Open mixxxbot opened 2 years ago
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: Be-ing Date: 2018-01-04T05:10:13Z
Cool idea! Uwe and I discussed the possibility of doing a collaborative GSOC project with MusicBrainz with one of the MetaBrainz developers at the GSOC Mentor Summit. I think this project would fit that idea really well. :)
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: uklotzde Date: 2018-01-04T15:30:34Z
YES! The dynamic organization of a library based on metadata is much more powerful than statically dropping tracks into just crates and playlists. Sharing, exchanging, and enriching this metadata with others and from different sources provides so many chances for exploring and discovering unknown possibilities.
I already was thinking about something similar. A simple system of custom tags composed of
To give you an idea here are some examples of names and values from my own library: "Rating" (0 to 5): "r0" / ... / "r5" "Energy" (0 to 5): "e0" / ... / "e5" "Mood" (0 to 5): "m0" / ... / "m5" "Epoch" or "Decade": "1980s" / "1990s" / "2000s" / ... "Occasion": "Cruise" / "Dinner" / "Lounge" / "Party" / "Wedding" / ... "Season": "Xmas" / ... "DjSet": "Arrival" / "Warmup" / "FloorFiller" / "PeakTime" / ... "Commercial" or "Advertising": ...value refers to the company/product where it appeared... "Soundtrack": ...value refers to the name of the movie or series where it appeared... "Cover": ...value references the original artist (and optionally the title if different) that has been covered... "CoveredBy": ...the other direction if the cover version itself is very popular... "Sample: ...value references the track by artist and title that has been sampled... "SampledBy": ...the other direction if the track that used the sample is very popular... "Soundcheck" "Mainstream" or "Charts" "Evergreen" or "Classic"
Currently I store my custom tags unorganized as space-separated textual tokens in the comments field. Just the values of "Rating", "Energy", "Mood", and "Epoch" in a predefined order followed by others, unordered, some of them with just their value (if more or less unique) and some as <name>:<value> pairs. All names and values encoded in CamelCase style to reserve whitespaces for separating individual tags. This works ok for filtering, but of course is very awkward and time-consuming to maintain and not suitable for parsing.
All custom tags associated with a track should permanently be stored (import/export) in one of the track's file tags in some well-defined format. I suggest using a well-adopted, machine-readable format like JSON. Enclosed in delimiters like {{ }} for distinguishing it from the remaining contents of the field when storing it side-by-side in a file tag that might already contain user-defined content. This would be much more sophisticated than what I've seen in Rekordbox: They simply enclose the list of custom "labels" into one C-style /* */ comment block and append it to the "COMMENT" file tag. I would also suggest to append the custom tag data to the comments field when exporting tags, but definitely not adopting such an oversimplified solution.In the database custom tags should be stored in an appropriate relational schema for efficient searching, grouping and filtering. This schema should also take into account synonyms for different names within the same namespace or even across different namespaces as discussed here: https://community.metabrainz.org/t/similarity-synonyms-merging-for-folksonomy-tags/326055 The synonyms could be synchronized initially and/or regularly with the MusicBrainz database and stored as some kind of master or contextual data in the local database. The file tags are unaffected if the synonyms change, but users should of course be able to normalize their tag names according to the synonyms for selected tracks on demand and export them into file tags.
I recommend a cooperation with MusicBrainz for defining some kind of informal, open standard. Both for how to store track-related data in file tags and also for sharing and synchronizing synonyms to correlate custom tags from different sources. Reviewing the APIs of services like Spotify or The Echo Nest and the features of other DJing or music applications might provide valuable ideas. A standard is easier to establish if it fits into the existing landscape.
Since this is a long dream of mine I would gladly support such a collective approach from within the Mixxx team! My condensed collection of ideas that I presented here hopefully encourages others to follow.
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: naught101 Date: 2018-01-05T01:35:04Z
Awesome. Musicbrainz already has the capacity for some relationships between different entities. Definitely the covered by/cover of is there.
I think rating is best left as the musicbrainz rating widget.
The mood thing I think is not a linear scale, so it's best left as crates/tags.
The energy thing is more interesting, and I think it's linear (or at least monotonic :P), and so makes sense as a rating style thing, but who's going to decide what's the middle, and what's "high" and "low" (I guarantee that my "low" is some other people's "high"). I guess MusicBrainz would need to implement another rating-style scale for ordered tags like that though? Might be difficult...
Personally I think all values like this (rating, energy) should be stored as arbitrary decimals between 0 and 1, even if they're displayed by most systems as an out-of-5 rating. Then things like https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/+bug/973145 could easily be implemented as just a UI change.
Not sure how MusicBrainz stores ratings internally, but if it's an integer, I guess that might cause data loss/aliasing.
All of the namespacing could be done with nested crates. Multi-level namespacing should then be possible too..
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: daschuer Date: 2018-01-05T07:17:17Z
I would love to have something like this as well. Can this also be a data base for our long dream to have a track suggestion feature?
