of 'rating' my music. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - I only 'synchronize' with last.fm and this only to have the total count and the charts. I don't use any of the other features on last.fm currently. I used to use the feature of playing last.fm stations on SB, but found the qualiy dismal at times and preferred to find new music via other sources. -- mschr mschr's Profile: h
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
audiomuze;567175 Wrote: > Let me start off by saying I agree with everything Pat suggested. I believe that it can be implemented fairly easily with only one additional field in the sound/track table, and one in the album table. This field is just a big space for text, that we use to store the unique fingerprint of the song/track/album. Perhaps we would want to have the same field in artist/group/etc. But the key design change of SBS is that they have to stop nuking the DB every time they do a scan. Its critical that the DB be considered important. The rest of the recommendation engine can be run out of either separate tables or a separate schema of tables. -- pfarrell Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html pfarrell's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=200 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Let me start off by saying I agree with everything Pat suggested. Now, at the risk of repeating myself... erland;566383 Wrote: > So some questions to guide the discussion: > > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? > - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or > track and want to find something related to that ? I browse by artist, genre or style/ mood metadata implemented via your plugins. If I've a web browser in front of me (rarely) I'll sort albums by artist and browse the library by cover. Right clicking and opening a new window whilst hovering over the 0-Z navigation guides enables me to open a full web page filled with album covers and take further browsing from there. Mostly use iPeng, rarely use use IR remote (only if SBS won't behave & connect, and very, very rarely do I make use of the web interface. Don't use stat based browse windows Album art is a definite preferred means of browsing through a catalogue. I imagine this would be even more so with something like an iPad I'd love to be able to see related artists and albums in browsing if it were easily available, it would likely influence what I listen to (but limited to what's in my collection). Personally I've no interest in playing stuff off the net - that I can do when sitting in front of my pc if I'm curious about an artist. erland;566383 Wrote: > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? > - Heard it on the radio ? > - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar > artists ? > - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music > store directly ? > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? > - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the > real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? > - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying > albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by > browsing the service ? > - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? > - Through friends ? Some community site ? Radio and friends' recommendations. If I were to search it would be based on simiar artists. I often make refeence to allmusic.com. Searching is always via computer, sometimes my iphone. No interest whatsoever in searching for new music via my Squeezeboxen. Previews (rare) are always via computer or listening to something on the radio or at a friend's. No interest whatsoever in a subscription service - I have an extensive library and MusicIP/ Spicefly for that. Will often check a review, predominantly on allmusic.com, but only when I've become aware of a release and want to get some insights. Amazon's reviews are generally not helpful because they're mostly writtn by fans of the artist/ album in question. erland;566383 Wrote: > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? I want to be able to browse by artist, similar artist, genre, mood, style, theme and perhaps even user defined keywords. I generally only use search capability if I'm looking for a specific song and I don't recall what album it's on or which version is on what album. erland;566383 Wrote: > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? > - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? No interest in finding music via my listening device ie SBS/ Squeezeboxen. Still prefer to buy & rip CD's. Ditigal music storage remains problematic from a backup perspective because of the volumes involved. Clound storage and high bandwidth may change that but its another discussion altogether. Until then, CDs rule the roost for me. Would like ot be able to explore every nook and cranny of my music collection based on a proper database that has persistence. Take allmusic.com and localise it for my personal collection and you get the idea of what I'l love to be able to do in terms of navigating by remote. Other hardware is irrelevant to me. There's storage, a server and a playback device. Network attached storage and the playback device already fulfil their roles well. SBS doesn't. erland;566383 Wrote: > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you d
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;567068 Wrote: > [b]There are also commercial pretty expensive solutions like > allmusic.com which from what I've heard mostly focus on B2B > integrations besides their web site, unfortunately this will make it > harder to have any discussion with them with only community > representatives.Erland, there seems to be an overriding assumption here that > integrating something like Rovi's allmusic.com metadata is by definition an expensive exercise. I agree they're aimed predominantly at B2B, but there are real examples where they've licensed their metadata in a B2C context also. One such example is 'SoundHound' (http://www.soundhound.com/) whicxh grants you the user a perpetual license to access the underlying metadata via SoundHound for the princely sum of a once off payment of $4.99. For that once off payment you have access to song recognition technology (and it's bloody accurate), artist biography, album cover, discography, top songs, similar artists etc. etc. via the SoundHound app. It's really worth downloading the freebie to check it out - the demo is fully functional for recognition of 5 tracks per month, and it'll give you a good idea of what's on offer. The point I'm trying to make is that Rovi's licensing cannot be that prohibitive if a user can get perpetual access for a once-off payment of five bucks. I'd suggest the addition/ incorporation of allmusic's metadata, playlisting, recommendation, audio recognition technologies (incl fingerprinting) be investigated before writing off the notion. If this functionality were incorporated on an opt-in, paid basis I've no doubt many would opt-in because it would speak directly to so many of the things discussed in this thread. -- audiomuze '*puddletag: A tag editor for Linux (that happens to run on OS X)*' (http://puddletag.sourceforge.net/) audiomuze's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=33613 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
That's a very good idea... 1. How do you find music in your own library ? Use the search function (when I remember only part of the song title or artist name, because I have a lot of acid Jazz compilations..). Otherwise by Artist or Album. I use album art when selecting what to play... 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? Radio, Amazon 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - Regular expression - A side page with only Album Art (where we can click on an album art to select...) 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? It would be nice to listen to the Amazon sample track on the squeezebox in 1 click... 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? Possibility to add new tags (ASCII char string) to any tracks (e.g. relax, background, dance, salsa slow, salsa medium,...). Then this tag can be used to build playlist, or to play directly the music (a little bit like the exif tag for the photo) 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? no Thanks. Regards, Michel -- MichelM MichelM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=30769 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
TO EVERYONE THAT HAVEN'T POSTED YET: First of all, I just like to say that this thread turned out to get really interesting, so people who haven't posted yet, please post your thoughts to the questions in the initial post. If you are interested in music discovery related features, I want to hear your thoughts. If you don't want to post in public for some reason, send me a PM or mail with your answers and I'll not tell anyone who I got them from. Don't be scared of repeating what someone already has said, you don't have to read through the whole thread, just read the questions in the first post and post your answers and ideas. TO ANYONE THAT'S WONDERING ABOUT THE TECHNICAL ASPECTS: At the moment I'm only proposing that Squeezeboxes need improved features related to music discovery, the purpose is to make it more interesting to listen to your own library and make the purchase process when getting new music easier and more interesting, at least the process until you have decided what to purchase. The actual purchase (after you have decided what to get) is probably out of the scope at the moment because that involves more work than I reasonably think can be done as a community effort. The idea with this thread is to start by gathering the needs/ideas from as many people as possible without going into technical details, I plan to continue the process later on with a thread more focused at how to do. However, I'd like some more people to post in this thread first and I'd also like everyone interested in helping to digest all posts and do some analysis. Basically, let's do the analyzing of the whole music discovery area before starting to implement individual features. I would like this thread to continue being focused at how people want music discovery to work and not at technical/architectural implementation details, but I'll give the people that wonders some answers below but I don't plan to start discussing them in this thread, there will be time to take that discussion later on in a separate thread. I've thought about a total re-write of SBS several times but I don't think it's the best option. Also, I do realize that if Logitech barely is able to maintain it with 5 full time developers there is no way myself and a few other community members can do it on their spare time. Also, possibly parts might need to be rewritten/changed but definitely not everything. SBS is really good at many things it's just that music discovery related features never has got enough focus. We have a lot of plugins already so I don't think we just need another plugin, what we need is to think about is the whole music discovery functionality area and decide how to solve the different parts to make them work together as a system. Some things might be suitable as an additional plugin and other things is suitable to add the core SBS products and with the right patch it might be possible to get Logitech to add it. Other things might be suitable to add to already existing plugins. Regarding my own plugins like SQL Playlist, Custom Browse and TrackStat I think they are all starting to reach a state where a re-write is appropriate. The main reasons being that: - When I started to do them they were developed as a temporary solution until Logitech had done something permanently. - It was the first perl code I've ever written in my life which means that some parts are rather messy. - I had only use Squeezebox'es for a few weeks/months when I started to develop them, I have a lot more experience from the Squeezebox products today. What I want to be the result of all this is a more permanent solution. If possible I would also like more people to be involved in the development, working more together instead of individual developers working alone and barely talking to each other. I also have some hope that Logitech resources at least can be involved in the integration points/API's, I would prefer to do this together with Logitech even thought they probably mainly want to focus on other areas than music discovery. I can say that I've had some really positive unofficial mail conversations with some of the Logitech developers and it feels like there is a chance to do something together as long as it doesn't conflict with their own work/ideas. However, I don't think we should expect to get more than a few development/QA hours from Logitech. Still, it's really important to take advantage of their experience of the system and their knowledge about parts that they need anyway for their own focus area (whatever that is). Finally, to anyone with knowledge or resources to setup cloud based computing or central servers, feel free to start to think about what you can do in all this. My personal feeling is that there is a lot of metadata about music involved in all this that would be even better if we shared it and improved it together. There are already central solutions available for this with open API's, for example LastFM and Musicbrainz and p
