More 2.0 than just amaroK!
May 28, 2006 – 7:01 pmThe K3M meeting has been supremely productive for all attendees. If you haven’t been reading up, the coolest things in amaroK have been: Vastly improved start times, inotify signals for collection scanning, porting to KDE/Qt4 (runs!!), UI redesigns and last.fm integrations.
In our developer conference, we discussed total redesign of the amaroK core, using the enhanced functionality which Qt4 will provide, such as Model View Controllers for the browser architectures. Additionally, we discussed integration with last.fm to provide an enhances user experience.
I’ve been pushing the notion of web services integration into amaroK for the last couple of days, and I’ll explain why now. With the introduction of web 2.0 not long ago, the internet has become much more than just a content provider - and now has a main functionality of providing a service to the user. Not what it can provide, but how, and with what value and benefits.
Last.fm is a social music network which has many hundreds of thousands of users. Services which they provide include statistics of personal listening habits, neighbours, which are people with similar music habits, music tags, and ponies which recommend new music to bored and inquisitive listeners. Imagine the possibilities of providing such services directly from within amaroK. I’ll provide a small example. The audioscrobbler web services provide such as favourite and newest songs, by tag/user/group and more. By downloading the playlist containing the best rock songs, I can import it straight into my playlistbrowser. Some clever work and the playlist will only show the songs which I have in my collection that are also tagged favourites by last.fm users. This is really cool, because now I don’t ever need to browser my music and create playlists, since thousands of last.fm users know more than I do.
The real power in importing playlists, however, isn’t particularly in showing the user what they already have in the collection, but rather what they may be missing. By importing the favourite rock songs, we can show the listener that there are another X amount of songs which they might like. Since last.fm provides perfectly legal radio streaming, we can offer the user a listen of the song. Awesome!
This is just a small insight into some of the great services which are provided. Imagine more - automatic tagging of songs, labels, playlist generation, radio streaming, similar songs etc
The future is promising!
2 Responses to “More 2.0 than just amaroK!”
This sounds awesome, seb - and an elegant way to combine the power of last.fm with the sexyness of Amarok
Looking forward to it.
By Christie on Jun 3, 2006
well, sebr, to follow our discussion of this morning on irc, I’m sure the wish #133884 can improve all that…
lastfm is fine, but we could do even better by gathering more informations about the context the song is played.
If Amarok record informations about the context, user’s habits could be analysed and Amarok would be able to suggest more accurency things to him. Including lastfm!
For exemple, I often listen jazz-club things for diners. Amarok could detect that: between 8pm and 10pm, when soft ‘xscreensaver’ runs, I chose to play that kind of music.
So, when implemented (and habits learned), if I want Amarok to automatically select songs ‘in realtime’ for me, it would choose in my database jazz-club (or ask lastfm for playing some jazz-club radio) when those conditions occurs (time and xscreensaver is running). But after that, if I raise kdevelop, amarok would detect it and select the appropriate music (electronic/rock in my case), using my previous learnt habitudes).
don’t you see how powerfull it would be? we could ‘forget’ amarok in a desktop place, and it would CHOOSE THE RIGHT MUSIC FOR THE RIGHT CONTEXT, without user’s intervention (or with very minimal one).
I don’t think this is Amarok devs rule to implement all that, but if you could think to a way that it could be implemented by plugins, I’m sure it would be fine, fun, furious and foobar.
Aren’t you bored to review your database to find what next you could listen? (or after a while, switch to Amarok to change your lastfm station or your dynamic playlist because you’ve change your occupation)
I DO think that it is not only a song tagging, because we need a more complet database, with an history of what had been played (with attached informations, provided by plugins, like time, weather, current focused soft, entry in the kde PIM-calendar to know what was planned for the current time,…). Then, a statistic/AI plugin could use this database to feed the playlist in realtime, to provide us exactly what we want to listen at the time!
By zebarbu on Sep 11, 2006