Fw: [imms-users] How do you listen to music?
Rick Ansell
On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:55:41 +0000
Dave Schaefer <dave.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I have a non-technical, fun question for each of you - how do you
> listen to music? :)
'Big Pile' variant - a 'pile' sorted into Artist and Album directories.
Sometimes I want to hear particular tracks so I set up a manual queue
of them.
I also listen to a large subset of tracks on my Android phone.
That Android thing - could I have an Android 'IMMS Enabled' player,
pretty please...
Related ideas:
Could I have a nice app that filters the 'top X GB' from my main
machine into a side directory for syncing with the phone?
Could the play/skip data from the phone be merged with that from the PC?
Also, I have a fair amount of Classical stuff on the phone. IMMS
recognises the various movements of a piece as 'mixes' of one track, so
I don't get to hear a lot of it. Could a way round this be built into
IMMS? I suggest a list of tags and parts of tags that would switch off
the 'mix' recognition for a track.
This sort of general solution would also help with the case where I
favour one mix or version of a track over others. Ideally tracks should
be able to be grouped (rather than excluding them one at a time). For
example, for one Artist I prefer the Digitally Remastered versions of a
track that appears on several albums, I would like to be able to add
'_digital_' in one of the tracks metadata tags, put '_digital_' into a
configuration file and have IMMS recognise the '_digital_' versions as
one set of mixes and the non-digital as another.
I know that part of the philosophy if IMMS is to get away from the user
having to set up list etc. but the ability to put lists in and have
IMMS treat them as one 'pick' would be nice. Old Fogies like myself
would then be able to put a Classical price spread over several files
in and get, say, Beethoven’s 9th or a Jean Michelle Jarre album come up
as a 'pick'. At the moment I have to do 'configuration' anyway, but by
merging the files to create one super-huge 'Beethoven’s 9th' file -
which then gets put down by IMMS as being a 'remix' of Movements 1,2,3
etc. unless I give it a sufficiently different name like 'BeethovN IX'.
This sort of breaks the philosophy even more than doing configuration
of IMMS, I shouldn't have to be doing configuration to get AROUND
features of IMMS, surely that worse than configuring IMMS?
Sometimes I have to go away from the PC for a while and I find myself
rushing back to skip tracks or enduring stuff that I don't really want
to listen to at that point. Could IMMS, on suitable players (maybe by
subverting their Playlist feature) or with a suitable interface, pick
tracks ahead of time, say 5 ahead (or a number determined by the
playing time), and show them on a display that allows the user to
'skip' a track before they hear it? Or could IMMS simply be asked to
generate a playlist of a certain length, then switch its track picking
off until that playlist is exhausted?
The ability to tag a track as '_noplay_' would also be nice, I have
tracks that I know I never want to hear stored separately from the main
album so that IMMS does not play them. This is untidy - I would like to
be able to store the full album together without having to work round
IMMS, simply putting '_noplay_' in the file name of one of the tags
would be great way to allow this with minimal configuration. Going back
to my 'file with a list of tags' idea the idea could be made more
general and the file could look like this:
[notmix]
genre= Classical
artist= Jean Michelle Jarre
any= _notmix_
[noplay]
any= _noplay_
artist= Shatner
title= *_NM
OK - that should get things going for a decade or two of development.
Rick
"Si Tibi Narraremus Te Interficere Debemus"
Michael Grigoriev
> On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:55:41 +0000
>
> > Hey everyone,
>
> > I have a non-technical, fun question for each of you - how do you
> > listen to music? :)
>
> 'Big Pile' variant - a 'pile' sorted into Artist and Album directories.
>
> Sometimes I want to hear particular tracks so I set up a manual queue
> of them.
>
> I also listen to a large subset of tracks on my Android phone.
>
> That Android thing - could I have an Android 'IMMS Enabled' player,
> pretty please...
>
> Related ideas:
>
> Could I have a nice app that filters the 'top X GB' from my main
> machine into a side directory for syncing with the phone?
music to play from my PS3:
CUTOFF=85
immstool ratings
sqlite3 ~/.imms2/imms2.db "select path from Ratings natural join
Identify natural join Library where rating > $CUTOFF or firstseen > $
(date --utc --date '2010-01-01' +%s)" |
while read filename; do
# do stuff with filename
done
You could tune cutoff to get a subset of desirable size.
There's also "IMMS Magical Favorites Collector" [http://
sourceforge.net/projects/imfavorites/], but it doesn't look like it
has been updated in a while, so it probably won't work with recent
versions of IMMS.
Have fun,
Michael.
Dave Schaefer
Awesome, thanks for the reply :) Here are some thoughts.
> 'Big Pile' variant - a 'pile' sorted into Artist and Album directories.
Are you saying you duplicate the music so you have the same tracks
organized in different ways, or is some music sorted by album and some
by artist?