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Erlang, I love your plugins. I'm not quite clear on what you are proposing here at the highest level. Do you see this as a whole suite of plugins? Or perhaps a from scratch re-implementation of SBS functionality aimed at being more collaborative? I have dreamed of a complete re-write, but stayed away as I think its a lot o work, and the released SBS is at least OK. But that said, I think there are a number of fundamental design philosophies that I would do completely differntly, starting with the assumption that the DB is fully capable of being recreated from the files of music. I want a real database of meta data on the songs, albums, styles, etc. Not this crippled "genre" ideas. I want to have a permanent handle to each and every song, so I can enhance the data with lyrics, mood, instrumentation, links to other sites with more information, etc. And of course, these days, I want to have a social recommendation system, so that people who I trust (or agree with) can lead me to new music. erland;566383 Wrote: > I'm not going to be the only one interested in this kind of > functionality. I am very interested, and I write code, speak RDMBS, HTML, etc. "How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus)" I use either the cover art or the group/artist name to navigate. I nearly always use my laptop to drive the HTML skins (except on my Touch). - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) No. - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? Rarely. - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? Often or more. - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? Start from either category (genre) or artist. Only occasionally by album. Never listen to tracks. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? Radio? There are still radio stations? I get a fair amount from reviews in paper magazines. - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? I use my laptop all the time. 10+ hours a day. - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? I very rarely preview music. "3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ?" I want to say, which albums have a particular artist as a sideman. Which have too much saxophone so I can avoid them. Which have a classic piano, bass and drums in the Jazz trio. And I really, really want "given that I agree with users X, Y, and Z, what are they buying, listening to, and liking these days? "5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ?" The whole point of having a real database is to not rely on tags. Tags can assist. But there is no way that you can keep the kinds and depth of information that I want for a real library in the tags. "6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ?" This is one of the things that I want. To do it, you have to have a unique identifier for each song/track and each album. Then you can bind the additional data to the unique id. -- pfarrell Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html pfarrell's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=200 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > > So some questions to guide the discussion: > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > I have 2xSB3, 2xDuet and 1xBoom, so browsing/searching depends on which room I'm in and what I'm aiming to do. For finding a particular track/album, I still find LazySearch easier and quicker than using the controller or even iPeng. If I'm near the laptop, I might search using the web interface. Much of the time, I use DynamicPlaylists and, after spending several years using TrackState to rate all of our music (there are close to 14,000 tracks), most of the time we listen to either a 4 star and above playlist or a 3 star and above one. I don't use album art for browsing, but the kids are always keen to grab the controller to see what's playing and they certainly use it as a cue for browsing (only one of them is old enough to read). I have MusicIP running (on a linux box), but it's been a long time since I actually made use of it. Nevertheless, when I rip a new CD, I religiously get MIP to scan it. > > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library? I very rarely listen to music on the radio (in the car I listed to CDs or more news/current-affairs oriented radio). We regularly record a weekend music show on the TV (Rage, for those who live Down Under like me) and scan through it listening for interesting new music. We also read CD and concert reviews in the paper and, particularly, the New Yorker to get ideas for new music. To sample something, I'll listen to it on Rhapsody first (if they have it, which they usually do). I used to use blip.fm a fair bit, but not lately. I also use Last.fm and do sometimes come across interesting bands on their Recommended Radio. I'm sure I could do the same with Pandora, but it's been blocked here for a number of years now. > > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? A better way to browse on the Controller would be good. With around 1000 albums and around 500 artists, scrolling through long lists is a pain. Having said that, I'm not sure what the solution would be. I still love the speed at which Lazy Search will find something specific, compared to rather painful search on the Controller. Don't have any answers though. > > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? I'd buy over the SB if I could get FLAC versions. While I'm sure I cannot really tell the difference, I still have a niggling feeling that I'm missing something if I have only mp3 format. > > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I (re)tag everything using MusicBrainz Picard and very occasionally tidy up genre tags using mp3tag. I haven't done that consistently enough to make my genre tags very useful though. I'd love a service that could retag all my genre tags (or at least add new ones, keeping the existing ones with ; separation). The only tweak I do of the MB tags is for multi-disc sets: I add disc numbers and change the album name from XXX (disc 1) to XXX for each, so that the SB treats the collection as a single album. For multi-disc albums where each disc has a name (e.g. "Pioneers", "New Generation", etc), I add an extra DISCNAME tag, but this currently is not used. It would be good to have it display on the screen/controller. While reminds me, I'd love to know how to get the controller to display track numbers in the playlist! > > 6. > Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make > it easier to find interesting music ? I used to export to iTunes, but haven't bothered since I ditched the Windows machine for a Mac. I don't think the linux MIP server keeps statistics. If it does, I haven't looked into it. -- smc2911 http://www.last.fm/user/smc2911/ smc2911's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4388 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1) I usually browse trough my music with one of our controller. I never use my classic or boom for it. It is to hard to get a view over what we got. I browse using the artist and "new music". Seldom trough genre and the other stuff. 2) We usually hear about new music on the radio or by friends recommendations. We don't use any of these new services since none of them works here in Denmark. 3) Our main problem with finding music is getting an overview over what we actually got stored. It not that we have a big library (about 7000 tracks) but when I want to find something I know we got I just browse. If I should want something it must be something like the album overview that Moose and other frontends for SBS provides, but I guess that it is hard to implement on a controller or Touch for that matter. I guess an IPAD must be more ideal for that kind of browsing. 4) Yeah it would be nice to be able to browse, buy and download new music in one single action instead of doing it in several steps as I am doing it now. 5) I use MP3TAG for handling tagging. Just to make sure that R.E.M for instance is always spelled R.E.M otherwise our library would be a mess. I don't use ratings or anything like that. If we hear a good number we simply add it to a playlist with the use of Phillip Meyers Playlist manager plugin 6) No. I use MediaMonkey but that is just for handling ipods and mobile phones. -- Kuben72 /Kuben72 2 Duet, 1 Receiver, 1 SB3 and 1 Boom Kuben72's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15308 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Triode;566832 Wrote: > Latest version of the plugin supports randomly playing all tracks from a > specific artist. You can bookmark this as a favorite and it will play > that artist including any new tracks. peert;566985 Wrote: > Awesome - must check closer! > And I just did. This is great stuff! It still leaves a bit to be desired compared to what I really want, but it takes me 70-90 % of the way (exact, scientific measure :-). Thanks! A suggestion to make this even more powerful: the ability to list a mix of artists and save the result as a favorite playlist. Very simple search expression, similar to Google search? Example: "Jon Lord" "Melissa Horn" John This would result in a playlist including all tracks with/by "Jon Lord", "Melissa Horn" and all the "John"s out there (John McLaughlin, Dr. John, etc, etc). With this ability, the Spotify plugin would add substantial value to the regular Spotify UI! Also, it is good to only include "main albums", not "appears on" (this might perhaps be a good *optional* feature in the future, but not something I would ask for). -- peert peert's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Triode;566832 Wrote: > Latest version of the plugin supports randomly playing all tracks from a > specific artist. You can bookmark this as a favorite and it will play > that artist including any new tracks. Do you want this to go through > albums in order rather than randomly? What!? Great stuff - how could I miss that! Awesome - must check closer! As for the play order, the ideal would be to have a choice - I'd like "album artists" (like Pink Floyd, Rick Wakeman or Jethro Tull) to play in order, bit "track artists" (like AC/DC, ABBA or Anastasia) to play random. But if I have to make a choice, I would choose "in order", since this is most "honest" to the artist/producer that decide the track order. -- peert peert's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
