lepisma / Blackbird

I am ripping this apart into pieces. Once I finish incorporating streaming media sources in it, hopefully all the moving pieces will fall again together. Also, I badly want to replan the UI.

under development

Exploratory music player

Blackbird lets you explore your beets library in acoustic feature space.

Setting Up

• Initialize a beets library

• Install blackbird

  npm install -g lepisma/blackbird
  

• Install python dependencies

  # Navigate to source (in local node installation directory, or clone this repo)
  cd ./utils
  pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Run blackbird-setup init to initialize configuration files.

• You might need to rebuild sqlite3. See here.

• Compile sass with npm run build if changes are made.

• beets imports will automatically put songs in blackbird database. Following commands are added to beets.

  # Generate sequential features for given query
  beet features
  
  # Generate coordinates from the sequential features using specified method
  beet coords --type [mean, lstm]
  

• Start with blackbird

Music Features

MFCC coefficients of size (20, N) are generated when beet features is called. N depends on length of song, block_reduced (mean) using a block of size (1, 100).

When beet coords is called with mean option, a clipped mean vector of size 20 is used as representation of each song. With lstm option, a keras lstm encoder-decoder model is loaded and resulting middle vector is used as representation. Both cases use TSNE to reduce the 20 vector to 2 and provide coordinates for visualization. Lookout for training notebook and pre-trained models in ./utils.

Commands

• a / artist → Artist mode

  View songs by artist of current song

• am / album → Album mode

  View songs from album of current song

• s <term> / search <term> → Search mode

  Filter using search query. _space_ in query is intersection, + is union, - is except

• f / free → Free mode. View all items

• sim / similar → Sort in-mode according to similarity with current song

• cap <n> / artistcap <n> → Filter artists with less than n songs

• n <n> / new <n> → n recent imports

• r / repeat → Toggle repeat

• slp <n> / sleep <n> → Sleep after playing n songs. Set negative n for reset.

• l / love → Mark songs as loved in last.fm

• lfm / lastfm → Toggle last.fm integration

• d / download → Download music from youtube. First command opens youtube, second lets you check metadata for download. Needs ffmpeg for saving mp3s.

Shortcuts

• ctrl+alt+<right> → Next song
• ctrl+alt+<left> → Previous song
• ctrl+alt+<space> → Play/pause
• ctrl+alt+<down> → Hide to tray
• ctrl+alt+<up> → Pop to front
• alt+x → Enter command (while window active)
• ctrl+w → Exit

Others

There is an emacs package for reading lyrics of current song (./utils/emacs/blackbird.el).

Bugs / Issues

blackbird is under development and therefore has crappy code structure and documentation. Feature addition/removal (and occasional refactoring) keeps happening. Please file issues here.