AFAIK most of the biggest media player support MPRIS, so it would be easy to adopt your code.

At first I was trying to look for the ultimate music organizer, but suddenly I realized that I want to program with music, but keep focus on the programing thing not into the music. I’m not trying to send you a lastfm account, just the idea under it ;)

Absolutely. Different scores for different circumstances (eg. some sort of music for when you’re working on a particular project, another one for when you’re idle, etc.) is something which Zeitgeist could handle up to a certain degree; it would be interesting to experiment with this.

@ Zash, Tuxdragon:

Thanks for recommending those, I may try them out when I’ve got a moment.

@ Arpia49:

While that sort of love/hate rating isn’t that bad (compared to having you choose a numerical value), it’s something I’ve avoided in my proposal as I want the rating to be fully autonomous. Also I’m not really comfortable with streaming solutions with my current 1 Mbps connection (shared between 4 computers). I’m happy that it works for you though :).

@ Gabriel Burt, Paul, Robin:

Thanks for letting me know about this, I’m updating to 1.6 now and will try it out, I may well work enough for me.

However the main reason why I wrote this post was to plug Zeitgeist, which has some advantages:
– Media-player independent; you can switch to another media player at any time and the information will still be there (without needing any export/import process).
– Full, situated information so you can have several classifications (see my answer to Dylan McCall), do stuff like finding out which songs you usually listen to together when you are choosing them manually, etc.
– Another consequence of the previous point is that the score can be recalculated from scratch if the algorithm is improved, given that all data is there.
– I think I thought of some more benefits of using Zeitgeist for this but I’ve forgotten them by now :P.

@ Ivan Frade:

Hey! Indeed, saving the score in Tracker would probably make sense; I didn’t mention it because Rhythmbox/Banshee aren’t using Tracker at the moment and depending on it just to store a number would be overkill, but I’d love to see those and other applications storing all their data in Tracker (I even briefly mentioned this in my post).

Using Tracker for this would also have a benefit, which is that the algorithm can ask it for the duration of the songs (so that it won’t penalize a song if it’s skipped 10 seconds before it finishes, for example).

However there is one concern I have with Tracker, which is its rigid structure. In many cases there will probably be more than one method for calculating something, for example in this case having a single “music-score” value can be rather limiting. It also doesn’t work with more fancy cases like having different scores for songs you want to hear at the morning / at the night / when you’re coding / when you’re learning / etc.

@ Abhishek Dasgupta:

No, the data-sources aren’t packaged yet. However you can install the Rhythmbox plugin like this:

$ bzr get lp:zeitgeist-dataproviders
$ cd zeitgeist-dataproviders/rhythmbox/
$ sh install.sh

(You may need to enable it manually in Rhythmbox’s preferences dialogue).

Thanks for your comments, everyone! :)

The output should/can be a property in tracker “zg:music-score” or something like that.

BTW i think that algorithms as plugins in ZG, “publishing” the aggregate values “somewhere” (e.g. Tracker) is the way to go.

# The interface, ie. plugins for Rhythmbox and other media players which take that information and use it to provide an option for semi-randomly choosing music excluding stuff you don’t like.

That could be part of the Applications/Tracker integration. The Tracker plugin in Rhythmbox can offer playlist like “recently played”, “by playcount” or… “by zeitgeist relevance”!

Scoring is done automatically, depending on how much of the song you listen to before you skip it and the score it had before. You can show the score column in the track list to see what score a song currently has.

So maybe that’s already what you want. But of course you need to use it some time to “train” the scores.

Too bad it doesn’t receive as much attention.

Some more info on it: http://gmusicbrowser.org/

I don’t hear it everyday but the “love/ban song” is the ultimate sorting interface for me.

And QL’s search functionality is completely awesome!

Anyway, just throwing that out there. Sounds like a good approach you have :)
I could have sworn there was an automatic rating extension being worked on for Banshee, but I haven’t seen it.

Good luck to anyone who takes it on!