kellyfelkins.org: the listening project

the listening project

The Listening Project

The listening project is an evolving collection of tools that support my own enjoyment of music. The project has also been an avenue for me to experiment with new-to-me software techniques. I started the project during a perl programming class, as a means to learn and practice perl programming.

History

May 16 2004

View saved page.

Currently Playing On Audiotron: Added a “currently playing on audiotron” section to the top of the page. The first try used the audiotron api to poll the audiotron. This turned out to be a bit slow, so I made it a separate page and include it on this page as an iframe. This way, the main page loads, and the iframe can load at its leisure. Bonus: The iframe even refreshes! I’ve now added this to the right border of all my pages.

Updating Stats Every Minute: I’m scanning the logs every minute for updates. This was done in anticipation of adding a list of most recently played. Don’t know at this time if this will create unacceptable work for the system, but so far it seems ok. The log scanning routines really try hard to scan the minimal amount, ie. what’s new in the logs. There is more discussion of this here.

Circa May 2004

View saved page.
This was a major upgrade to the system. It was almost completely re designed and reimplemented. Some of the changes:

Store Play Information in a Database: previously, play information was written to a text file. A database was thought to provide much needed flexibility in generating the stats for the system, as well as efficiently storin
g stats. Both of these have shown to be true.
Store Open Times, Not Just Open Counts: The thought was that file open counts were a poor indicator of actual play time for a couple of reasons. One, some of the tunes I enjoy the most are long—sometimes the whole side of an album. File opens would not indicate how much I’m listening to those tunes, compared to others. There are a lot of opens that are not listening events, such as when the audiotron builds its index of music. Now that the system looks at open time, the brief opens that are associated with non-listening events can be discarded.
Amazon Associates Links: I’m curious—would anyone view this page and decide to order one of these CDs? So far (mid May, 2004), the answer is no :-). It’s possible that no one has visited the page, other than myself.
New Page Designs: I continue to experiment with the display of the play information. I want the page to convey information and be esthetically pleasing.

To Do

pri	what	discussion/rationale	status
x	web stats	I need to know if anyone is viewing these pages.
2	rate tunes/cds	Play time is a passive way of rating music, but I would like to be more active, especially for individual tunes. I usually play whole albums. If a tune plays that I know I don’t like, and I’m sitting at a pc somewhere or near the audiotron, I’ll skip it. The fact is that on most albums I only like a few of the tunes. I’d like to be able to randomly play any tune that I like, for example.
x	cd publish date	I’m curious. I think the stuff I listen to is a decade old or more… :-}
x	edit mp3 tags	Often, music is mis-tagged. Sometimes the artist is listed in different ways for different CDs, like “The Dave Mathews Band” and “Dave Mathews Band”. Many of my compilation CDs are coded inconsistently.
x	audiotron start cmd	I need to start the audiotron if it is not playing. The queue links do nothing if the audiotron is not already playing.
x	log atron playing in db	I need a list of the last few items played, and I don’t want to wait for them to be added to the db via the samba log scan (though I realize now I haven’t thought this through). Also, I want a log of internet radio activity. This is a big part of what I listen to, and I want to generate stats on it.	partial
x	annotate tunes	The list of recently played is now displayed. Now we need the ability to annotate these, as in rating, or add to playlist, etc.
x	audiotron controls	I’m sorely in need of some basic audiotron controls on this page. I’m playing some fairly iffy music, and it would really be nice to be able to easily say “next track please”, or, in other words, “please stop torturing me”.
x	schema enhancements	need to make a separate artist/cd/tune table, and take that stuff out of the other tables.
x	project history	I want to capture the history of the project for my own grounding and to share with others. I’m interested in the evolution of software systems and so I want to track the evolution of my own systems. Also I want to share that with others.	done
1	recent play list	To implement the above, the UI needs a list of what is currently and recently played. Also other thoughts on this.	done 5/30/04

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I am visiting your page Kelly ! Checking out once a while. There are some really nice stuff but I must say the songs collections are not so familiar to me !
— Priya Jun 18, 01:52 PM #