Smart (intelligent matching, like average bpm) and Dynamic (filtered) playlist?

[mzlink]

Hello.
I found two threads from a few years ago that are relevant:
https://getwacup.com/community/index.php?topic=1373.msg8189#msg8189
https://getwacup.com/community/index.php?topic=716.0

I remember WinAmp had some kind of plugin to analyze tracks in a library so you could generate playlists and it wasn't limited to tags if i remember correctly.
I don't know because I could never get that to work at all (music library was probably too big? - it always crashed WinAmp for me)

Anyway:
The way that i see it, there is two ways to automatically generate a playlist:
The easy method: use tags to filter out things
The hard method: actually analyze the tracks somehow, perhaps integration with some existing service and then build a playlist around for instance "average bpm" or something.

 I'm primarily curious about the state of the tags method, but the second would be nice to have too.

[dro]

That'd have been predixis musicip or something like that which I never liked since it was an embedded version of it's program instead of leveraging the existing libraries that winamp of that time was already providing. I know some liked it but imho it wasn't ever nice to use.

A form of dynamic playlists will be looked into at some point but it's not a top priority vs other things I've already got in the queue to finish & it should already be able to be achieved mostly by playing around with smartviews & the query language to try to get associated results since that's what I was planning on the dynamic playlists to be based around.

-dro

[Aminifu]

I use an old app "MusicIP Mixer", that was last updated in 2008 (https://musicip-mixer.software.informer.com/). It appears to no longer be supported, but it still works and does a good job creating playlists. It takes a long time to create 'acoustic fingerprints' for each audio file, since it's online database is no longer available. It's power tools feature is also no longer working.

Once created, it then uses the acoustic fingerprints and selectable metadata tag filters to create dynamic and interesting playlists. IMO, it does a better job than what Winamp had.

[thisisbbc]

@Aminifu

Thanks for suggesting MIP, first time hearing about it and I've been looking for something like that for a while. It's a bit unclear if it can figure out the BPM at the moment, but the audio fingerprinting analysis seems very interesting (albeit very time consuming).

Unfortunately I'm having quite a bit of issues working with it.
I don't want to hijack this thread but adding some information that may be relevant...

1) MIP won't scan files on mapped network drives without elevated privileges (Start as Administrator)
2) In elevated mode, MIP has no access to mapped network drives unless you modify some registry (See: https://woshub.com/how-to-access-mapped-network-drives-from-the-elevated-apps/)
3) After modifying the registry, analysis still fails on FLAC files, but MP3s seems OK
4) Failing analysis on FLAC files seems like a known issue on exFAT drives. Copying to an NTFS drive may fix some issues, but not always. (See: https://forums.slimdevices.com/forum/user-forums/ripping-encoding-transcoding-tagging/93668-musicip-analysis-in-windows-7-failing/page3)

That last issue is kind of a deal breaker for me as 90% of my library consists of FLAC and copying my entire library to an NTFS drive is just not possible. I would have to do it in batches and it would take forever with the size of my library.

Would be wonderful if Wacup integrated MIP fingerprinting and/or something like Mixmeister BPM Analyzer (this was free a while ago but it looks like they changed their license). Mostly looking for a way to read/add the BPM metadata on all my files and create dynamic playlists based on the sound signature of a song (i.e: 'Find more songs like the selection').

[Aminifu]

Hi thisisbbc,

Sorry for the late reply and sorry you're having problems with MusicIP Mixer and your flac files. Most of my files are mp3, but the flac files I have were analyzed without problems. My files are on a solid state NTFS drive, so that may be the reason why.

Anyway, here is another article about MusicIP Mixer (https://oldmanmetal.com/2019/04/15/musicip-mixer-playlist-generator-extraordinaire/) for any others who may want to try it. It explains how to register the app which will enable it's power tools. MusicIP Mixer will not use the BPM metadata tag when making playlists. But, it's been my experience that using BPM is not a good way to match the sonic similarity of other files, with a similar BPM, to that of a seed song.