Playdar / Tomahawk : the future of the music ! SB should follow

[manatlan]

Just discovered tomahawk (a desktop player) http://gettomahawk.com/
its modo : Multi-source. Socially-connected. Cross-platform. Open-source.

It's just the perfect future desktop player. The interesting behind that is the playdar system : http://www.playdar.org/about.html
(playdar's modo : Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.)

SqueezeBox is the perfect device, and should be compatible with playdar, out of the box !!! (Is logitech is working on that ?)
There is something to do !

Let's go !

[MeSue]

Sounds similar to what they are trying to do with the SMD project.
http://code.google.com/p/socialmusic.../wiki/AboutSMD

[erland]

I can't believe I missed this thread.

I just stumbled on this video which demonstrates Tomahawk content resolution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU9IUJScbqM

This is something I really want, it's exactly how I would imagine my music streaming system to work.
I don't care where the music comes from, I just want to be able to find it and listen to the best representation of the song I'm interested in.

Has anyone looked at the possibilities to somehow integrate this with LMS ?
Is anyone interested in investigating if it would be possible ?
Has anyone tried Tomahawk player so you know how it works ? If so, does the concept work in reality ?

MeSue, you are right that it's similar to SMD, it more or less exactly demonstrates what I've imagined that SMD would be able to accomplish, unfortunately we aren't really progressing as fast as I would like at the moment due to limited development and analysis resources. As a side note, if anyone is interested in something like Tomahawk and is able to contribute as a developer, please let me know because then you would probably fit perfectly in the SMD project.

[manatlan]

Good to hear you ;-)

Tomahawk is fine, but the real concept behind is playdar !!! Tomahawk is just a frontend (with a lot of features too ;-)
Since that time : I've build mine : a playdar server in full python : https://github.com/manatlan/pyplaydar
(just saw that there is a fork of mine : echopipe : https://github.com/JensBee/EchoPipe (which I will test tonight))
There was a java one, but can't find a link (seems dead) : playnode (https://playnode.com/source/ )

btw, I don' use mine ;-( and no others playdars content resolver ;-(
But I continue to believe it's the way to go ...

In fact, I've got my own "content resolver" ! ... On my SBs : I use my lua plugin (described here : http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...829#post664829 ) which communicate with a python server, which serve "UI features" (to the plugin), and "audio content" (to the SBs). Server side is a big mashup of lastfm, musicbrainz, vk, echonest, (web services ...) ... It works, it's pleasant, I use it all days ... and I can listen to what I want.
But I plan to replace my "own content resolver" with a playdar's one ... one day.

I could help to do something ... but not in java ... (I make java @work, and @home for android's dev ... it's boring)
I see 3 big parts :
- Client Side : something like my lua plugin ... I really think that is a good approach.
- Server content : which should be able to list/search artists/albums/titles ... to server content UI to SB
- Pladay server : to resolve audio content

[erland]

Good to hear you ;-)

Tomahawk is fine, but the real concept behind is playdar !!! Tomahawk is just a frontend (with a lot of features too ;-)
Since that time : I've build mine : a playdar server in full python : https://github.com/manatlan/pyplaydar
(just saw that there is a fork of mine : echopipe : https://github.com/JensBee/EchoPipe (which I will test tonight))
There was a java one, but can't find a link (seems dead) : playnode (https://playnode.com/source/ )

btw, I don' use mine ;-( and no others playdars content resolver ;-(
But I continue to believe it's the way to go ...

Ok, I installed Tomahawk and I got to say that I really love the global search.
The browsing is still way to limited for my needs and I'm missing any way to add online tracks to my library, I thought something was available regarding this but I can't find anything except for possibility to synchronize playlists with Spotify.

Of course, in a real situation I don't want to play the music on the laptop I want to play it on the Squeezebox and I want to control, browse and search using an iPad, but I really love the global search concept.

It seems like Tomahawk is the frontend, as you said, but also contains a content server for my own library. Is this correctly understood ?

Let me see if I understand this correctly there are playdar servers and playdar extensions, playdar.org provided a playdar server initially but this is now dead and has been replaced with the Tomahawk initiative. Except for tomahawk there are also other kind of playdar servers, for example the one you have made, is this correct ?

Also, Tomahawk uses playdar for its resolvers but its resolvers have support for an extended version of the protocol, but the extended protocol version is backward compatible with the original playdar protocol so all the resolvers bundled with Tomahawk would also be theoretically possible to use in another playdar server. Is this correctly understood ?

In fact, I've got my own "content resolver" ! ... On my SBs : I use my lua plugin (described here : http://forums.slimdevices.com/showth...829#post664829 ) which communicate with a python server, which serve "UI features" (to the plugin), and "audio content" (to the SBs). Server side is a big mashup of lastfm, musicbrainz, vk, echonest, (web services ...) ... It works, it's pleasant, I use it all days ... and I can listen to what I want.
But I plan to replace my "own content resolver" with a playdar's one ... one day.

Is this something that's specific for your setup or something that could also work for other people ?
Is it something you would be willing to share, either in public or private ?

Does it do the playback through LMS/mysqueezebox.com or do you play the streams directly in the applet without communicating with LMS/mysqueezebox.com ?
Does your applet provide all browse menus and act as now playing screen or do you use standard SqueezePlay applets for now playing screen and browsing menus ?

I could help to do something ... but not in java ... (I make java @work, and @home for android's dev ... it's boring)

Ok, shouldn't be a major issue, I'm most productive in Java but I'm not really restricted to that.
However, I think it's important to choose something that can be built, packaged and installed on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX).

I'm guessing you prefer python ?
If so, is there an effective development IDE for python or am I going to be constrained by using a simple editor with syntax highlighting (in same way as I currently am for perl and lua) ?

I see 3 big parts :
- Client Side : something like my lua plugin ... I really think that is a good approach.
- Server content : which should be able to list/search artists/albums/titles ... to server content UI to SB
- Pladay server : to resolve audio content

For the content service, I would really like to see a combined library where I can have both local music and online music which I like.
What does your python server do today, is it acting as a content service ?

The playdar server would only be used for global search as far as I understand ?

For the client side, I think I would primarily want:
- To be able to do some simple browsing on a Squeezebox Radio
- To be able to do more advanced browsing and searching on an iPad
- To be able to display a Now Playing screen both on a Squeezebox Radio and a Squeezebox Touch

Possibly I might need a computer interface for library maintenance but an iPad app might be enough also for this.

The SMD database is able to contain both local and online music, we have also started to work on a Spotify integration to automatically import your Spotify library into SMD database, so using that might be an option but I'm not really restricted to that. It would also be possible to also use the SBS/LMS database but in that case scanning has to be handled so the online contents isn't deleted when SBS/LMS performs a rescan, there are some things with their latest usage of WAL in SQLite that makes this kind of complicated as it means that you can't do any writes to the database while LMS scanner is running.

Let me know if you prefer to continue this discussion via mail, I just thought I'd start in public as it might attract other people also interested in this area.