Automated play for office environmet

[blasto]

Hi there,

In our office we use a central music system and use FM radio as source. Since most of the stations play the same songs over and over again I want to ditch radio and set up our own music player. I will dedicate a Pc for this purpose and run winamp as the media player.

We have big a collection of music structured by genres like classical, jazz, ambient, folk, pop etc.. While researching the topic I read about (not tried yet) MusicIP which seems like a brilliant tool for playlist generation based on musical harmony.
I would like automate the play (utilizing MusicIP, winamp and any other tool) as follows:

• A playlist with a certain duration, based on a random genre is created daily,
• Winamp is fed by this playlist and started and stopped at certain times,
• Played tracks are noted so that for the next playlist not played ones are prioritized.

I will deeply appreciate your thoughts and guidance on this topic. How can I achieve such an autonomous system? Thank you very much in advance.

[blasto]

Hi,
you can checkout my own solution here

[Victhor]

Mhm... researching what is all this now... (between, some brief tutorial on how to use your files -where to place it mostly- would be fine)

[blasto]

well it's not much of an hassle actually. you can download the binary here.

it is a basic standalone app and should work wherever you run it from. it will create an ini file in its working directory to keep your settings. There is a mini help page inside the program, hopefully it would be enough for starters.

• Below you can see 3 apps running along. Let me introduce the basic functionality:
• MusicIP Mixer is a brilliant software, It analyzes audio files and generates a unique id for each of them. This id is then used to mix match similar songs and create smart playlists depending on various parameters. Smart listing tracks is very popular nowadays and surely with these tools one can create far superior lists in harmony rather than a random shuffle.
  MusicIP alone by itself provides all you need to analyze tracks, create a mix, play it or send it to your favorite player. But you need to do that manually.
• With Mip2Win you can automate this routine without any interaction, please follow:

1. First of all you need MusicIP to analyze your tracks and build its database.
2. You better check "Archive analysis" option from Preferences->General so it embeds the id and you should enable "API" from services
3. It would be favorable to fix your track genres (I grouped my tracks in a total of 19 main genres with mp3tag)
4. Mip2Win can build playlists in any given length in time; you can specify total play time and partial play time
5. partial play time is the length of a partial list; a total time of 12 hours with 1 hour partial time will generate 12 partial mix lists.
6. partial lists are needed if you would like to switch (random) genres in the long run.
7. alternatively you can choose to have x hours of both total and partial list
8. If you wish you can lock the genre for the lists or you can unlock it to have a mix of genres in a partial list
9. Mip2Win will create a pool of genres multiplied by the probability factors you assign and pick a random genre each time a partial list will be formed.
10. First button will fetch genres and the second will build a list with your preferences
11. Folder locations server addresses etc. are in the settings tab.
12. You can schedule list creation and start stop times daily on the next tab
13. The playlist created is presented on the playlist tab, you can manually create and feed your playlists to winamp as well as creating them automatically(scheduled).
14. Last tab contains the mini help page with topics similar to these I mentioned here.

Hope you like it

[Victhor]

Ey! Thanks for the detailed info, that will come handy to many of us who didn't know the app at all.
I'm on the middle of an intensive-work week so I won't be able to look at it in details, but so far the first program scan throwed me all red songs, meaning it isn't ready. I'll check for the next scans later.

Once I get into the program I'll test your plugin, thanks for doing / sharing it.

PS: Those trees remind me a lot of the Winamp Media Library.. coincidence?