Author Topic: Is there an MB equivalent to iTunes Genius Mix to auto-create a playlist?  (Read 1987 times)

joninge

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One of the (few) things I liked about iTunes was the ability to right click on a single track and have it create a Genius Playlist, picking as many tracks as you specified (25, 50, 100, whatever) that were related to the starter track in terms of similar period, music style, artist, etc.  E.g., starting with a Beatles track would automatically generate tracks from the Stones, Who, Yardbirds, Hollies, etc, but not anything from the 50s or 90s, nor anything from other genres.  I'd hoped Auto-DJ would do this, but I haven't found a way to restrict it to a specific Genre, or time period; it seems to pull tracks from across my full Library, including classical and jazz.

I've tried using Auto-Playlists to do something similar (Genre is Pop/Rock, Decade is 70s)  but this is still a bit wide for the selection.  I've built Auto-Playlists where Artist is any of Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc., but this excludes all the many good single tracks I have in the Library.  iTunes used to do this all automatically, pulling in relevant tracks I hadn't heard in a long while.

How have other people approached this?  Thanks for any advice!

Jon

psychoadept

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Have you played with the auto-dj settings? I don't know if it still works since last.fm has gotten cranky, but there used to be an option to select similar tracks
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joninge

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I can see that applying Filters to the Library would help, but that really doesn't seem to do anything different to an Auto-Playlist but with the option to vary how close/different the next artist should be.  I was hoping for something more automatic!

psychoadept

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Do you know where to find the auto-dj settings in the left navigator?
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joninge

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psychoadept

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Yeah. Have you tried the tick box that says "only artists rated x% similar by last.fm"?
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joninge

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   You may find this hard to believe, but I've never used last.fm and am completely unfamiliar with it!  So no, I haven't clicked that box so far, as I was concerned that Auto-DJ would pick up tracks from last.fm's universal library, which isn't what I was looking for.  However, after looking at it more closely (and if I understand it correctly) it looks like Auto-DJ will actually just use last.fm's "similarity engine" (to coin a phrase) to pick the next artist and track from my _own_ Library. 
   I just set Auto-DJ up to filter to Genre = Pop/Rock with artists at least 25% similar, and so far it seems to be doing what I need.  Do I have this right?

psychoadept

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I think you've got it. If you find the selections are too narrow, I find that 10% or even 1% can be effective
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joninge

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Many thanks!  I will certainly try other settings; a Jazz selection with similarity = 25% gave me only the starter artist!  I really appreciate your clarity and patience with this newbie!

psychoadept

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You're welcome! Good luck
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Mr. Trev

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This part of AutoDJ is one of my favourite things.

I have my ADJ set for 13% similarity (I can't remember where I read it, but that was a suggested value) and a 15 track gap before an artist can repeat. It works great for the most part. Sometimes there'll be a glitch where ADJ seems to ignore the repeat gap - I haven't figured out why that happens yet. Of course if you're using a pretty obscure band as the seed track, you might not get many matches.

One thing I'd like to see ADJ do is keep using the "next track" as a new seed, just to see if a playlist will naturally evolve. I've though about trying to build a playlist manually just to see what happens.

So far, this route has been the best replacement I've found SenseMe channels - which I would dearly love to see somebody build a plugin to generate them.