fakarava2;566983 Wrote: > Dear Erland, > I have been interested with your "classical library" features for > long. > All I actually need is a way to find and sort "work" items (albums, too > but no problem there), I don't need to go further. > Integration of online sources and so on is of no interest for me, as my > musical interest is for lossless ripped or downloaded classical music > only. > I am close to complete tagging (incl. "work", of course) of over 1 TB > of .flac files. > Best regards, Aha, give me a remote Foobar interface (for SB3 & Transporter) instead of this slow and messy Squeezebox server. -- fakarava2 "To nobody, except those who will take pleasure here" (Franz Schubert, 01/31/1797 - 11/19/1828) fakarava2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16310 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Dear Erland, I have been interested with your "classical library" features for long. All I actually need is a way to find and sort "work" items (albums, too but no problem there), I don't need to go further. Integration of online sources and so on is of no interest for me, as my musical interest is for lossless ripped or downloaded classical music only. I am close to complete tagging (incl. "work", of course) of over 1 TB of .flac files. Best regards, -- fakarava2 "To nobody, except those who will take pleasure here" (Franz Schubert, 01/31/1797 - 11/19/1828) fakarava2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16310 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) Since my library is mostly classical I mainly browse by COMPOSER and WORK. I also use the New Music menu a lot, and sometimes use the standard search menu when I can't find things easily in those menus. - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? iPeng almost exclusively. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? I'm a primitive and still prefer collecting CDs. SB can be helpful here by reminding me what CDs I already have. Having that be available offline on my iPod when I'm browsing in a store would be great. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? First, something has to be done about the speed and convenience of integrating new data into the custom browse menus. It takes over 4 hours for a scan of my library (currently about 1.3TB of FLACs). 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I redo the COMPOSER, ARTIST, CONDUCTOR and BAND tags and add the new tags listed below. The important thing is consistency. I don't want to hunt for Beethoven under "Beethoven, Ludwig van", "Ludwig van Beethoven", "L. V. Beethoven", and various misspellings. It would be nice to have this data in a database with a fully normalized schema. - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? WORK RECORDING_DESCRIPTION, a brief description of a particular recording of a WORK when the ARTIST or CONDUCTOR is not enough to distinguish one from another. FIRSTARTIST, a virtual tag, oneof (RECORDING_DESCRIPTION|ARTIST|CONDUCTOR|BAND) See also http://age.hobba.nl/audio/mirroredpages/ogg-tagging.html for a list of standard Vorbis tags. -- Daverz Daverz's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=32335 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? > -Most of the time, I use the My Music -> New Music link. I frequently add new albums to my collection, and I like to have an easy way to access the latest music I've added. When I do a search, I tend to just type into the search box. -If I'm at work, I will use the web interface or Moose (depending on how tight the network settings are at the office I'm in). At home I tend to use Moose or one of the Android-based Squeeze interfaces to control the SB. -I do use automated mixes - I use the MusicIP plugin. Unfortunately, development on MusicIP stopped a year or so ago, but the plugin still works fine and I use it to generate a mix based on a track/artist/album. That's one of my favorite uses for my SB. I think MusicIP doubled the usefulness of the SB for me - I make mixes based on it all the time, it's like having my own Pandora/Slacker/Last.FM radio right on my computer. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library ? > -Can't remember the last time I heard something new on the radio, unless it was being showcased on NPR. -I read music blogs like Pitchfork, get recommendations from my older brother (who is a new music junkie), check out the Hype Machine once in a while, and frequently ask my friends what they're listening to these days. -Tend to do all my searching for new tunes via my computer. Yes, I preview before purchasing (on my computer speakers). -I have an eMusic subscription, and use that to preview/buy most of my music. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future ? > -I would absolutely love to have a service like MusicIP, but with a real development team behind it, that can scan my music for similarities and make recommendations/mixes based on attributes of a selected track/collection of tracks/artist/album/genre/ -Once in a while I browse by genre (mostly around December when I want to find my "holiday music" tag. Sometimes I will combine that with another genre tag, so a multiple-genre browse would be nice. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future ? > -I don't really see the need to purchase through the SB as a priority. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to > your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS > today ? > - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? > - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides > those supported by SBS ? > - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? > -I use my folder structure to separate FLAC and MP3s. -I don't usually add additional tags, but I always set title, artist, album, date. -I sometimes rate songs, but I almost never remember to go back and make a playlist of highly-rated songs (though I would like to do this if it were easier to rate while playing). erland;566383 Wrote: > > 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to > make it easier to find interesting music ? > -I use the Last.FM plugin to report all playback to my last.fm profile, then I use that to analyze my listening. I would also love to be able to integrate with my MP3 player (Sansa Sandisk). Thanks, Erland! -- tfish77 Jordan Hirsch Technical Project Manager Content Management Expert http://jordan.teamhirsch.com tfish77's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1809 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Look like this Last.fm thing is kind of important to me. Never realized how much. erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? I usually go for New Music since I add about 10-15 albums a week. I mainly use iPeng on my iPhone and recently started to enjoy SqueezePad. I use statistics from last.fm to find out what I actually listened to so I can recommend to others. erland;566383 Wrote: > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? Music blogs is the new thing. I usually download to try out and buy afterwards to support the artist. I also use Last.fm a lot. erland;566383 Wrote: > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future ? I really would like something similar to Apple Genius Mix to listen to music. I would like some kind of recommendation engine. erland;566383 Wrote: > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future ? Maybe use Audioscrobbler API to find out what I should get? erland;566383 Wrote: > 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to > your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I use Tag & Rename which has always gives me great tagging. And I always rely on in-file information rather that file name and structure. Not a single untagged file on the system. I keep the covers separate from the audio file however. erland;566383 Wrote: > 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to > make it easier to find interesting music ? Audioscrobbling and Last.fm. -- markstrom markstrom's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17691 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I'm not so interested in having SBS help me discover music outside my collection, so I only comment on finding things inside my collection. Searching: when I look at local library catalogues over the internet for something more or less specific, I tend to use a "keyword anywhere search."This allows multiple keywords connected by implicit boolean AND, which can match any part of any field in the library's structured database. Of course, this is also what we use in search engines such as Google, which search the whole internet, or when searching amazon.com. This is also more or less the behavior of simple search in iTunes. I would very much like to see SBS implement this behavior, or have a plugin to SBS do it. Such searches can always be refined on the fly by adding a keyword, but I would also like the output of a search to be browsable. Browsing: Browsing is winnowing. One should be able to successively refine the output by making choices. A reasonably successful implementation of this idea can be found in iTunes column browsing setup. I think the main idea should be interactive refining or winnowing: output should always be refinable by adding criteria on the fly. -- fredgoodman fredgoodman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7616 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? I USE 2 SUB-LIBRARIES WITH SEVERAL SUB-SUB LIBRARIES, AND SEARCH WITHIN THEM BY EITHER ALBUMARTIST OR GENRE (20+ SPLITS). I SELDOM USE OTHER APPROACHES. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? - Through friends ? Some community site ? I USE WEBSITES DEDICATED TO THE TYPES OF MUSIC I LIKE, ARTIST WEBSITES, BROWSING ON AMAZON, ARTIST DISCUSSION FORUMS, AND HARD COPY MAGAZINES DEDICATED TO TYPES OF MUSIC I LIKE. INDEPENDENT MUSIC STORES ARE GONE FROM MY AREA AND THE MASS RETAILERS HAVE NOTHING OF INTEREST. SO I PURCHASE ALL MY MUSIC ONLINE-- USUSALLY HARD COPY CDS, BUT OCCASIONALLY LOSSLEES DOWNLOADS. I'LL RARELY BUY MP3 DOWNLOADS IF THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO GET THE MUSIC. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? I'D LIKE TO SEE A MORE EFFICIENT BUILT-IN CUSTOM SCAN FEATURE. THE PLUG-IN IS TOO SLOW TO DEAL WITH MY 114,000 SONG LIBRARY (8-10 HOURS TO SCAN). I'VE STOPPED USING IT AND SET UP WORK-AROUNDS (SUB-LIBRARIES, APPENEDED INFORMATION TO ALBUMARTIST TAG). STILL USE CUSTOM BROWSE (WOULD LOVE TO SEE THAT BUILT-IN AS WELL). I'D LIKE TO SEE YOUR STANDARD CUSTOM BROWSE TEMPLATES ALLOW THE OPTION TO SORT BY OLDEST RELEASE TO NEWEST, RATHER THAN ONLY BY NEWEST TO OLDEST. