C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:54:21 -0300

I just published a small set of scripts I've hacked together over the last
week or two called Uykfe.  They let me listen to music on my SqueezeCenter
(Squeezebox Boom and Duet / hifi).

The advantages are:

  * I get to explore my music in a meaningful way.  I have music from artists
    that I hardly know.  By playing "random" tracks that have a common theme,
    music from new artists is placed in the context of music I recognise.

  * I get themed "radio station" music, even though I have mp3s that cover a
    pretty wide range of styles.  This is often preferable to "random shuffle"
    which can be playing Bach one minute and NoMeansNo the next.

  * I can generate playlists to load dmusic on to my portable mp3 player.

  * It naturally interoperates with the SqueezeCenter playlist.

The last point is particularly cool.  The program monitors the current
playlist and whenever that reaches the "last track" it adds a new, related
piece.  Also, if no music is present at all, it provides a random starting
point.

This lets me skip tracks I don't like, do a "random jump" by clearing the
playlist (good when I get bored), and even lets me set a context (so I
manually select a track by someone in the style I want to hear and then Uykfe
"takes over").

It requires Python 3.2 and there are full instructions here -
http://code.google.com/p/uykfe/

Andrew

(It's fun, although perhaps not too meaningful, to compare this to Uykfd,
which did a similar job in Scala.  That took much, much longer to write, runs
more slowly, is harder to understand, and has more lines of code ;o)