Wow. Great prog. And some questions
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Wow. You've got no idea how long I've been scouring the internet looking for something like this. It does pretty much all that I imagined such a program should do.
I sincerely hope you intend to keep up the development of this. I look forward to seeing it evolve - and believe me, I've got plenty of suggestions.
Just a couple of q's about the genre constraint. How wide a region around the point you choose does the program play songs from? It seems a little strange that you should have to specify a point on a continuously variable surface. After all, few songs will hit exactly that point. So what I'm asking is what is the 'tolerance' of the point specified?
Also, since we have a 2-d continuous surface, and it's designed so that genres near each other are simliar styles, then surely it makes sense to be allowed to select a 'bounding box' rather than a point?
Also, I'm interested to know how you or others use the genre classification system. I like the idea of it, but I'm having trouble thinking of a good classification system. I'd be interested in seeing some others' suggestions here (NB. I suspect an additional 3rd dimension might be handy in future versions: 1 axis for genre, 1 for mood/tempo, 1 for 'social acceptablity' perhaps?)
Anyway, great stuff, I look forward to being part of this community.
Hi Carl,
your comments about the genre thing are all valid, and they've already been discussed internally, to some extent.
First, a bit about how it all currently works:
when searching for songs to queue, lplayer assigns scores to songs based on their genre. If it's close to the point the user specified, it'll get more. If you checked the "allow drift" box, the genre is compared with that of the previous song.
The song with the highest score gets chosen.
So, what would be nicer?
- let the user specify a bounding box, like you said
- let the user specify that he only wants to hear music that HAS a genre
- let the user specify an unlimited number of genre dimensions: everyone has other ways to classify music
The problem is, of course, that the last bullet is not very easy to implement, but I do think that it would make genre classification a lot more useful.
I myself am constantly hindered by the limited expressiveness of the 2d surface.
To illustrate: the scheme I currently use (but be warned, I don't like it myself), is something like this:
vertical: soft & accessible <-> hard
horizontal: classical - chanson - oldies - pop - tropical - blues - alternative-dance - rock - symphonic rock/soundtrack
I try to fit in other genres as blends or "harder" and "softer" variations (e.g. lounge as a soft version of alt-dance). I'd rather describe a number of simple characteristics (such as mood) though.
As this is a new feature, additional genre comments are greatly appreciated!
You're right, and unlimited number of axes would be nice, though 3 would be a good start. Good to see you're thinking along similar lines with regards to this. I've tried to make a somewhat complicated array on the 2-d sheet to take in to account a number of factors. I'll let you know how it goes.
One quick question- does the colour chart go "round the world" -ie. does the red on the right flow continuously into the right on the left? I'm working on the assumption that it does.
Also, I've had a look at the songs.lp2 database, and all the fields in there look pretty self-explanatory, except of course the unique (long) number associated with each file. Would it be possible for you to explain how this number is derived, as I'd be quite keen to try and come up with a method for batch classifying files in my collection (with 8500 songs, its going to take some time at the current rate). I don't have any programming knowledge, but maybe I can come up with a Macro or something to generate the appropriately formatted xml file which could then be imported into lplayer. Would this work?
One more thing. I see someone has requested the ability to create 'exclude' directorys in the playlist mangement. This is a cool idea, and I too would like the ability to mult-select directories (Ctrl-click, Shift-Click in Windows). One simple way for you to achieve this would be to allow the program to respond to directory shortcuts in the selected directories. That way the user would just have to set up one folder for each playlist they want to create and then do all the directory management in their file manager by bulk creation and movement of shortcuts into these folders - piece of cake in Windows.
Anyway, thanks for the reply.
Cheers,
Carl.
How's this for a way of doing the GUI for a multi-dimensional genre system? Basically just a list box with user-definable categories and beside that a slider to record the value (of the current selection in the list box). I doubt that you could allow an unlimited number of categories, so maybe allow the user to define 10 or so. These would be arbitrary names, the program doesn't care what they are. The slider should have a similar range as the current 2d surface, but be labelled 0 to 10 to be consistant with the rating slider.
Hmmm, another thought, if you're going to keep the rating slider, it could be integrated into this system as a static choice in the listbox.
Just some ideas. :)
Duey
But could the programme move intelligently through 10-dimensional space. It's simple to imagine a 3-d cube where each subsequent song drifts a little through the 3d space, but 10 parameters? I don't know, perhaps I'm not well enough versed in this kind of conceptual maths, but it seems to me that it would be difficult to make intelligent drift with more than 3 parameters. I guess not for mathematical wizards though.