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's remotes ? - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? I'M OK WITH WHAT I DO NOW 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? FOLDER STRUCTURE IS IMPORTANT ONLY TO FIND THINGS FOR AMENDING TAGS, ARTWORK - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? ALBUM TYPE (ALBUM, BEST-OF COMPILATION, BOX SET, ARTIST-SPECIFIC SPLIT LIKE DYLAN'S "BOOTLEG SERIES" OR FAIRPORT CONVENTION'S RELEASES FROM THEIR ANNUAL CROPREDY FESTIVAL). I ALSO CAPTURE LABEL, ORIGINAL LABEL, YEAR MY VERSION WAS RELEASED (I USE THE YEAR TAG FOR THE ORIGINAL ISSUE YEAR). I LIKE TO SHOW THIS LATTER INFORMATION IN THE HEADERS, NOT USE IN BROWSING. - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? NO 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? - Export statistics to MusicIP ? - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? - Export statistics to iTunes ? - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? NO TO ALL -- aeo12 aeo12's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10883 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Erland, cool thread. While I believe that there's a lot that can be done I don't think it's only about user interface if it comes to discovering music with or without a Squeezebox. I'll distinguish by "discovering my own music" and "discovering new music" here: 1. OWN MUSIC For my own music I usually browse by Artist or by Album and often use Dynamic Playlists with Sugarcube to browse through that collection. That said: at 1.000 Albums (around 10.000) tracks my collection is not particularly big. I may be kind of special in that while I love to see cover art, have tagged all my albums correctly to show it and also want to see it while browsing I don't like to SELECT music based on the cover since I find that rather confusing (I often don't recognize music based on the cover). CoverFlow is something I tend to show off but never ever use. 2. NEW MUSIC As far as it goes I use Pandora and Napster a lot to discover new stuff, usually through Artist automixes. I used to use Last.fm for this but tfor some reason they only send annoying crap these days, maybe I have to clean out my account or something. I often use the TrackInfo menus to store Albums I discover and like in my profile to listen to them again later. This only accounts for around 20% or so of the new music I discover. The rest is plain old radio, which I listen to in my car so I would need some in-car-integration. And the vast majority is stuff I hear about from other people and that I usually check out on YouTube, Tape.TV or similar sites (you've got EVERYTHING on YouTube these days). IMHO, if you REALLY want to bring music discovery on the Squeezebox forward, this is the place to approach since this is where I have to switch media. The Squeezebox currently mainly lacks integration for all those media that are emerging as the new distribution channels for new music making it difficult to really use it for discovery, I don't really see how to get around that without tackling that integration issue. -- pippin --- see iPeng, the Squeezebox iPhone remote, at penguinlovesmusic.com pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I normally Browse by artist or browse by folder. When the music collections swallows speed is a bit slow sometimes. I never use search. The IR remote is superior when it comes to typing and speed. I would be interested in a iPad client with a Spotify GUI so I could easily create and edit playlist directly. And a speedier album art GUI. mvh/Harry -- Harryup Harryup's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=38464 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
peert;566798 Wrote: > I recently downloaded the Spotify plugin. I have been using Spotify free > for quite some time, but just got premium. I have been reluctant to get > premium since Spotify IMHO lacks a vital feature: the ability to create > dynamic playlists (similar to how I create them using my own > "playlister"). The Spotify Radio might be heading in the right > direction, but the selection criteria is IMO far to limited. I would > love the ability to create playlists based on the name of one or more > artists rather than selecting the artist and manually adding all > individual songs - an operation I would have to repeat whenever each > interesting artist releases a new album. The UI-based operations for > searching, selecting and playing an artist works OK in UI, but is hard > to use from the SB remote; having a choice of dynamically created > playlists to select from would be much easier (+ the list would be much > smaller). > Latest version of the plugin supports randomly playing all tracks from a specific artist. You can bookmark this as a favorite and it will play that artist including any new tracks. Do you want this to go through albums in order rather than randomly? -- Triode Triode's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Hi Erland, thanks for initiating the discussion. Currently I use your plugins to create random playlists based on various criteria and that's what I listen to most of the time. This covers my current library. If I fancy a change I will listen to albums. These are either selected via iPeng through the artist lists or else I have some playlists like 5star albums which narrow down the selection. For new music I use a number of different sources to find new music. I watch shows like Later with Jools Holland which does a good job of showing up and coming artists. I also subscribe to the Zane Lowe RSS feed which has a record of the week. Other RSS feeds I subscribe to are the new releases for singles and albums from Amazon. This help me capture new releases from artists I like. I also have used last.fm but I find I get a bit overloaded with new stuff! CW -- Chunkywizard *Squeezebox:* Boom x2 (Lounge and Office), Radio (with battery) *Server:* 7.5.0 for Windows Home Server (HP EX-490 MediaSmart Server) *Plugins:* Dynamic Playlists 2.8.1 | SQL Playlist 2.5 | Music Information Screen 4.4.6 | Custom Scan 2.7.4 | TrackStat 2.10 | Album Review 2.9.0 | Biography 2.9.0 *Remote:* iPod Touch Gen. 1 running 'iPeng' (http://penguinlovesmusic.de/2008/11/25/ipeng-application-now-on-app-store/) *Music: *'Last.fm' (http://www.last.fm/user/chunkywizard) Chunkywizard's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=25868 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the only one interested in > this kind of functionality. Oh no, rest assure you're not! erland;566383 Wrote: > > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > I use my own playlist generator (http://p2rplaylister.sourceforge.net) to dynamically generate playlists from multiple selection criteria based on ID3 tags and/or file system properties. A few typical cases are to find all music by a one or more specific artists, one or more specific genres, etc. I also generate playlists for individual artists with a filter to exclude artists with very few songs - this makes it easier to browse thru artists when I want to select some "background music" (while working or cooking dinner, etc). When I browse for music, I typically select one of these "major artists" or one of the "genre/artist-based" playlists. Now, I made my "playlister" before I was using SB, and I realize that many of these features are covered by SB. But I think it still has its value; it adds a few features that are missing (or that I didn't discover ;-), and it helps me browse my music collection when played "offline" (not using SP, e.g. from an USB disc at the office). erland;566383 Wrote: > > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? > I recently downloaded the Spotify plugin. I have been using Spotify free for quite some time, but just got premium. I have been reluctant to get premium since Spotify IMHO lacks a vital feature: the ability to create dynamic playlists (similar to how I create them using my own "playlister"). The Spotify Radio might be heading in the right direction, but the selection criteria is IMO far to limited. I would love the ability to create playlists based on the name of one or more artists rather than selecting the artist and manually adding all individual songs - an operation I would have to repeat whenever each interesting artist releases a new album. The UI-based operations for searching, selecting and playing an artist works OK in UI, but is hard to use from the SB remote; having a choice of dynamically created playlists to select from would be much easier (+ the list would be much smaller). Now, this may of course be an issue to raise with Spotify rather than on the SB forum, but you asked for opinions :-) erland;566383 Wrote: > > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > I think my current approach works quite well, but would like to see the same functionality in Spotify. If something is missing in SB, it would be the ability to create dynamic, composite "playlists" from the selection criteria you already have (or is this perhaps already possible? Haven't looked for it since I had my own approach when I first got to SB). erland;566383 Wrote: > > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > Browse Spotify for "similar artists", "other people who listened to this also listened to", "a friend suggested this music", etc. Social music networking :-) erland;566383 Wrote: > > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > No additional tags. I manually add genres since I want multiple genres (is ABBA Swedish or Pop or both?). If there is something I miss in MP3 tools in general, it is the support for multiple genres - I am VERY happy that SB supports it! I also miss a sane way of managing sort orders; the current way of tagging artist sort order is inherently flawed. I recently reported a bug/enhancement request for this: http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16416 erland;566383 Wrote: > > 6. > Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make > it easier to find interesting music ? > I have used MusicIP to add missing metadata, but it has messed up my tagging a number of times since it doesn't recognize multiple genres, and since it adds its own artist sort tag (XSOP - see forum: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80558). I am now VERY careful of using MusicIP - it does wonders for an initial tagging operation, but I would be VERY careful about using it after having done any manual tagging. I would be equally careful with any "auto-tagger". erland;566383 Wrote: > > I've probably missed a lot of relevant questions, so feel free to post > your thoughts about other areas that's involved in discovering old and > new music even if it's not mentioned in the questions above. > Thanks for a number of REALLY good plug-ins, and for taking this initiative! -- peert peert's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=19646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.sl
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Background: I have about 1700 albums and use the Squeezebox Duet to play them. I live in Australia, so services like Last.fm and Pandora are not available to me. I don't play music via internet services at all - everything I play comes from my PC's HDD. erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library? > I often download albums to hear them once or twice and decide if they're worth buying. Such "audition" albums are all stored temporarily in their respective folders under my library's "Downloads" folder, so I use the Controller's "Music folder" option to drill down to the album I want to hear. To play normal albums I usually drill down by Artist, often spinning the Controller's wheel to a semi-random part of the alphabet and choosing an artist who grabs my fancy at that moment. I also use "Random Mix>Song Mix" a lot, typically when I'm too lazy to choose an album or I just want to be surprised. I'm always discovering stuff that I haven't heard in years, so I like this feature a lot. I use Trackstat occasionally if I want to hear a random mix of just my top-rated songs (of which I've only rated about 120 tracks out of 20,000 or so.) If I have guests visiting, I pre-choose 8 or 10 albums which they might like as a starting list and store them temporarily in Favorites. I use the PC's Fishbone interface to do this, as it's faster than the Controller. Then during the visit I select albums one by one from Favorites via the Controller. I do have album art stored with every album, and I find that seeing the thumbnail of the cover can sometimes make it faster to choose which album I might want to hear. > > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library? > I don't listen to the radio at all as it takes too long to discover something I like. Instead I first search out albums