Using MusicIP with mpd

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