Interesting article on Linux.com regarding IMMS, a digital music manager which theoretically learns what kind of music you like and plays it more often.
Intelligent Multimedia Management System (IMMS) is an attempt to create such a system — an adaptive playlist framework that tracks your listening patterns and dynamically adapts to suit your personal music tastes. Plug-ins are currently available for two popular Linux media players: XMMS and Beep Media Player.
The main feature of IMMS is its complete transparency to the user. It is incredibly unobtrusive — you never have to interact with IMMS directly. Just continue using your player as usual and, over time, IMMS will influence the song selection to cater to your preferences. When your music player chooses the next “random” track in shuffle mode, IMMS weights its choice, based on which songs you’ve played and which songs you’ve skipped previously.
IMMS also offers a number of features beyond basic rating. For example, it keeps track of when a song was played last and makes sure the same song does not repeat too often — a common complaint with traditional shuffle-based systems. Moreover, it is able to recognize different versions of the same songs (for example remixes) and treat them as the same song.
IMMS also learns which songs should be played together and which should not. It does so by both watching and learning from the user, and performing acoustic analysis on the actual songs to determine their tempo and spectral “color,” and then attempts to group more similar songs together.
IMMS’s XMMS plugin is in the Ubuntu repository, so I’ve already installed it. But I don’t really use XMMS for general music listening anymore (amaroK is my library of choice), so it’ll be a while before I can tell if IMMS is making a difference or not. But I love the concept, and I want to see this work.
IMMS for amaroK, anyone?