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: Be-ing Date: 2018-01-06T07:26:42Z
Possibly related: ListenBrainz scrobbling Bug #669273
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: naught101 Date: 2018-01-07T07:24:10Z
Musicbrains also has a "collections" feature, which would I guess be equivalent to playlists, except that it doesn't have an order. Might be a worthwhile feature request to musicbrainz to have playlists/orderable collections though.
I am also keen to use this data for track suggestion. I guess an external app would be fine, sounds like scope creep for Mixxx... Using playlists as the basis for track selection would be somewhat similar to how Spotify's recommender engine works, I think. I've been wanting to play with something like that for quite a while., but haven't had the time..
The scrobbling data could be really cool for this, too, because they provide association via proximity - a recommender that could handle "what tracks are often played immediately after the current track" would be a pretty killer AutoDJ feature :D
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: naught101 Date: 2018-02-01T01:26:28Z
Added a playlist request to musicbrainz: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/AB-329
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: gramanas Date: 2018-02-16T10:22:31Z
Collections are equivalent to crates, since as you said they are unordered.
I also think mood is not in a linear scale. I remember a feature in an old samsung music player app (idk if it's still around, I don't use samsung any more) where there was a grid of coordinates with (0,0) in the middle, and the Y axis was sad/happy while the X axis was fast/slow.
You would tap on a coordinate on the grid and it would play a song relative to the grids position (top right would be happy and fast for example). It would then curate a playlist for you based on the first song picked.
An even cooler "autogenerated" playlist would have the user pick a startpoint, an endpoint and a route through the grid and it would create a playlist of songs that take you from mood A to mood B continuously! (some calculus required)
Implementing a multidimensional (2D at first) mood widget to capture the actual mood of the song shouldn't be that hard. Making it fit with the rest of Mixxx would be tho (filter by mood etc)
Mood could be set either manually or by ML algorithms that already exist.
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: naught101 Date: 2018-02-16T22:44:23Z
I also remember that Samsung app, though I barely used it, and I can't remember how reliable it was.
Fast/slow we already have in BPM (although there are other music aspects that affect the feeling of speed - some 174 bpm DnB tracks feel a lot slower than most techno). But I don't think happy/sad are two ends of a linear scale either - you can be both at the same time (nostalgia is an example), and anger doesn't fit there. That Sentify visualisation captures it a bit better, but I suspect there are still cases that could be in multiple quadrants at the same time...
Acousticbrainz (https://acousticbrainz.org/1ce7ee57-8870-46c4-9dde-6a64e460f2c0) does it by having a separate axis for each major mood (Electronic, Party, Aggressive, Acoustic, Happy, Sad, Relaxed), which I think is a better way to store the data, but perhaps a lot of information to display. Also, I note that 4 of those moods are the same as the Sentify map, so maybe that is a good enough scale... Along with the danceability metric from acousticbrainz, that would provide a LOT of useful information.
FWIW, My current energy/mood crates are: agro, ambient, bounce, building, chilled, disconcerting, driving, funky, grind, gritty, groovy, heavy, introspective, iraphilia, latenight, melancholic, poppy, punchy, salad, sexy, smooth, thump, upbeat, weird, wonky, WTF.
Of the ones that are strictly mood related (as opposed to energy), some fit in those four categories (agro, chilled, iraphilia, melancholic, salad), but others don't (disconcerting, introspective, sexy, weird, WTF). Not sure if there are likely to be other things like that that are worth putting in a scale-variable (I don't think any of those are, really, they can all just stay as crates).
disconcerting
mixxxbot
commented
2 years ago Commented by: naught101 Date: 2018-03-06T21:22:18Z
On further thought, I think this would need to be enabled on a white-list basis for crates (or crate trees, when the nested crates feature is implemented. I have a bunch of utility crates that allow be to group tracks in a way that is not useful for a global database (like "tracks for <friend>", or "broken files", or "recommended by <blah>"). These would need to be excluded. With nested crates, it would make sense to have the ability to include all crates in a tree (e.g. grenre:* or mood:*).Some of those crates might be useful for me to keep and sync to a web service, but only if the service allowed private tags as well as public tags. I'll submit a feature request to musicbrainz for that, although I wouldn't be surprised if they consider it out of scope.
Reported by: naught101 Date: 2018-01-04T00:48:21Z Status: Confirmed Importance: Wishlist Launchpad Issue: lp1741147 Tags: metadata
https://musicbrainz.org/ is an open music encyclopaedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public, under open licenses. Mixxx already uses it for grabbing metadata (I don't use this functionality, because I'd rather have the metadata stored in file tags).
MusicBrainz also has the ability to store per-user per-track ratings (out of 5 stars) and tags (which can be completely arbitrary). These two features correspond almost perfectly with Mixxx's track ratings and crates. It would be great to have a way to synchronise Mixxx's ratings with MusicBrainz. This would be particularly useful in 3 ways:
point 2 would be especially useful when https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/+bug/671632 is implemented, as we could synchronise multilevel crates like "genre/electro-swing" -> "genre:electro-swing", and provide a de facto name-spacing for MusicBrainz tags (see https://community.metabrainz.org/t/similarity-synonyms-merging-for-folksonomy-tags/326055/5 for discussion)