getmusicbee.com
MusicBee & Add-Ons => Customizations => Plugins => Topic started by: Steven on October 01, 2012, 09:13:10 PM
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I have implemented a plugin that shows recommended artists and tracks similar to the current playing track in the Track and Artist panel. You can perform a number of actions such as finding tracks by each artist in your library, opening the last.fm web page, queueing/playing the similar tracks if they are in your library, etc. You do not need to have a last.fm account to use this plugin.
Its inspired by the Last.fm Playing Track Data (http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=6914.0) website link done by Thorbjorn.
(http://getmusicbee.com/images/forum/RecommendedArtistsAndTracks.jpg)
You can click on an artist or a track, with the default or override action set from the right click context menu.
For artists the actions can be:
- open the last.fm artist web page
- find the tracks for that artist in your library (note that the displayed track count includes inbox files, which dont appear in the library filter)
- find the tracks for similar artists to the one clicked
- if you click using the middle mouse button, then a tab with the artist tracks in your library will be opened irrespective of the settings
For tracks the actions can be:
- as above for the track artist
- open the last.fm track web page
- if MB matches the track to one in your library:
- play now (it actually queues the track next and plays immediately so as not to destroy your now playing list)
- queue next
- queue last/ random
Installation
for MusicBee 3.0+:
- unzip the plugin: https://getmusicbee.com/download/plugins/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin.zip (https://getmusicbee.com/download/plugins/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin.zip)
- copy the files to the Plugins sub-folder of MusicBee
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Hehe awesome Steven. It works great.
I was actually in the process of trying to make this into a plugin myself. Have never done any programming like this so was a hard learning curve. Looking through the API was almost greek to me at the beginning. Made me respect your work even more.
If anyone is interested to see my very early test it's here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kyfq90s32wpwm4s/mb_LastFMTrackDataDll.rar
And no, it can't compare to Stevens work of course :)
(http://i.imgur.com/z2yPL.png)
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This is great, thanks a lot!
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small update - i added the option to open the last.fm page for the clicked track
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this is excellent! thanks.
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I like this a lot, I'm using their actual pages less and less now. Would it be possible to also show the amount of plays I have for the recommended artists? That would come in use if you're exploring a genre.
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Thank you Steven. Another excellent addition to MusicBee.
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Thank you Steven. Another excellent addition to MusicBee.
What he said!
You keep coming up with great ideas. Thanks again
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This is great, thanks a lot! +1 !!
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Last.fm has introduced a new API-call a couple of days ago: artist.getInfo - http://www.last.fm/api/show/artist.getInfo
It provides the option to get the auto-corrected version of the artist name (very handy for cleaning up the local library), artist description from preferred language/locale, number of listeners/plays, the user's playcount for this artist and a whole lot more. It would be great to incorporate that.
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Superb plugin. Really love it. I used MediaMonkey for years and only moved to MB this year. Plugins like this make me ever happier I switched.
You return 5 Similar Artists each time right ? Anyway to increase this and/or also return them in sorted order ? Sorted by number of tracks available to you locally from the artist ? That would be great.
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I did not visit this forum a lot lately, Musicbee is already working great for me as it is.
So I was happily surprized to find this plug-in today, one from my wish list, fine work again from Stephen.
I had used Thorbjorn's webpage until now, which also worked OK.
I have 2 questions:
- like the previous poster: is it possible to configure the number of similar results?
- not all similar tracks shown are actually in my library. An indicator saying so with the found result would be nice.
Gerard
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Love this plugin, Steven.
One minor gripe -- would it be possible to distinguish between Similar Tracks that are actually in your library and those that are not found in your library? Perhaps the tracks that are not found could be grayed out/dimmer in color. I often have no idea which tracks are in my library and which are not so I end up getting the "track not found in your library" error/alert all the time.
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the plugin has been updated so similar tracks that are not in the library are displayed as dimmed
see the first post for the download link and instructions
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This plugin seems quite interesting. Thanks for the update.