of interest, then listen to samples online if possible (typically via All Music Guide or Amazon) and then try to download the full album to audition it before deciding whether to buy it. I also have an eMusic subscription (via which I purchase a set number of tracks each month) - I use the web to scan their most popular albums every month or so. To find possible albums of interest I read reviews from: Magazines (mainly Uncut) Email newsletters (All Music Guide, Village Records, etc) Some web sites of interest (eg. Americana-UK) Occasionally I get recommendations from friends. And finally every once in a while I'll search online (eg., via All Music Guide) to see if artists in whom I'm particularly interested have released new albums I'm not yet aware of. For any music which I download, I audition it on my main hi-fi speakers via the Squeezebox. > > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future? > I'm frustrated a bit with the Controller for finding music. I used to like browsing my physical wall of CD jewel boxes, and I miss that functionality. Now I keep a printed list of my last 200 or so purchases, and often browse that in preference to using Squeezebox's Controller or browser interface. I guess Squeezebox's "New Music" feature comes closest to that, but the albums displayed in New Music are in reverse chronological order, whereas I'd prefer them also grouped by Genre. I almost never use the Controller's Search function, because typing in a name via the Controller is painfully slow. > > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future? > Ideally I'd like to somehow browse new music of interest via the Controller, and hear short samples from each track. Maybe Pandora etc would suit, but they're not available in Australia. While my tastes are wide, there are many styles of music I'm not interested in at all, so searching by genre subgroups (eg. alt-country) seems to work best for me. But I'm frustrated by the sheer volume of music out there - I love to discover new artists, but 99% of the previously-unknown artists I listen to are junk (perhaps a result of every Tom, Dick & Harry being able to record an album in his bedroom these days). So something which helps me find what's most likely to be good (eg. reviews and ratings) helps me a lot. I'd also love to be able to search for specific styles, such as electric 12-string guitar bands [I grew up on The Byrds], but this can be quite difficult. > > 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to > your library to make it easier to find stuff later on? > Before I audition anything I edit its tags to get them all exactly how I want them. I use about 10 genres and no sub-genres. That way I can go straight to (say) "Country" and find all my albums in that genre. I don't use any special tags, although I do use Trackstat to rate my very favorite tracks. Folder structure is also vital to me. I have all my music stored in hierarchical subfolders. > > 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some oth
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I have a large library of mostly classical/opera, with some soundtracks, jazz, and electronica thrown in. I've ripped about half of it so far, and have approx 2 TB of FLAC files. 1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) By Album or Artist (using custom album format for classical based on composer and work; Artist includes performers, conductors, and ensembles). - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? iPeng on iPhone (preferred), front-panel controls on Boom, or IR remote for SB3. - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) No -- I find music based on whatever my mood strikes me; whether that means listening to a Ring cycle, or all my Autechre albums. - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? No - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? No - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? Start at Album or Artist, not track 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio? In the past, when I lived in LA and listened to KUSC, not anymore. - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? Branch from known composers to related unknown ones, or to unfamiliar works. - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly? Web sites, Amazon reviews can be useful to help distinguish versions or different remasterings. - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? Computer. - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar? I usually only buy based on reviews. I exclusively buy lossless, and MP3 previews are not useful to me. - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? No, but the B&W service looks interesting. - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? Various classical music blogs, subscription to Fanfare (fanfarearchives.com), reviews on music-web. - Through friends ? Some community site ? No 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing? Lacking lots of needed features needed for classical/opera, such as explicit support (tag support [incl. sort versions] and menus) for the following tags: composer, work, opus no.(or KV etc), original work name (e.g. in german or french), classical part (e.g. movement no. and description), conductor, performer with instrument, singer with voice type and role. - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching? Search by conductor, work, opus no., ensemble, performer, instrument, voice type, opera role. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's remotes? No. - What would you like to do on some other hardware? Browser the web and read e.g. Fanfare via something like an iPad, but with more resolution. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? Disknumber/Disktotal Disktracknumber (per disc, allowing track to overflow for multi-disc albums) Classical work Classical opus no. Classical composer, and composersort Classical part Classical short work (e.g. abbreviating "A-flat minor" to "ab") Classical album is synthesized from composer and work, a single CD may contain multiple albums. Classical album name (e.g. Bernstein plays Bernstein), if applicable - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? Yes. This is my primary way of recovering the location of the FLAC files relating to a single CD. - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? Stopped using custom scan due to inability to get it working just the way I needed it. - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? No ratings. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? No. I won't allow any app to touch my tags automatically. I use Foobar 2K to query my tags and find things, MP3Tag with lots of custom regexes to help automate my tagging process. -- felixh felixh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=39681 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? Mostly My Music-Dynamic-not rated (use all kind of expressions) or top rated I m listening music based on ratings and history (top rated songs not recently played) Often use the simple search feature too. Album art is nice, i love it, but i never use. :) Im a total idiot, but dreaming about a simple menu that can be able to choose some genres with top rated tracks and play them. (a+b+..n genre -top rated songs in dynamic playlist) 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? Always look my fav band's side projects, search all artist's bio and seek for new bands. Looking new youtube links on Facebook. :) Sometimes im listening radioio, and try to remember the best songs and bands Sometimes use Allmusic.com Through friends (but its a marginal factor) Always previewing before i buy something. Good audio quality is important too. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? Im a total idiot, but dreaming about a simple menu that can be able to choose some genres with top rated tracks and play them. (a+b+..n genre -top rated songs in dynamic playlist) Would be nice, if i can be able to change/add tags via SB Classic (or on web) or write comments to each song (maybe can marking points of a track (nice drum solo here, and search it later) 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? Nowadays i use the Squeezeplay more than SB Classic, but i prefer Classic with remote. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I'm not using custom tags yet, but i ll do that Yes, im rated my songs/albums manually and this make the base of my playlists. I have a huge collection of music (21000 songs) and id like to see, whats my really fav songs. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? Only Facebook app Thanks for your hard work Erland! Saughassy -- Saughassy Saughassy's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18489 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Custom Browse Random Albums or Artist By Letter. Sometimes I use Lazy Search for something really specific. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Friends, internet news/reviews... I have a large collection, and do not need a lot new music. 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - I use MusicIP with Spicefly's Sugarcube a lot, as well as custom browse random albums. I would love to have the two combined, where the albums are selected based on the Music IP data seeded from the last album. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future? - An RSS news feed based on what you are listening to.. i.e. new album from band in your collection, or specific style (last.fm data?) 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? NOTHING OTHER THAN MAKE SURE TAGS ARE COMPLETE AND CORRECT. - Nothing gets in my library without first passing though MusicBrainz (Picard), then a volume analysis with MediaMonkey, I clear all Genre tags, and then finally a Music IP scan (i archive the analysis in the tag). Everything is stored in a folderstrucutre (\albumartistsort first letter\album artist\album\tracks) 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - No... SBS manages the library based on the track metadata. MusicIP integration is to indicate a track is mixable only. hope this helps, Matt -- matthijskoopmans www.linkedin.com/in/mattkoop matthijskoopmans's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2622 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
