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.
#!/bin/bash # Richard Taylor 26.May.2013 # A script to generate a MusicIP playlist for mpd, using # the current song as the seed. # Prerequisites: # 1) musicIP server installed in headless mode somewhere on the # network and answering on http://MIPHOST:MIPPORT # 2) mpd running somewhere on the network # 3) mpc installed on localhost (with the MPD_HOST environment # variable set accordingly, if your mpd isn't on localhost) # 4) curl installed on localhost # Set these to match your setup: MIPHOST=localhost MIPPORT=10002 MUSICDIR='\/tunes\/' # music root folder (slashes must be escaped) MIXSIZE=12 MIPURL="http://$MIPHOST:$MIPPORT/api/mix" # Use mpc to check if mpd is currently playing: if mpc | grep -q "playing" then echo "mpd playing; using current song as seed" mpc -q crop else echo "mpd not playing; using last song in playlist as seed" fi ## Get the last song in the current playlist; mpc reports relative ## paths but MusicIP expects absolute paths, so use sed to prepend ## MUSICDIR to the path: SEED=`mpc -f "%file%" playlist | tail -n 1 | sed -e "s/^/$MUSICDIR/"` # Uncomment this to see the communication with the MusicIP server: #curl -v -G -d size=$MIXSIZE --data-urlencode "song=$SEED" "$MIPURL" # Use curl to request a playlist from the MusicIP server; # the result is a list of full paths to music files. Since mpc # expects paths relative to MUSICDIR, we use sed to strip the # leading MUSICDIR from the path before passing the playlist to mpc. # The first song in the playlist should be the seed, so we remove # it since it's already at the end of the current playlist. curl -G -d size=$MIXSIZE --data-urlencode "song=$SEED" "$MIPURL" | \ sed -e "s/$MUSICDIR//" | tail -n +2 | mpc add
By the way, spicefly has loads of good info about MusicIP and how to set it up, including documentation of the server API.