I have no a Last.FM account though. Is it mandatory to have one for the plugin to be used ???
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Hi Steven,
Superb work as always :) Thank you!
It works fine in Musicbee 2.0.4663.
A question: on some tracks I get a list of Similar Tracks returned, but on others none. But I do get Similar Artists all the time. Why is that?
Gerard
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Here is plugin's wiki page (http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Last.fm_Plugins). Please update it if plugin is updated.
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I just noticed that this plugin will only use the display artist for searching, even if you try to switch it to another one using the Artist menu.
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I have this comment:
sometimes an artist is playing a song together with another artist. I have the individual artist(s) in my music library, but it is not found as a similar artist.
Example: 'Marc Glenroy' shows the combo 'Ed Starink Peter Weekers' as a similar artist. I have 'Ed Starink' in my music library, but he is not shown . . .
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This plugin is an excellent idea, so it's really unfortunate that LastFM's recommendations are pants. No music service developer (in the whole universe) appears to understand that a similar track is not necessarily a track from the same genre or band. Or from a band that comes from the same town or genre. Yet that seems to be the only method used by LastFM.
Example: When I play "Tonight Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, I might add tracks that are uplifting, melodic, and maybe a little bit dramatic or 'athem' like. I could also throw in a suitable love song. Examples:
1. Bat For Lashes - Daniel
2. Elbow - One Day Like This
3. The Divine Comedy - Tonight We Fly
4. Aha - The Sun Always Shines On TV
5. INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
But instead it recommends:
1. The Smashing Pumpkins - Zero
2. The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
3. Weezer - Buddy Holly
4. Beck - Loser
5. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
6. Weezer - Say It Ain't So
Now, you could put group 2 onto a playlist, but most of them don't really go with Tonight Tonight. But the songs in the first group (which uses my own tags + algorithm) would have some hope of fitting together in the same playlist, perhaps with some judicial padding or editing.
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Re: raffraffraff
That's the reason I stick to Musicbee 2.0.4663, with MusicIP selected as AutoDJ for continuous playing.
It's not ideal either but works to my satisfaction.
To have a visual link back to my library and discover a new band every now and then, I use the Recommendations plugin.
Gerard
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This plugin is an excellent idea, so it's really unfortunate that LastFM's recommendations are pants. No music service developer (in the whole universe) appears to understand that a similar track is not necessarily a track from the same genre or band. Or from a band that comes from the same town or genre. Yet that seems to be the only method used by LastFM.
Example: When I play "Tonight Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, I might add tracks that are uplifting, melodic, and maybe a little bit dramatic or 'athem' like. I could also throw in a suitable love song. Examples:
1. Bat For Lashes - Daniel
2. Elbow - One Day Like This
3. The Divine Comedy - Tonight We Fly
4. Aha - The Sun Always Shines On TV
5. INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
But instead it recommends:
1. The Smashing Pumpkins - Zero
2. The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings
3. Weezer - Buddy Holly
4. Beck - Loser
5. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
6. Weezer - Say It Ain't So
Now, you could put group 2 onto a playlist, but most of them don't really go with Tonight Tonight. But the songs in the first group (which uses my own tags + algorithm) would have some hope of fitting together in the same playlist, perhaps with some judicial padding or editing.
Hello, i understand what you're saying, i made a post with almost similar subject / request here (http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=7635.0).
My wish was to be able to listen to similar kind of tracks, using the genre tags.
The only thing that would need to be implemented is a function where we could indicate which genre is the "neighbor" of another.
Then enable a new shuffling option, or a new kind of playlist, where the tracks will only be played following a neighbor genre (or the same genre).
For people like me that doesn't tag my genres in a too much "blocky" way, with enough nuances, this system would be a great way to listen smoothly to a lot of songs.
Because you won't pass from an ambient song to an aggressive one.
It would just take some minutes to the user to configure relations between its genres.
What do you think about it ?
