About upstream project MPD_sima (Was "Joining pkg-multimedia / mpd-sima package")

[Geoffroy Youri Berret]

Hi Jonas, the Team,

I split the reply in two parts since the discussion concerning upstream projet
is off topic IMO.

Le 12/06/2011 17:18, Jonas Smedegaard a écrit :
> On 11-06-12 at 11:32am, Geoffroy Youri Berret wrote:
> […]
>> I'm upstream author for MPD_sima,
> 
> […]
> Hope you might be intrigued by my ideas:

Indeed, users feedback are essentials, I'm grateful for your opinion.

> Album mode
> ----------
> 
> I often enjoy music as complete works, respecting the playing order 
> originally chosen by the musicians when they composed the album.  Would 
> be nice if MPD_sima optionally would add albums rather than single 
> songs.

I completely agree on that, albums are entities that happened to be split into
singles for broadcasting and commercial reasons.
An album queue mode is available in MPD_sima since v0.7.0.
You have to set "queue_mode" option to "album" in the configuration file (not
available on command line).

> Prioritize manual selections
> ----------------------------
> 
> My music collection contains some non-mainstream stuff. Current logic of 
> MPD_sima cause it to slowly degenerate into pop music (stuff appearing 
> both in top-5 results from last.fm queries and in my collection).  Would 
> be nice if MPD_sima would remember last manually selected tune and 
> (optionally?) take that into account as guidance, to go in circles 
> around that instead of drifting off at random[…].

There is actually something approaching available in MPD_sima.
Users can add to the internal database similarities of their choices thanks to
a command line tool. These similarities are used in addition to last.fm
similarities, the level of similarities can be used to override last.fm
recommendations.
But well, for now the CLI is quite cryptic and needs some improvements to be
more user friendly.


> Musicbrainz support
> -------------------
> […]
>
> Offline support
> ---------------
> 
> I am involved in the FreedomBox[2] project - about user-friendly, 
> decentralized services.  Would be cool if MPD_sima could be used in an 
> autonomous mode, independently from centralistic services like last.fm.
> […]
It is my concern as well to provide services independent from closed and
centralized services like last.fm. I'm expecting libre.fm to provide someday
features similar to last.fm.
In the meantime it looks like MusicBrainz is a rather mature alternative.
I'm already working on supporting MusicBrainz ID in MPD_sima, but I can
obviously take advantage of these other aspects of MusicBrainz database.
I'll try to take time to have a look at it, thanks for pointing it out.

> I imagine to use Musicbrainz tagging as mentioned above, or other tags 
> as well - e.g. the genre which (as I understand it) is commonly gathered 
> also with cddb.  Would then (especially with cddb) need a text-fuzzying 
> algorithm to treat e.g. "electronic" and "Electronica" as equal.
I've been thinking about using genre tag to find artists to queue, as you
mentioned, this is prone to spelling mistake and fuzziness since there are no
standards for genre. That part is not crucial as MPD_sima is already shipping a
fuzzy matching engine to get the right artist name, it could be use for other
strings. The reason why I did not use genre back then is that it is not
refining enough while looking for artists, at least it was not enough for my
taste :). But well, I guess it could suit others listeners habits.


> I have interest in semantic web and RDF.  Would it be interesting for 
> you to try make MPD_sima able to query a local database, if I put 
> together one such database service?
It is quite premature for me now, but I'll get back to you as soon as I have a
better idea of what is possible and what I want to push into MPD_sima.


Another approach I'de like to try, maybe implement in MPD_sima, is Music
Information Retrieval (aka MIR), using pure signal processing techniques to get
a track "profil". These techniques are independent of external database, all
needed information is gathered from the sound track itself (the sound signal
not meta-data).
This is the way banshee plugin named Mirage is working.


Thanks for your ideas Jonas :)

Kind regards,
   Geoffroy