In another thread Erland wrote this and suggested that it should be possible to look up on Spotify and similar services artists/albums not in the local library through a context menu. erland;564817 Wrote: > I just realized something that would be really great. There are a few > plugins available that provides things like "similar artists" through > the context menus of an artist. For example, the Spotify and Biography > and Song Info plugins have functionality like this. > > [Snip] > > Scenario 2: > 1. I'm listening to an artist in my library > 2. I pull up the Biography plugin and lists some followers to this > artist > 3. I would now like to find and play some music on one of these > followers, to do this I would at this stage want to launch the "On > Spotify" menu for the selected follower. This is not possible today > since there aren't any context menus for items that doesn't exist in > the SBS database. I too use the similar artists function a lot to find "new" artists and to get ideas on what to play next. Erland's suggestion would make a great improvement. I would also like to be able to use such a context menu on a follower/similar artist in the Biography plugin to look up that artist in my own library. I also often use the song info context menu to look up guest artists and composers and play more tracks by them. With this approach I often wish it would be easier to expand an album, i.e. see, or play, all tracks in an album, not just the tracks where the artist/composer appear. Otherwise I mainly use the artist list to find music. I would use the search function more often if it was faster in large libraries. Now, I basically only use it to find songs I cannot otherwise find. I use the standard tags recognised by SBS and add cover art and information on original release year and style, mood, theme and album rating tags according to the system used by AMG. I also use the genres used by AMG and add Christmas, Compilation, Live, Soundtrack, Bootleg, Bonus Track, EP and Single tags. I have tried to import and use the style, mood and theme tags but I am experiencing such performance issues with a large library that I cannot do that currently. Importing and merging tags for original release year works so I use that and also import album ratings. I personally would not use a function to download music via SBS and automatically adding it to SBS, because I want to check and supplement the tagging before committing anything to SBS. I mostly play full albums. Sometimes I use CustomSkip to play only the original album and get rid of all bonus tracks with crappy demos, discarded takes etc. added to reissue albums. For the occasional random playing I would love to be able to use the style, mood and theme tags. Today I have only one dynamic playlist to play songs originally released in a particular year. Otherwise I use the standard random song mix with CustomSkip adequately configured. Before I sometimes used MusicIP, but as the library grew I experienced such performance issues that I stopped using MusicIP. Nowadays I use almost exclusively iPeng to control SBS. I loved muso and the way it sorted artists/albums and displayed automatically information on biographies, reviews and similar artists (from LastFM and Amazon), but development unfortunately seems to have stopped. I do not do manual or automatic rating of songs. I use only the album rating as reported by AMG. The folder structure is not per se important to me, but I find that SBS and other software works better if the structure is consistent (one folder per album). I do not embed cover art in flac files but use folder.jpg so the folder structure for those files becomes important. -- vagskal 2 x SB3 (wired), Receiver (wireless), Boom (wireless), Controller, iPeng on iPod Touch, muso on remote computer running Win 7 | 7.5.2 on Win XP vagskal's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=20778 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the only one interested in > this kind of functionality. No you're not alone in this :-) erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? All my browsing/searching of the SBS library is done through iPeng usually by artist or by album. I don't use the web interface at all except to track down tagging issues and I rarely use the SB3 remote. I also use Trackstat, Dynamic playlist, MusicIP and Spicefly plugins to delvelop 'on the fly' playlists when I don't have anything particular in mind and imported playlists for manually produced efforts. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library ? For sometime I have been using a combination of Spotify, Last.fm and Groveshark. This started from the fact that I have only recently (this year) joined the ranks of SB users and have a much larger vinyl LP (4500 records) collection than a digital collection (700 CDs). I therefore wanted to hear lots of the stuff that I have on vinyl (hence the use of Spotify free) and I started using the biography and related artist festures to listen to music I don't currently own. I have subsequently broadened my searches by also using Last.fm. I now use these two products plus Groveshark to preview music I might want to buy. I recently discovered the Biography plugin for SBS and have started to use that to track down related artists but still tend to go back to the computer to preview any new music found rather than trying to do it through the DSBridge/Spotify setup I also use via the iPod Touch. I would tend to use the computer rather than my hi-fi due to the low quality of most (free) streamed services. I have no desire to use subscription based services at present as I wish to have bit perfect recordings held digitally and played back through my hi-fi. As with everyone friends also play a large role in introducing me to new music. The biggest difference today is that I can then perform more discovery on a new band/performer recommended to me by a friend using the tools identified above. I'm not a fan of community sites like Twitter and Facebook but this is probably due to my age (50)! erland;566383 Wrote: > > 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in > the future ? As a long time vinyl collector I find myself both liberated and strangled by the digital era. By this I mean that the speed with which I can now play music and the ability to produce static and dynamic playlists is awesome, but it could be improved and it tends to make one lazy and stop searching and playing individual albums. As I've stated I use MusicIP and Spicefly on SBS and get great value out of both. I've also started using Moodagent on the iPod and am beginning to think that this has a very bright future. I would like to see these types of feature more heavily integrated into the base feature set of SBS. However, they still don't go far enough IMO in that sometimes I want a feature similar to the Last.fm artist radio feature to randomly play artist related music from my own collection. The combination of these features would give me all I need to produce all the random playlists I could ever want. I feel particularly strangled in the area of searching music, although I find this much harder to describe properly. My vinyl collection is held on purpose built selves where each shelf holds about 600 LPs. The LPs are not ordered alphabetically or by genre, but are grouped by artist/ composer and very loosely by classical, blues, rock. The point is that I can find any individual album very quickly because I know where they are on the shelves I think through some sort of pattern recognition. Accepting that I can always search for a known album alphabetically I would like to be able to search via album art and find that the current mechanisms are all lacking in some way. The coverflow (ala itunes) mechanism doesn't do anything with a big collection because it's just an alphabetical listing. I would like something that gives me an overview of the entire collection, ordered as I want it (and its not related to current tag info), and then allows me to drill down to see more detail. I know this is vague but I want to graphically recreate and use my LP shelving system as a search mechanism. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future ? Having recently discovered the Biography plugin I really want to be able to perform the functions that I currently do through Spotify, Last.fm and Groveshark on my computer without ever leaving the iPeng/SBS wrapper and my hi-fi from my armchair. erland;566383 Wrote: > > 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to > your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? I think that my tagging is fairly standard in that I rip through EAC to flac,
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I have discovered music in most of the ways described in the tread . But also via the amazon plugin (is it an app by now) and webradio /last.fm . Then when I hear something good i would go and put it in my basket, if they have it. This works in Eu to you can use amazon.co.uk or .de for you purchase . -- Mnyb Main hifi: Touch + CIA PS +MeridianG68J MeridianHD621 and assorted amps SiriuS, Classe' Primare and Dynadio speakers, Contour 4 Contour Center, and Contour 1.3SE for the rear ch. Rel Stadium 3 sub. Bedroom/Office: Boom Kitchen: SB3 + powered Fostex PM0.4 Miscellaneous use: Radio (with battery) I use a Controller various ir-remotes and a Eee-PC with squeezeplay to control this Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35229 The above-mentioned thread covers many of the things that speak directly to the topic at hand. To get an idea of how these technologies have been implemented in a different, but extremely useful content, have a look at the free version of SoundHound in the iPhone store. Before anyone raises licensing as an issue, you can purchase SoundHound for $6 and have perpetual access to the underlying technology & metadata, so it's more a question of someone with the vision and the means to implement (even if by paid for plugin) having the right discussion with Rovi. Ideally though, this would require support from the center to make it a viable development, otherwise I'd strongly suggest a standalone application that just uses SBS for playback. -- audiomuze '*puddletag: A tag editor for Linux (that happens to run on OS X)*' (http://puddletag.sourceforge.net/) audiomuze's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=33613 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently > don't have in your library ? This is almost irrelevant, as it's not working as well as I'd like. Mostly I listen to Internet Radio streams and try to take note of interesting artists. My PlayLog plugin sometimes helps, as it logs info about every song I hear on Napster, Pandora, and traditional shoutcast-style streams, but PlayLog needs something like a manual flagging feature I could easily use while something is playing to "bookmark" or "tag" it. Even then, I'm sure there's lots of great music out there that I'm not finding. Last.fm sounds promising, but I don't like the privacy implications (or what I expect the privacy implications to be). > 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the > future ? I wish I knew. I think some cloud-based service for note-taking could be nice. Imagine someone mentions a band or album online. Maybe it's in a blog, a tweet, a web review. Maybe you're at a friend's house, using your netbook or smartphone. It'd be great if you could just copy a phrase and paste it into some website that somehow tied into SBS. Think of it as queueing up phrases to feed to an SBS / music service search when you're back in front of your Squeezebox. This might be a pretty natural feature to add to MySqueezebox.com. -- peterw http://www.tux.org/~peterw/ Free plugins: 'AllQuiet' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/AllQuiet.html) 'Auto Dim/AutoDisplay' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/AutoDisplay.html) 'BlankSaver' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/BlankSaver.html) 'ContextMenu' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/ContextMenu.html) 'DenonSerial' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/DenonSerial.html) 'FuzzyTime' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/FuzzyTime.html) 'KidsPlay' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/KidsPlay.html) 'KitchenTimer' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/KitchenTimer.html) 'PlayLog' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/PlayLog.html) 'PowerCenter/BottleRocket' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/PowerCenter.html) 'SaverSwitcher' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/SaverSwitcher.html) 'SettingsManager' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/SettingsManager.html) 'SleepFade' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/SleepFade.html) 'StatusFirst' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/StatusFirst.html) 'SyncOptions' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/SyncOptions.html) 'VolumeLock' (http://www.tux.org/~peterw/slim/VolumeLock.html) peterw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2107 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
pski;566457 Wrote:
> so I guess it would need to check binsearch.info and include a
> newsreader/downloading client
>
Do you find new music that way ?