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My wish was to be able to listen to similar kind of tracks, using the genre tags. The only thing that would need to be implemented is a function where we could indicate which genre is the "neighbor" of another.
I'd bet that the system you describe already exist, but the problem, as I see it, is that genres themselves are inadequate to describe music. There are some exceptions where a whole genre is pretty homogeneous in its sound and in its themes. To my ears, rap is one example. Its sound is generally beats + samples + rhyming speech. Its themes don't vary much outside violence, misogyny, self-importance or overindulgence. Aside from rap and a few other exceptions, genres pigeon hole bands too much. Most decent artists break free from their ascribed genre, sometimes several times per album. Therefore genres are useless.
LastFM tags for Karma Police as Indie, Rock and Alternative. What does that tell you? Nothing much really. My tags for Karma Police are: Piano, Male Vocals, Melancholy, Downtempo, Beautiful, Dark. However, very few other people tag their music using adjectives, so it's almost impossible for me to use them to discover new music that other people have tagged. I can, however, use them within my own collection to create a playlist that matches the mood I'm in. I'm willing to spend a lot of time tagging tracks - its is essentially a never ending task. But this is the only way I know how to listen to music. I would go as far as saying that if my NAS broke and my backups weren't working, given a choice between recovering my music files without metadata, or the metadata without the music, I'd take the latter. You can always get the audio files again, but years of meticulous tagging can't be replaced.
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My wish was to be able to listen to similar kind of tracks, using the genre tags. The only thing that would need to be implemented is a function where we could indicate which genre is the "neighbor" of another.
I'd bet that the system you describe already exist, but the problem, as I see it, is that genres themselves are inadequate to describe music. There are some exceptions where a whole genre is pretty homogeneous in its sound and in its themes. To my ears, rap is one example. Its sound is generally beats + samples + rhyming speech. Its themes don't vary much outside violence, misogyny, self-importance or overindulgence. Aside from rap and a few other exceptions, genres pigeon hole bands too much. Most decent artists break free from their ascribed genre, sometimes several times per album. Therefore genres are useless.
LastFM tags for Karma Police as Indie, Rock and Alternative. What does that tell you? Nothing much really. My tags for Karma Police are: Piano, Male Vocals, Melancholy, Downtempo, Beautiful, Dark. However, very few other people tag their music using adjectives, so it's almost impossible for me to use them to discover new music that other people have tagged. I can, however, use them within my own collection to create a playlist that matches the mood I'm in. I'm willing to spend a lot of time tagging tracks - its is essentially a never ending task. But this is the only way I know how to listen to music. I would go as far as saying that if my NAS broke and my backups weren't working, given a choice between recovering my music files without metadata, or the metadata without the music, I'd take the latter. You can always get the audio files again, but years of meticulous tagging can't be replaced.
I said the same thing a while ago :)
Sometimes tags are more precious than music files
I spent a good deal of time manually tagging my classical music collection, so I can understand how you feel about that.
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My wish was to be able to listen to similar kind of tracks, using the genre tags. The only thing that would need to be implemented is a function where we could indicate which genre is the "neighbor" of another.
I'd bet that the system you describe already exist, but the problem, as I see it, is that genres themselves are inadequate to describe music. There are some exceptions where a whole genre is pretty homogeneous in its sound and in its themes. To my ears, rap is one example. Its sound is generally beats + samples + rhyming speech. Its themes don't vary much outside violence, misogyny, self-importance or overindulgence. Aside from rap and a few other exceptions, genres pigeon hole bands too much. Most decent artists break free from their ascribed genre, sometimes several times per album. Therefore genres are useless.
LastFM tags for Karma Police as Indie, Rock and Alternative. What does that tell you? Nothing much really. My tags for Karma Police are: Piano, Male Vocals, Melancholy, Downtempo, Beautiful, Dark. However, very few other people tag their music using adjectives, so it's almost impossible for me to use them to discover new music that other people have tagged. I can, however, use them within my own collection to create a playlist that matches the mood I'm in. I'm willing to spend a lot of time tagging tracks - its is essentially a never ending task. But this is the only way I know how to listen to music. I would go as far as saying that if my NAS broke and my backups weren't working, given a choice between recovering my music files without metadata, or the metadata without the music, I'd take the latter. You can always get the audio files again, but years of meticulous tagging can't be replaced.
