Understanding MusicIP moods and recipes

[audiomuze]

I make use of Spicefly Sugarcube in conjunction with MiP headless running under Linux.

Can someone in the know please explain MiP moods and recipes and whether and how they can be used in the abovementioned setup

[Siduhe]

I spent a fair bit of the weekend playing around with this on a Linux headless build (Fedora 10).

As far as I'm aware, recipes have only ever worked on the Windows MIP implementation in Squeezecenter using the GUI and I couldn't get these to transfer across to Linux even by copying the default.m3lib file etc. Would be interested to hear if anyone else has managed it.

Moods I did get to work - my first successful technique was by copying across the default.m3lib from the Linux box to a Windows box (where MIP is set up not to scan or monitor folders) and replacing the existing default.m3lib, making the mood using the GUI and then copying both the amended Linux default.m3lib and the mood.m3u file back to the Linux box.

However, I've found a slightly simpler process to get moods working under Linux headless as follows. Disclaimer (for anyone else who wants to try this), you will need to be comfortable moving stuff around on the Linux system - it is a good idea to do this in a user name other than "root" if you can to minimise the risk of something going wrong:

1. In Squeezecenter, create a playlist containing the songs that you want to use to create your mood. It's best to do this in Squeezecenter so you can be sure the path names are correct, but you could use a different playlist editor so long as MusicIP and Squeezecenter can follow the paths to the music). Name it and save it in your playlist directory (e.g. Happy.m3u).

2. Work out where the MIP default.m3lib is stored on your Linux system. I used "find -name default.m3lib" from the command line (in the top level root folder) to find it. There is a "moods" directory created when you install MusicIP in the installation directory, but storing the mood in that folder doesn't work (at least on my system).

3 Navigate to the folder where your default.m3lib file is stored. In my system it's in a hidden folder: /root/.MusicMixer/default.m3lib.

4. In that folder create a folder called "moods". The lower case name is important - "Moods" doesn't work.

5. Move the .m3u file from your playlist directory to the new moods folder you created (in the example above "/root/.MusicMagic/moods/Happy.m3u".

6. Reboot your system. Stopping and starting the squeezebox server alone doesn't work (at least for me) I needed to restart both MIP and SBS. Under Music Library you should see a new option "MusicIP Mood Mix" and under that "Happy". Clicking Happy will give you a mix based on all of the songs in the playlist.

I don't use Spicefly but Moods should still work using the normal SBS setup even with Spicefly enabled.

Hope this helps.

[ericj]

I was tinkering this weekend with MusicIP on a Ubuntu box. This is very interesting. I am wondering if a similar technique would work for filters? Since I run MIP server headless, I wonder if there is a way of constructing an xml file (old blog posts about MMM suggest that this is the format) and copying it to a location.
Alternately, I guess I could try to get MusicMagicMixer to run under Ubuntu. I tried briefly but got a JAVA_HOME variable not set error. Has anyone had luck with this?
Thanks much in advance.

[mr_hyde]

I was tinkering this weekend with MusicIP on a Ubuntu box. This is very interesting. I am wondering if a similar technique would work for filters? Since I run MIP server headless, I wonder if there is a way of constructing an xml file (old blog posts about MMM suggest that this is the format) and copying it to a location.
Alternately, I guess I could try to get MusicMagicMixer to run under Ubuntu. I tried briefly but got a JAVA_HOME variable not set error. Has anyone had luck with this?
Thanks much in advance.

Hi,

filters in the headless working quite well. Filters are implemented inside the m3lib file. On my setup (QNAP NAS), i have only the possibility to run the headless version, where filters can not be created.

I installed MIP on a windows PC, scan may library and create the filters with the gui under windows. Then you can copy the m3lib file to the linux system and you have to refresh and rescan the library. Then you have also the filters within MIP. (You should have stored the fingerprints inside the music files).

Recipes are not working with the 1.8 headless under linux. They might work in headless mode with the 1.9 beta which is (or better was) sadly only available for windows

[audiomuze]

Thx Siduhe & others for responding. Seems I have s little experimenting to do with moods and filters :-).

On the subject of moods, would anyone care to post their mood files for others to use. I'll post mine as soon as I've created a few.

Thx

[mr_hyde]

Thx Siduhe & others for responding. Seems I have s little experimenting to do with moods and filters :-).

On the subject of moods, would anyone care to post their mood files for others to use. I'll post mine as soon as I've created a few.

Thx

Hi,

sharing the mood files is not possible, as long they are m3u. MIP has to read the files of the playlist. Up to now i was not able to use binary mood files. Here it should be possible for sharing.

[Siduhe]

Ok, so I have got some of my filters working on headless linux, but only by copying across the default.m3lib file to a Windows setup, creating the filters, then moving the default.m3lib back to the Linux headless setup. The filters do seem to be stored in the library file, not in any seperate .xml file.

However, at the moment I can only get filters based on file path to work, not any of the more complex (multi-condition) filters, so need to look at this a bit more.

As mr_hyde says, only binary moods can be shared with others and you have to use the UI to create a binary mood, not the playlist method I described above.

[panos_k75]

Are binary moods supported? Can they be selected through the SC interface?

[cblock]

I have got MMM (i.e. the client) running in Ubuntu. I set it up some time ago but broadly this is what you need to do:

- Install a java runtime, e.g. from the "Ubuntu Software Centre" (or the other choices) install the Sun Java 6 runtime (not the openJDK).

- open a terminal and type 'gksudo gedit /etc/environment' , insert the line 'JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"' into the file and save it.

- close the terminal box, open a new one, navigate to your MusicIP directory and type './MusicMagicMixer'
..and hopefully it will start up!

The client is a bit slower and somewhat less slick than the windows one (and can take some time to start) but it does offer all of the basic functions including filter creation as mentioned above. There is no support for Recipes and it doesn't appear to import the binary(shareable) Mood files

[sander]

As far as I'm aware, recipes have only ever worked on the Windows MIP implementation in Squeezecenter using the GUI and I couldn't get these to transfer across to Linux even by copying the default.m3lib file etc. Would be interested to hear if anyone else has managed it.

I was able to get recipes to work by copying recipes.xml file from a 1.9 Windows install into the same user directory (~/.MusicMagic on my machine) and now I can choose recipes on the interfaces that support them (DynamicMix and Sugarcube) as always with MusicIP its hard to understand when parameters make a difference because when MusicIP is bad, it's oh so bad.

I used to freely copy the databases back and forth between machines until for some reason my production instance just wouldn't scan any more so I would always have to scan on an old machine. The error would eventually always be "[0:00] Fingerprint failed (mis-execution):" when adding any new songs with some licensing failure in the beginning so I tend to be more careful. Since this would persist until I rebuilt the whole db which could take weeks in my case, although I've moved to archiving tags now so it shouldn't be as bad now.

My hope is go to the musicip going on a linux vm on my desktop and then link the config directory to the headless config files on my nas. That way I can use the gui for filtering, tweaking and scanning then refresh the db periodically from the web ui.

I'm responding to this now because I was searching on moods again and I had never come across this thread this before. I've found so far if I make the mood too large the process times out before MusicIP can get back to LMS, but reducing the mix to 7 songs did the trick. I'm trying to narrow it down to see how useful it is. What is nice is once the moods are working and you can see them through the lms ui you can edit and add .m3u files as needed with out any rescans or restarts.

I'm wondering what granularity the moods use? I.e do they use the style/variety from mmm.ini? I will have to play more.

Thanks for this tip another tool in the arsenal in the struggle for the perfect mix!