Or is it just a way to get music after you have decided what you want
?
How do you use it today, do you have an artist in your mind and goto
binsearch.info and search for it or do you do it some other way ? Do
you or would you like to start searching based on something inside your
own library or something that's just in your head ?
Since I haven't used binsearch.info before, is binsearch.info just some
kind of illegal sharing place for music you usually have to pay for ?
--
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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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
and include a newsreader/downloading client -- pski real stereo makes the lights dim on the bass notes. pski's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15574 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I'll have to give your other questions some more thought, but this one came to mind earlier today: erland;566383 Wrote: > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? > I'd like to be able to find all the playlists that include a particular track, or one or more tracks from an album. Then, should I get a new remaster, I can see which playlists will have to be changed. (Yes, there is a separate utility available to repair playlists, but that's geared towards coping with changed locations or replaced tracks, and I usually keep the old version around.) By "playlist" I'm really thinking of static playlists - I wouldn't expect to get a list of those DynamicPlaylists that *might* include the track. Notmad and Anapod (3rd-party Zen/iPod managers) had a playlist index that was very useful for things like this (well, when it worked). In iTunes, I can right-click on an individual track to get a list of playlists that include it, which is a bit tedious to use when I replace an entire album. (And here's one of those "I'd forgotten SS could do this!" moments: I was about to add: Fancier playlist combinations, for example, today I'd queued-up a join of my Sun Lounger Rock and Prog playlists. When my wife came home, she wanted me to remove all the Prog; luckily I didn't know how :-) But just now, I've rediscovered that I can just go to Home/Playlists and click the "x" on the Sun Lounger Prog entry...) -- Brian -- Brian Ritchie Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Good idea. answers below. 1. How do you find music in your own library ? - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) TYPICALLY BROWSE BY ARTIST, THEN ALBUM - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different situations ? IPENG AROUND THE HOUSE, WIFE USES CONTROLLER, AND I OFTEN USE SQUEEZEPLAY AS CONTROLLER FROM MY LAPTOP, WHERE I HAPPEN TO BE SITTING IN ANY CASE. - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, play counts, history) NO - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? USE DYNAMIC PLAYLISTS, SQL PLAYLISTS PLUGINS AND STANDARD TEMPLATES, WHICH I EDIT TO PICK CERTAIN GENRES, EXLCUDE CERTAIN ARTISTS OR GENRES, AND ASK TO NOT PLAY SONGS THAT HAVE BEEN PLAYED IN THE LAST X MONTHS, ETC. VERY BASIC USE OF THESE PLUGINS TO CREATE RANDOM PLAYBACK WITH CERTAIN PARAMETERS. - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? NO, BUT I LIKE SEEING IT. - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or track and want to find something related to that ? ARTIST. 2. How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't have in your library ? - Heard it on the radio ? YES, BUT TYPICALLY ONLY INTERNET RADIO STATIONS - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar artists ? NOTHING I LIKE THESE DAYS IS EVEN ON CHARTS. I READ SOME SPECIALTY WEB SITES, BLOGS, ETC. RELATED TO MUSIC STYLES I LIKE. AMAZON SOMETIMES RECOMMENDS STUFF, BUT I EITHER HAVE IT ALREADY OR I'M NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED. - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music store directly ? SEE ABOVE. - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when searching for new music ? COMPUTER. - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? SOMETIMES, COMPUTER SPEAKERS. - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by browsing the service ? NO - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? NODEPRESSION.COM - Through friends ? Some community site ? FRIENDS 3. How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the future ? - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? I'D LIKE SOMETHING LIKE MUSICIP BUILT IN. I KNOW I COULD INSTALL ALL THIS, BUT I DON'T WANT TO GO THROUGH THE TROUBLE OF SCANNING 60K PLUS FILES TO HAVE THE SOFTWARE GO AWAY, WHICH IT SEEMS IS PROBABLE. - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? NO COMMENT, BUT I DON'T REALLY SEARCH THAT MUCH. 4. How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future ? - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's remotes ? - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? RECOMMENDATIONS BASED ON MOST PLAYED SONGS WITHIN MY LIBRARY, COULD BE SBS OR OTHER. 5. What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? NOTHING OTHER THAN MAKE SURE TAGS ARE COMPLETE AND CORRECT. - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS today ? NONE - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? SORT OF. I LIKE AN ORGANIZED ARTIST/ALBUM OR COMPILATIONS/ALBUM TYPE STRUCTURE. - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides those supported by SBS ? NO - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? NO. 6. Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make it easier to find interesting music ? - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? NO, BUT WOULD LIKE TO - Export statistics to MusicIP ? NO, BUT WOULD LIKE TO - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? NO - Export statistics to iTunes ? NO - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? NO I DO KEEP TRACK OF TRACKS PLAYED BY SCROBBLING TO LAST.FM -- garym garym's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17325 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I've often thought a hook into amazon (or take your pick) mp3 purchases would be great: "I see you are listening to X, amazon suggests Y, shall I buy it, download it, and pay it next?" -Chris On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:41 PM, erland < erland.4f4vrz1280864...@no-mx.forums.slimdevices.com> wrote: > > I've been thinking a bit and it really feels like it's time to try to > move the Squeezebox products to the next level. I'd like to get some > more focus on features that's related to finding music both in your own > library and also new music which you currently don't have in your > library. It's getting painfully clear to me that it's not the primary > focus area for Logitech, at least not during the last year or two. At > the moment with the smaller team, they seems to be mostly focused on > fixing bugs, doing some technical enhancements and doing small > enhancements to the core functions, but nothing revolutionary related > to the music discovery. I should say that the Logitech developers are > doing a great job with the amount of resources they have access to, so > this isn't any critique on them. > > However, if we want something to happen it feels we need to take this > into our own hands. I'm not sure about exactly how to do this yet and > I'm also not sure how much time I'm personally prepared to commit on it > but I like to at least start a discussion about what's missing to make > the Squeezebox the best music discovery device out there. If I decide > I'm not prepared to do this myself this discussion might at least > result in some good ideas which Logitech can use. Hopefully more people > in the community are willing to help with various parts if something > good comes out of this discussion, I'm definitely not going to do > anything if I'm alone. However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the > only one interested in this kind of functionality. > > > So some questions to guide the discussion: > > 1. > How do you find music in your own library ? > - Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus) > - Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different > situations ? > - Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings, > play counts, history) > - Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or > random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ? > - Do you use album art when selecting what to play ? > - Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or > track and want to find something related to that ? > > > 2. > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? > - Heard it on the radio ? > - Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar > artists ? > - Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music > store directly ? > - Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when > searching for new music ? > - Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the > real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ? > - Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying > albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by > browsing the service ? > - Through reviews ? Any specific online site ? > - Through friends ? Some community site ? > > > 3. > How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the > future ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ? > - What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ? > > > 4. > How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future > ? > - What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's > remotes ? > - What would you like to do on some other hardware ? > > > 5. > What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your > library to make it easier to find stuff later on ? > - Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS > today ? > - Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ? > - If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides > those supported by SBS ? > - Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ? > > > 6. > Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make > it easier to find interesting music ? > - Import statisitcs from MusicIP ? > - Export statistics to MusicIP ? > - Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ? > - Export statistics to iTunes ? > - Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ? > > > I've probably missed a lot of relevant questions, so feel free to post > your thoughts about other areas that's involved in discovering old and > new music even if it's not mentioned in the questions above. > > I realize there are many questions to answer and that this is a huge > functional area, so feel free to answer in several posts if the forum > post max length feels too limi
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
Aslak3;566427 Wrote:
>
> Anyway, I'm interested to hear other thoughts on UPNP/DLNA.
>
That would be interesting but let's handle that in a separate thread
unless UPNP/DLNA is important for you to be able to find what to listen
to and find out which music you want to buy.
I don't want this thread to turn into a technical/architecture
discussion, instead I like the focus to be how people find their music
and what kind of search/browse functionality is needed to make that
process as effective as possible.
