Lately I’m using mpd instead of a squeezebox as my network music player of choice. The only thing I miss about squeezebox is its integration with MusicIP. MusicIP is a great piece of abandon-ware. It analyzes your digital music collection to discover acoustic “similarity” between tracks. Given a seed song (or songs), it creates a playlist of “similar” songs — sort of like Pandora, but operating on your own music collection. (The notion of “similar” here is based on some undisclosed metric; MusicIP is most regrettably closed-source.) I’ve used MusicIP for years now and I’m still impressed by how well it works. It’s an integral part of how I navigate my music collection.
I wrote a simple script to act as a middle man between MusicIP and mpd. It gets the current song from mpd, asks MusicIP to generate a playlist with this song as the seed, and passes the result back to mpd. You can run it from any machine on your network. Linking this script to a desktop icon gives a nice way to generate a MusicIP mix with one click. Continue reading