I said the same thing a while ago :)
Sometimes tags are more precious than music files
I spent a good deal of time manually tagging my classical music collection, so I can understand how you feel about that.
Maybe the system i described already exist in Musicbee, but nobody has been able to tell me where ^^
Other than that, i understand your explanation about the genre tags, i also tag mine, track by track and not by album or by artists.
But the fact is that having too many tags or too much complex tags come to not serve you as good as you think it will.
I mean it happened to be my case.
Over tagging my tracks one by one was fastidious and time-eating, when it finally appeared that, at a certain level, the things that differentiate a genre from an other were simply the group or the artist themselves ^^
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"You can click on an artist or a track, with the default or override action set from the right click context menu."
I don't any such options on right click.
(http://s12.postimg.org/yupuf8p4t/mb2.png) (http://postimage.org/)
The usual 'search>find similar' only shows me option from my library but not from Last.FM
I have properly installed the plugin and it shows up in the plugin screen.
UPDATE:
Found it! Sorry for the false alarm :)
(http://s7.postimg.org/sgticr92j/mb3.png) (http://postimage.org/)
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Hey Steven!
Is this a bug?
I hardly get similar tracks listed and instead an artist picture from the last recommended artist is moved below the first recommended artist and no similar tracks.
(http://i.imgur.com/SzvIBOl.png)
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;D I hope this works for me! If it does, it will be the greatest thing since sliced bread, seriously. It's something I really wanted & desperately miss about last.fm after they decided to be idiots & remove their main function (radio) and since I have SO much music, I suspect it would be great for me. <3
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for musicbee 3 only:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dg2o1e9wnoky6ad/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin_%28for_MB_V3%29.zip
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OK what am I doing wrong?
I downloaded the v3 plugin and when I try to enable it an error pops up:
Could not load file or assembly file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\MusicBee\Plugins\mb_LastFMRecommendationsPlugin.dll or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Execption from (it cuts off here)
Same thing happens for Addtional Tagging Tools (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)
and the v3 last.fm stats & web browser plugins as well (Exception from HRESULT: (cuts off here)
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OK what am I doing wrong?
I downloaded the v3 plugin and when I try to enable it an error pops up:
Could not load file or assembly file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\MusicBee\Plugins\mb_LastFMRecommendationsPlugin.dll or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Execption from (it cuts off here)
Same thing happens for Addtional Tagging Tools (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)
and the v3 last.fm stats & web browser plugins as well (Exception from HRESULT: (cuts off here)
same here
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Maybe a silly question, but are you running MusicBee 3.0?
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assuming you guys are using the MBv3 version of this plugin
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dg2o1e9wnoky6ad/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin_%28for_MB_V3%29.zip
then the next most likely thing is the plugin is probably blocked. In windows explorer, right click on the file/ Unblock
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Maybe a silly question, but are you running MusicBee 3.0?
Yep, latest version.
assuming you guys are using the MBv3 version of this plugin
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dg2o1e9wnoky6ad/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin_%28for_MB_V3%29.zip
then the next most likely thing is the plugin is probably blocked. In windows explorer, right click on the file/ Unblock
Yeah, those plugins were blocked. Thanks.
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for musicbee 3 only
i have made a change so the Last.fm recommendations panel is now accessed from the Services node in the lest navigator and shows in the entire main panel
http://www.mediafire.com/download/dg2o1e9wnoky6ad/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin_%28for_MB_V3%29.zip
you will need the very latest MB3 version:
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_0/MusicBee3_Patched.zip
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Love this.. Great job..
Any chance you can increase the number of similar artists & similar tracks.
Thanks
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I take the no reply as a not going to happen..
