Announce: Squeeze Display for Android

[erland]

- Any plans to add support for internet radio artwork?

Do you mean showing the station logo or something else ?

- It might be interesting to combine this with some sort of screensaver dock mode. In other words, I put my tablet on it's dock and instead of switching to just a floating clock, it autodims but displays both a clock and the artwork.

Not sure I understand exactly what you mean.

I've thought about launching Squeeze Display when you connect it to the dock and I've also thought about having some kind of clock mode when nothing is playing but it sounds like you want something different ?

Could you explain what you like to see on the tablet when:
1. It's in the dock and something is playing on the Squeezebox
2. It's in the dock and nothing is playing on the Squeezebox
3. It's not in the dock and something is playing on the Squeezebox
4. It's not in the dock and nothing is playing on the Squeezebox

[mherger]

> I've now released a 1.1.0 version, should appear in a few hours or so,
> the changes are:

Still didn't get it this morning...

> - Standard album cover is now shown initially when a new album is
> played.

Looking forward to this: right now I see our ugly radio tower lack of
artist artwork on last.fm, but the stream would provide its own album
artwork (actually: my plugin would pull it from last.fm ;-)): "Good to be
me" by "Uncle Kracker Feat. Kid Rock". It might be helpful to split
artists by "feat." if nothing is found otherwise.

A few more tricks I apply in my plugin to improve reliability (in case
nothing's found by default):

- split artists by "feat." or "a.k.a."

- I started to build an "alias" list for commonly mis-tagged artists, eg.
many of "beatles" vs. "the beatles" style:
"b-52's" => [ "the b-52's" ],
pink => [ 'p!nk' ],
'freda goodlett' => [ 'funky brotherhood', 'funky brotherhood & freda
goodlett' ],
kesha => [ 'ke$ha' ],
'earth wind and fire experience' => [ 'earth wind and fire' ],
'mothers pride and huri hurban' => [ 'mothers pride' ],
'beyonce' => [ 'beyoncé' ],
'beyonce knowles' => [ 'beyonce', 'beyoncé' ],
'rasmus' => [ 'the rasmus' ],
"youssou n'dour with cirkus" => [ "youssou n'dour", 'cirkus' ],
'sina und steff la cheffe' => [ 'sina', 'steff la cheffe' ],
'legendary lightness' => [ 'the legendary lightness' ],
'mama rosin and hipbone slim' => [ 'mama rosin', 'hipbone slim' ],
'brandy butler and the fonxionaires' => [ 'the fonxionaires feat. miss
brandy butler' ],
'pamela mendez' => [ 'pamela méndez' ],
'rambling wheels' => [ 'the rambling wheels' ],
'john k.samson' => [ 'john k. samson' ],
'moondog show' => [ 'the moondog show' ],
'cee lo green' => [ 'cee-lo', 'cee-lo green' ],
'b.o.b.' => [ 'b.o.b' ],
'die kummerbuben' => [ 'kummerbuben' ],
'yves la rock' => [ 'yves larock' ],
'jackson five' => [ 'the jackson 5', 'jackson 5', 'the jackson five' ],
'brand new heavies' => [ 'the brand new heavies' ],
'jason derulo' => [ 'jason derülo' ],
'carl barat' => [ 'carl barât' ],
'm.ward' => [ 'm. ward' ],
'zueri west' => [ 'züri west', 'zuri west' ],
'tone loc' => [ 'tone-l�c', 'tone-loc', 'tone l�c' ],
'tony! toni! tone!' => [ 'tony toni toné', 'tony! toni! toné!' ],
'duke spirit' => [ 'the duke spirit' ],
'wombats' => [ 'the wombats' ],
'jonsi' => [ 'jónsi' ],
'rolling stones' => [ 'the rolling stones' ],
"salt'n'pepa" => [ 'salt-n-pepa' ],

- I started to build a blacklist of "broken" images. Below images all are
1x1 pixel images showing nothing:
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0002U87LW.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' => 1,
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000BGUD0K.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' => 1,
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00000JAUH.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' => 1,
'http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000BPPVNK.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_V60798117_.jpg'
=> 1,
'http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B0000CC7HP.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' =>
1,
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000E1E7Q8.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg' => 1,
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000AD1SAI.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' => 1,
'http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00006IR69.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg' => 1,

I'm keeping all of this on my web server. This allows me to tweak the
performance of the plugin without rolling out new builds. But this
wouldn't scale if my plugin was a little more successful (it's for a local
radio station in a small country - no risk there ;-)). Maybe you could
provide such rules in an xml file online, which the app would download
every now and then?

