Tag: Spotify

Better than anticipated

Back in the day I’d digitize stuff by taking audio off my receiver and run it into the audio-in on my computer. I was lazy the other day and decided I wanted to try to pull sound directly off the sound card. And that’s how I found Audio-Recorder [1]. It’s easy enough to install and I was able to pull sound directly off the sound card. Nice.

Then I started playing with the Source configuration. It detected all of the expected /dev foo coming off my audio card. Then I noticed it also detected RhythmBox and Spotify as audio sources. I accidentally left it configured to Spotify and wandered off.

This evening I was listening to They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln [2] album on Spotify on my phone. I was rocking out to Mr. Me when I got home so transferred my Spotify session to my workstation downstairs. Bigger and better speakers, the better to share with Elizabeth. That was well and good.

After dinner and then some time sitting out in the rain with my lurvly bride I went down to the Man Cave and started puttering around–listening to the rest of Lincoln on Spotify. I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that the system tray icon for audio-recorder was glowing. So I opened the app, and lo, it is dutifully recording songs off Spotify as I play them. And stuffing the resulting files full of metadata. And organizing them by track name inside folders for each artist. Didn’t even ask it to do this for me.

Brain asplode! I can own the entire Spotify catalog by doing nothing more than queuing songs up and playing them 24/7. At least until I run out of disk. And now I’m one happy Fezster.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~osmoma/+archive/ubuntu/audio-recorder
[2] http://tmbw.net/wiki/Lincoln

Pr0nado

Speedometer’s This is… Vol 1 & 2 album [1] is like a whole album of 70’s pr0n soundtrack cuts. Nothing overtly sleazy, mind you, just chock full of the kind of jazzy funk wah wah plus full horn line awesome that usually serves as bed music (heh) in your higher quality vintage pr0n.

Makes a Friday afternoon at work tolerable.

[1] http://open.spotify.com/album/5bZfAJ3VcRhgjzQmpdtNRL

Spotify Recommendation Engine

Loving the Spotify recommendation emails I get, although probably not for the reasons they’d prefer. The best thing about them is that they give the reasoning behind the recommendations. Based on this you can get a rough visualization of the Eigenvalue matrix they use to make these suggestions. For example:

Simon & Garfunkel

The most successful folk-rock duo of the 1960s, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel crafted a series of memorable hit albums and singles featuring their… (Read more)

Because you’ve listened to Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

This is probably the most novel suggestion I’ve been given. Not novel in the sense that I’d probably never listened to Simon & Garfunkel, but novel in the way the suggestion came about. None of the vectors (groups/bands/artists) used to make the suggestion are close to the folk-rock genre yet if you average out the vectors, I can see how you’d land squarely along the vector that gives you Simon & Garfunkel.

Another interesting bit of vector math is the one that came up with The Clash as a suggestion. Here we have:

The Clash

The Sex Pistols may have been the first British punk rock band, but the Clash were the definitive British punk rockers. Where the Pistols were… (Read more)

Because you’ve listened to Beastie Boys, Jimi Hendrix, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Kinks.

Again, you can see where The Clash are like the pre-rap Beastie Boys with more complex songcraft than most “punk” bands a la Hendrix, with sometimes clever lyricism a la The Kinks. This recommendation also makes sense, even if it is for a group that is not all that far off the beaten path.

Vector analysis and the related mathematics was probably the one subject that completely blew my mind back in grad school. Recommendation engines are truly fascinating things. Not only do they possibly show you some synthetic reasoning, but they also give you some pretty decent insight into the folks who set up the matrix that is being operated on. So even though the recommendations Spotify sends along are pretty middle of the road, they still provide some great entertainment.