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Thank you for the nice plugin. I often use it and found out, that it cannot find artist names with "&" e.g. Belle & Sebastian.
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I am using Musicbee 3, and I can't find how to implement the bottom panel like I used to have. I am attaching a photo.
Please let me know how I can get this back, because this panel is where the last.fm recommendations were, and other tabs that I liked to use.
Thanks!
(http://getmusicbee.com/images/forum/RecommendedArtistsAndTracks.jpg)
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I am using Musicbee 3, and I can't find how to implement the bottom panel like I used to have.
That used to be supported until v2.5 but no longer supported from v3 on as MB's web browser feature is now separated to a plugin. Instead you get web links from context menu in now playing tab that opens up the link in web browser tab (if you have installed the web browser plugin) or in your default web browser (without the plugin).
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Somehow this plugin stopped working today. Anyone has similar experience? Plugin got corrupted somehow and downloading again solved the problem
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Will this funtion ever come back to MusicBee?
I would love to see the Recommendations all the time in a PANEL and not only in a special TAB.
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I'm resurrecting this old topic, because I'd like to know if you can indeed have the Last.fm related artist information on the Now Playing page/tab. This way we would have a view very similar to https://roonlabs.com/
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Where can i find the Tracks and Artist Panel in Musicbee? Or can it be shown in another way? Tried the Panel settings, right click: nothing. Maybe i am to blind to see. I really like to use this incredible feature. The plugin is installedand activated, Musicbee Version 3.3.7165 P.
Could someone help, please? Thanks in advance!
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Where can i find the Tracks and Artist Panel in Musicbee? Or can it be shown in another way? Tried the Panel settings, right click: nothing. Maybe i am to blind to see. I really like to use this incredible feature. The plugin is installedand activated, Musicbee Version 3.3.7165 P.
Could someone help, please? Thanks in advance!
Have your read #39? :-)
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I realize this plugin isn't a high priority item and probably hasn't even been looked at in a very long while, but I've recently rediscovered this plugin and am having a good time using it. Three suggestions come to mind.
1. The list of "Similar Tracks" being in columns like it is now is really not functional because the track names are mostly truncated to the point that it's impossible to know what they are. I'd ask that Similar Tracks be one or two columns at most or at least that the entries expand in a tool tip when you hover over them so you can read them.
2. Most artists have a very brief section of their biography displayed with "read more on last.fm" at the end. There's no way through the plugin to get to the full biography.
3. Under Similar Artists clicking on the similar artist will either bring you to that artist in your library or that artist at last.fm depending on your choice, but there's no way to do either of these things for the artist that you're actually listening to at the time (the one the page is based on).
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You can already do (3) using right click on the header bar but i have now also added click support on the artist name.
For (1) I have tweaked the handling do it uses 2 columns for each artist column
For (2) you can now click on Read more... and it will open the last.fm wiki page in your default browser
https://www.mediafire.com/file/m8387radlr0fkv9/mb_LastFmRecommendationsPlugin.zip/file
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Beautiful stuff. Thanks!
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Sorry to dig up an old topic, but I found a minor issue with this plug-in, Multiple artists
Perhaps my fault since I sometimes a track with multiple artists seperated by a semicolon (;), especially if an artist goes by their real name and stage name, or if multiple people made the song (musician + vocalist, collaborators, etc)
It seems like the plug in searches strictly for whatever string is in the Artist field, so when there are multiple artist on a track, it will search for all of that text as one search query.. It would be handy if you could choose which artist it searched for or at the very least, force it to only include a string before the first Semicolon
Below is a track by BLANKFIELD and Doragon Entertainment. To be honest, the tracks here are technically all made by BLANKFIELD and Doragon Entertainment would maybe fall under a Publisher at best, But I think this tag info was already in the tracks from the official soundtrack. I probably should just remove the second artist in the specific case, but I have many other tracks where I feel extra artists are necessary and this plug-in would fail in finding the right artist.
(https://i.imgur.com/8uMv29j.png)