Njos2SQEZtPVRhHListenBrainz about to hit 100k users
https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1890297/listenbrainz-about-to-hit-100k-users
Can someone explain to a Gen x guy what “listening data” gets me? I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years. Does this use my music? Does this get it from the Internet somewhere? How is it different from asking Alexa to play music for me? Thanks.
I’ve been living off a folder of mp3s for 30 years.
Same here. I love that shit. My mood is the algorithm. I still occasionally get new stuff, but from other sources I happen to see or hear, like a Netflix show that has it in the background or a musician’s personal recommendation in an interview, and I go look it up manually. But even if I never got anything new, I already have more music than I could easily listen to in a lifetime that I already know I liked at least once.
I’ve tried streaming sources, but it never hits right. This way, where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right, always fresh, and I’m always listening to something I want to hear.
where I am specifically picking the artist or album, it’s always right
That’s a remarkable level of effort, these days. Yes, I know, it’s trivial compared to pulling vinyl from the sleeve and flipping it every 20 minutes the way I used to before 1985, but… I prefer to put in my music effort with focus, and let a mix algorithm surprise me when I’m not in “music picking mode.” To me, it’s much more enjoyable to hear a song I like that I wasn’t expecting than it is to think about it, navigate the list of thousands to find my pick, and then hear the thing I was thinking of.
It’s all good. I think it has a lot more to do with accommodating one’s own brain, and how we individually categorize and enjoy our listening, than with specifics of music like genre/artist/album/track.
For myself, I almost always have some tune or another out of nowhere running through my head, so when I choose something to listen to, I am either picking with or against what’s already playing. So if I tune in to the music that’s already playing, I can see associated choices that are the same, similar, or completely unrelated on a superficial level, but my brain has linked them all somehow. Any of those choices, if I put them on, will satisfy because my brain is already playing one and mentally I’m already there.
I think the reasons algorithms never work for me is because no one could ever follow that, much less predict it. Even I can’t. Instead I’ve learned to simply accommodate it.
so when I choose something to listen to, I am either picking with or against what’s already playing.
AcousticBrainz has (had?) a bunch of dimensional measures of various qualities of a song. How I used it was to first define a set of maybe 4 to 8 songs to “set the mood” and then pick a list of a few hundred songs that were “closest to” those songs in all the AB dimensional measures, pre-filtering out artists and songs recently played. Then - the final step was to sort the remaining candidates by their similarity to the songs most recently played. It was still random within that list, but a weighted random with the most similar (by AB measurements) songs most likely to be queued up next.