>could I have an Android 'IMMS Enabled' player, pretty please...
We can try! ;) I created a ticket for this -
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=8
I don't have an Android myself, but I think you can get an emulator as
part of the SDK. If I have some time in the next few weeks I'll give
it a shot.
This would also require creating an IMMS client for some music player
on the Android. Do you know if XMMS, Beep Media Player, Quod Libet, or
Audacious run on Android? My google searches don't turn up any
immediate results. Otherwise, what music player do you use? We would
have to write a client.
>Could I have a nice app that filters the 'top X GB' from my main machine into a side directory for syncing with the phone?
We may be able to whip up something like this using an SQL query...
maybe we can wrap it in a script. Ticket here -
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=9 , I'll try and look
into that too.
>Could the play/skip data from the phone be merged with that from the PC?
Yep, I think this is something we'll really need, especially if we
have people using IMMS from multiple locations like Android, ipods,
multiple computers, etc. There is already a ticket in about that -
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=6
>[Could we turn off the feature that treats remixes as one song?]
I'll have to dive into the code to see if this is possible. Mag, any
thoughts? If you want to turn off global remix recognition vs. just
having one or two remixes treated separately that might be two
separate features too. Let me know which you're thinking of and I'll
add some tickets.
>I know that part of the philosophy if IMMS is to get away from the user having to set up [playlists] etc. but the ability to put lists in and have IMMS treat them as one 'pick' would be nice.
I think the philosophy of having things simple and easy to use is
good, but I don't think that should mean that we can't have advanced
configuration or other features for advanced users (maybe Mag
disagrees?). Maybe we can keep the simple/easy-to-use defaults, but
allow other options and features to fit people's work style. And
thanks, that's part of what I am aiming to do here - make IMMS more
useful :) If you are having to hack around IMMS by merging multiple
mp3s into one big file that definitely sounds like a pain!
>I shouldn't have to be doing configuration to get AROUND features of IMMS, surely that worse than configuring IMMS?
Exactly. Agreed.
It sounds like you have a few feature requests here
1. the ability to put in several songs and have IMMS treat them as one 'pick'
e.g. a Classical [piece?] spread over several files, such as
Beethoven’s 9th, or a Jean Michelle Jarre album
So you would like to take, say, 10 songs, group them together, and
always play them in the same order back to back. They share one rating
for being good/bad. If any song in the group (or maybe we just have
one entry for 'the group'?) is selected for play IMMS queues up all of
those songs, in the correct order, plays through all of them, and then
treats you listening to *all* songs start-to-finish or skipping at any
point during the songs as a play/skip counter for the statistics. Is
that right?
Interesting :) I don't know the code well enough to say whether this
is technically possible, but I can have a look (or Mag, feel free to
comment!). We would also need some kind of interface for selecting the
songs as a group, specifying their order, etc. But I think you have
discovered something insightful here - another person I have
interviewed only likes listening to long trance albums, and must have
the songs played in a certain order, because they don't want their
concentration interrupted. I was thinking maybe IMMS was simply not
the right product for them, but if we had a feature like this maybe
that would fix their issue too. So thanks for enumerating this. And
take comfort that you are not alone in your listening habits ;)
Let me know if I have your idea right and I'll add a ticket.
2. >Could IMMS pick tracks ahead of time and queue them up? say 5
ahead (or a number determined by the playing time), and show them on a
display that allows the user to 'skip' a track before they hear it?
This sounds doable, but yeah, might depend on the specific music
player because we would need an interface for viewing songs and
kicking them out of the list. Would you want songs rejected from the
queue to also get a 'skip' counted against them?
I split this up into two tickets just for implementation - one for
queueing up songs, either by # of songs or by time
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=11 , and another for
viewing this playlist to modify it before it plays. (
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=12 ) This might be
tricky because technically IMMS is always 'queueing' up songs, so
without the viewer the first ticket is largely redundant.
4.>then switch its track picking off until that playlist is exhausted?
So you're saying you would not want 'plays' to be counted for songs in
the generated playlist, thus not boosting their rating? Are you
worried about IMMS liking those songs too much?
>I have tracks that I know I never want to hear stored separately from the main album so that IMMS does not play them. This is untidy - I would like to be able to store the full album together without having to work around IMMS
This could possibly also be accomplished with SQL or a tool that talks
to the database - maybe we can set the artist's rating to zero? I
would have to look into this and learn more about how ratings are
pulled. Mag might know more.
http://code.google.com/p/imms/issues/detail?id=13
Phew! Thanks very much for the input :)
Huge Disclaimer: I have added tickets for these but that doesn't mean
that I will have time to work on them or that they will necessarily
get done any time soon :P But I think the first step to improvement is
identifying what we want to improve.
Dave