--

Michael

[mherger]

Another featuring breaking the logic in the app: "K'naan feat. Nelly
Furtado". Radio stations are a hard nut to crack for this kind of app. Not
only do they not always tag correctly, but they play different stuff than
you'd have in your library you test with ;-).

--

Michael

[mherger]

Heh... this morning's program is full of those exceptions: third in a row.
This time the "the" case: "bianca story" returns nothing, is known as "the
bianca story" on last.fm.

I just checked the api: while getImages wouldn't return anything, the
getInfo query would return information for "the bianca story", including
some artwork. Might be another fallback you'd want to try.

--

Michael

[mherger]

Your app just caused me to fix tags on about 90% of my Rolling Stones
tracks. I wasn't using the "The" prefix, causing last.fm to return about
four images only, three of which were of those large, red "fix your tags"
images :-).

--

Michael

[Mike Meyer]

I know the Kindle Fire is 'Android'ish. Any idea if this would work on one of those? Looks pretty cool.

[mherger]

> I know the Kindle Fire is 'Android'ish. Any idea if this would work on
> one of those? Looks pretty cool.

It does. I use some backup tool to copy the .apk to dropbox, from where I
install it on the Kindle.

--

Michael

[erland]

> I know the Kindle Fire is 'Android'ish. Any idea if this would work on
> one of those? Looks pretty cool.

It does. I use some backup tool to copy the .apk to dropbox, from where I
install it on the Kindle.

I've published a zip with the apk on my download page for users who don't have access to Google Play (Android Market)
http://erland.isaksson.info/download

Unfortunately my web application for the download page doesn't support apk format directly at the moment, so you have to download the zip, unzip it and make the apk file accessible to Kindle Fire in a suitable way.

Does Kindle Fire support installation of an apk directly from a web page ?

Users which have access to Google Play (Android Market) should get it from there.

By the way, the 1.1.0 version seems to be available on Google Play (Android Market) now.

[Mark Miksis]

Do you mean showing the station logo or something else ?

I mean show artwork like Radiotime aka Tunein does

Not sure I understand exactly what you mean.

I've thought about launching Squeeze Display when you connect it to the dock and I've also thought about having some kind of clock mode when nothing is playing but it sounds like you want something different ?

Could you explain what you like to see on the tablet when:
1. It's in the dock and something is playing on the Squeezebox
2. It's in the dock and nothing is playing on the Squeezebox
3. It's not in the dock and something is playing on the Squeezebox
4. It's not in the dock and nothing is playing on the Squeezebox

Haven't really thought it through, but I guess I mean:
1) A special screensaver with both a clock and artwork
2) The normal dock clock screensaver
3) and 4) Nothing

[mherger]

>> Do you mean showing the station logo or something else ?
>
> I mean show artwork like Radiotime aka Tunein does

FWIW: I've been playing with the thought of doing this as a server side
plugin. I did it for a local station to start with.

But in my experience it's not easy to do right, and last.fm probably isn't
the best solution for this. Eg. the key for an artist is his name. There's
not much you can do if you happen to have an artist with a non unique
name. There's a rather popular pop band in Switzerland called Pegasus. And
they didn't do their homework when choosing that name. There's another one
in Germany, doing "power metal". And a hardcore band. The biography is for
the Swiss group, while most pictures are for the hardcore band etc.

The good news is that TuneIn does provide this feature in their API.

Erland - if you're interested in my Perl code for this feature, let me
know. There are a few tweaks to work around above issues (optimizing for
the Swiss music scene), but in general it does work pretty well already
for pop/rock.

--

Michael