"Randomise" sorting in browse

[mirutoyoshi]

Hi jc,
I think it could be good to be able to get a randomised view of the covergrid results. Perhaps by a sort option.

I find sometimes I don't have a plan of what to put on, so I browse, but always start with the same albums in the browser - ABC or ZYX etc...
Mixing it up would be great to get some inspiration!

[jcorporation]

I like the idea of exploring albums randomly, but I am unsure if this is a good way.

[mirutoyoshi]

No, I don't any players with a covergrid / music browser that do that. There are players that will shuffle by album in a playlist, but that's more like Jukebox mode (which is a very nice feature, but a different one). Websites - youtube, spotify, pandora suggest things (not randomly) in the music browser, but they have huge libraries and use a lot of models based on user data to make those suggestions. I think this would be difficult to work in a personal music player without some online component.

I think a better example are photo library apps, where the landing page is a random selection from the photostream. Photostructure does this as an example. Others apps present older images based on some other criteria - e.g. 'three years ago today'. But the point is that you see something a bit unexpected and you might go explore the library from that 'new' entry point. Now most people's photo libraries are probably bigger than their music collection, and will be less well tagged with metadata, so it could be argued that the 'random' page approach works for photos because of that...

[jcorporation]

Hm, an explore view as an option could be an idea. This view can display albums or songs randomly and/or by some criteria. We can brainstorm here, which criteria could make sense.

Integration of listenbrainz could help to get suggestions.

[john-]

I put a bunch of random music into the queue with the jukebox function and then delete the ones I don't want to listen to :)

[mirutoyoshi]

A few ideas...

If it was just based on mpd internal data, rather than MusicBrainz/ListenBrainz etc, then some tags that make sense to me for filtering the pool to draw randomly from would be:

• Genre (if the collection is well tagged in that regard - mine's not a great example)
• Date (e.g. explore mid-90's music)
• Playcount (show a mix of often played and infrequently played)

If you can use the "tracks you might like" ListenBrainz feature that would be cool. I'm not sure how you restrict that response to albums in your library though.

Similar to the Listenbrainz feature, if you can pull in aditional metadata from Musicbrainz or similar service, then I think something like this would be neat:

1. Show the initial 'random' selection
2. Click on a particular album
3. Get data from "Relationships", "Aliases","tags" etc from Musicbrainz. Maybe even search again on the related artists to get their other bands.
4. Search the MPD library for other albums that match the gathered data and present them

But that's probably a lot of work, and could could give bad user experience if it is unresponsive in step 3 or 4... It probably would need a local database to be built, or be done at the server side. Either way, it sounds like a different tool/project to mympd!

[jcorporation]

Listenbrainz and musicbrainz integration is on the roadmap. I am willing to invest time to enrich the metadata and provide a cool explore feature.

A local database is out of scope of myMPD, we should fetch all data online from musicbrainz. This should be done on server side, so we evtl. can cache some results.

[jcorporation]

myMPD v18 adds home widgets that can display random albums.