--
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))
erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910
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Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I'm going to stick my neck out, but something has been bugging me for a looong time. You don't really talk about this, and it's one hell of a can of worms, but your talking about SqueezeBox improvements. So here goes. UPNP/DLNA client support. I love SBS as much as the next person, but with CPU horsepower in the player (Radio/Touch), you could conceivably include some level of UPNP support in the player itself. This would be a massive change, of course, from traditional "SlimDevices Squeezebox", but it would get Squeezebox out to new people. SBS would of course continue to be the *correct* way to get music into the player, but UPNP would be available to more casual users. UPNP would be impossible on the non SqueezePlay players, but surely now it could be included. I would look at doing it myself, if I didn't have a day-job To briefly answer some of the other questions, I'm old fashioned and usually play whole albums. So my browsing needs are fairly simple. It's either albums or streaming radio, or maybe LastFM. I've recently started to use SqueezeCommander (Android prog) and absolutely love it. I only really listen to the Radio first thing in the morning, and find the controls and screen a pleasure to use. Otherwise if I'm in front of the thing I play with the Boom controls or grab the phone and use SqueezeCommander. I don't use the IR remote much as my eyesight is poor. I find myself using the web UI less and less, but it's great for doing general admin and making up playlists. Anyway, I'm interested to hear other thoughts on UPNP/DLNA. -- Aslak3 (SB 2, SB Boom, SB Radio) Aslak3's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31977 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the only one interested in > this kind of functionality. Oh no, you're not. erland;566383 Wrote: > 1. How do you find music in your own library ? I mainly use the browse by artists menu, and search for songs when not remembering who's the author. Although I own two controllers, I mainly use an IR remote with my SBs (because it never goes to sleep and it's faster to type some text with it). The Controllers come out of their cradles when friends pass me a visit. I barely use the web UI. Statistics, well, last.fm handle mines good enough to me. I love listening to MusicIP mixes, because that's good music for the lazy. Even if I take care of tagging my music with artwork, album art is not a must have for me. It's nice to get it when playing, though. Being able to browse music from a track's contextual menu is one of my favourite features. erland;566383 Wrote: > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? I listen to webradios (really liked the "On Amazon" feature) and subscribed to some music services like Society of Sound. Before that, I was a last.fm subscriber, but stopped supporting them when they decided only 3 countries - I'm not living in - would legally be able to stream from the SB. I also tried Deezer lately, but found paying 10 a month was not compatible with being not able to listen to a single Pink Floyd album. Friends are my best source of ideas when it comes to listening to something new. To be continued. -- sebp Transporter, SB Classic, SB Receiver, SB Boom, SB Radio, SB Touch, 2 SB Controllers Will soon need a bigger home - 'Last.fm' (http://www.last.fm/user/sebp) sebp's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11768 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
erland;566383 Wrote: > I've been thinking a bit and it really feels like it's time to try to > move the Squeezebox products to the next level. I'd like to get some > more focus on features that's related to finding music both in your own > library and also new music which you currently don't have in your > library. It's getting painfully clear to me that it's not the primary > focus area for Logitech, at least not during the last year or two. At > the moment with the smaller team, they seems to be mostly focused on > fixing bugs, doing some technical enhancements and doing small > enhancements to the core functions, but nothing revolutionary related > to the music discovery. I should say that the Logitech developers are > doing a great job with the amount of resources they have access to, so > this isn't any critique on them. > You're probably the ideal person to spearhead this: anyone who has used your plugins knows how well they work to make a library manageable. > > However, if we want something to happen it feels we need to take this > into our own hands. I'm not sure about exactly how to do this yet and > I'm also not sure how much time I'm personally prepared to commit on it > but I like to at least start a discussion about what's missing to make > the Squeezebox the best music discovery device out there. If I decide > I'm not prepared to do this myself this discussion might at least > result in some good ideas which Logitech can use. Hopefully more people > in the community are willing to help with various parts if something > good comes out of this discussion, I'm definitely not going to do > anything if I'm alone. However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the > only one interested in this kind of functionality. > You're not. :) My music buying has slowed down lately and that's not good! > > How do you find music in your own library ? > I tend to just wander: I do use Dynamic Playlists for my morning alarm clock, and for my "I don't know what to listen to" things >From my 'Random SQL' one (which is pretty much a normal random playlist, but I exclude 'Explicit' and 'Comedy' and such genres, as well as things less than a minute long or more than 15m... this is my usual 'work mix'), I sometimes hear a song and think, "Oooh, let me play something else by them." Being able to insert something (track or album) into a playing playlist would be nice. I think I can do that in Fishbone with an option, but never remember to turn that on. For the "I just heard this, now want to take a diversion, but don't want to remember to turn Dynamic Playlist back on when that album ends" sorts of cases. I do have mostly complete album art and do sometimes choose from Albums when I don't know what I want. I usually just choose a random page and look at cover art to see what tickles my fancy at that point. > > How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't > have in your library ? Last.fm and Emusic, the wife uses Pandora. When -really- bored, Amazon to see what they tell me to listen to. Emusic and Amazon unfortunately have to be done from a browser. I do often play a song and wonder what is similar use that as a key to start a last.fm 'similar artist' station. That works well right now. > > I realize there are many questions to answer and that this is a huge > functional area, so feel free to answer in several posts if the forum > post max length feels too limited. :-) What about if my brain just overloads and I have to take a break? :) As I said, most of my personal library discover comes from Dynamic Playlists of some variety... I am curious how to expand that to "not in my library". Last.fm and Pandora type services seem to be good for that, but they're sadly limited in areas they can legally serve. -- snarlydwarf snarlydwarf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1179 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80910 ___ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[slim] Let's make the Squeezebox to the ultimate music discovery device!
I've been thinking a bit and it really feels like it's time to try to
move the Squeezebox products to the next level. I'd like to get some
more focus on features that's related to finding music both in your own
library and also new music which you currently don't have in your
library. It's getting painfully clear to me that it's not the primary
focus area for Logitech, at least not during the last year or two. At
the moment with the smaller team, they seems to be mostly focused on
fixing bugs, doing some technical enhancements and doing small
enhancements to the core functions, but nothing revolutionary related
to the music discovery. I should say that the Logitech developers are
doing a great job with the amount of resources they have access to, so
this isn't any critique on them.
However, if we want something to happen it feels we need to take this
into our own hands. I'm not sure about exactly how to do this yet and
I'm also not sure how much time I'm personally prepared to commit on it
but I like to at least start a discussion about what's missing to make
the Squeezebox the best music discovery device out there. If I decide
I'm not prepared to do this myself this discussion might at least
result in some good ideas which Logitech can use. Hopefully more people
in the community are willing to help with various parts if something
good comes out of this discussion, I'm definitely not going to do
anything if I'm alone. However, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be the
only one interested in this kind of functionality.
So some questions to guide the discussion:
1.
How do you find music in your own library ?
- Which way to you browse/search ? (which browse or search menus)
- Which type of remote/interface do you use ? Different for different
situations ?
- Do you find music through statistics based browse menus ? (ratings,
play counts, history)
- Do you find music through smart playlists based on statistics or
random selection or other kind of automatic mixes ?
- Do you use album art when selecting what to play ?
- Do you typically start searching/browsing from an artist, album or
track and want to find something related to that ?
2.
How do you usually find new music you like to get but currently don't
have in your library ?
- Heard it on the radio ?
- Where do you start when searching ? Top charts ? Genres ? Similar
artists ?
- Do you use some web site when searching or do you browse some music
store directly ?
- Are you using the computer, your Squeezebox or some other device when
searching for new music ?
- Do you preview the music before puchasing ? Do you preview it on the
real system or cheep laptop speakers or something similar ?
- Do you use a subscription based service so you aren't actually buying
albums, you just need to find the albums/tracks you are interested in by
browsing the service ?
- Through reviews ? Any specific online site ?
- Through friends ? Some community site ?
3.
How would you like to be able to find music in your own library in the
future ?
- What kind of functionality is missing today related to browsing ?
- What kind of functionality is missing today related to searching ?
4.
How would you like to find new music you like to buy/get in the future
?
- What would you like to do through the Squeezebox/SBS or one of it's
remotes ?
- What would you like to do on some other hardware ?
5.
What kind of tagging/management do you do on new music you add to your
library to make it easier to find stuff later on ?
- Which additional tags do you add which isn't handled by standard SBS
today ?
- Is the folder structure the music files are stored in important ?
- If you use Custom Scan, which additional tags do you add besides
those supported by SBS ?
- Do you manually add ratings to your music ? Why ?
6.
Do you synchronize the data in SBS with some other application to make
it easier to find interesting music ?
- Import statisitcs from MusicIP ?
- Export statistics to MusicIP ?
- Import files, playlists and statistics from iTunes ?
- Export statistics to iTunes ?
- Do you use some other application integrated with SBS/Squeezebox ?
I've probably missed a lot of relevant questions, so feel free to post
your thoughts about other areas that's involved in discovering old and
new music even if it's not mentioned in the questions above.
I realize there are many questions to answer and that this is a huge
functional area, so feel free to answer in several posts if the forum
post max length feels too limited. :-)
--
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))
erland's Profile: http://forums.sli
