GSoC Proposal: Statistics synchronization for pluggable devices and Last.fm

Fri Mar 23 10:05:32 UTC 2012

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 00:06, Matěj Laitl <matej at laitl.cz> wrote:
> Hi Teo, Bart and list,
> as suggested by Teo, I've decided to try to take part in GSoC 2012 working as
> a student on Amarok. My idea is not on the KDE Ideas page, but I've been
> playing with (a variant of it) for months.
>
> Continues a very draft of my GSoC proposal. I'd be very grateful for any
> possible comments, pointed-out omissions or questions that may arise.
>
> Introduction
> =======
> Amarok has an ability to store per-track play statistics such as play count,
> first & last played date, rating and labels. It then has powerful means to
> generate custom-tailored playlists based on gathered statistics (e.g.: play me
> what I've listened to last month) that many users like to exploit. This works
> well when your computer is the only device you play music from. More likely
> situation is that you play music using Amarok at home, listen to iPod while
> commuting and use Amarok or another music player at work. All these 3 devices
> are able to keep track of what you've listened to, but each one only a third
> of it, which makes Amarok statistics more or less useless. This project aims
> to remedy the situation; Last.fm is an online service that can keep track of
> music a user listens to[1] and can help us with a part of this project. Amarok
> Users group on Last.fm has over 23 000 users.[2]
>
> Project Goals
> ========
> This project will implement:
>  * track statistics synchronization between Amarok collections that support
> statistics; these are currently Local Collection and iPod Collection, but the
> framework will be general
>  * Last.fm scrobbling from pluggable media players that support statistics
> (iPods, currently) using the general framework from previous point
>  * ability to synchronize labels from Amarok to Last.fm
>  * ability to synchronize play counts, first & last played date from Last.fm to
> Amarok collections (other way around is already implemented by scrobbling)
>  * GUI dialogue for performing the synchronization/resolving conflicts
>
> Bonus points (what will Amarok gain for free):
>  * ability to synchronize statistics of Amarok and other media player that
> scrobbles to Last.fm
>  * track statistics backup through Last.fm
>
> Caveats:
>  * Last.fm has no concept of track ratings. This can be however worked around
> by special Last.fm-side labels such as "7/10 stars"
>  * advanced features will be only available for Last.fm users; Last.fm is free
> to use, but the data are public which may be unpleasant for certain users
>
> Implementation
> =========
> Amarok represents audio tracks by Meta::Track abstract C++ class that provides
> getter methods for meta-data (title, artist, album..) and getter/setter
> methods for statistics (rating, play count...). These tracks are grouped into
> so-called Collections, where each Collection represents one source of songs
> (iPod, Local, USB Mass Storage..). Tracks from different collections will be
> matched together using their meta-data and other collection's QueryMaker to
> perform the search. Moreover, iPods provide additional data that can be
> used for conflict-resolution: app_rating and recent_playcount. [3] I plan to
> expose these as new capability offered by Collections. This capability will
> also be used to implement Last.fm scrobbling from iPods (in fact, every
> collection that will support this capability), exploiting recent_playcount
> field in the iPod case. It should be noted that I have already implemented
> similar synchronization in my spare time back in summer 2011 [4], but I was
> not satisfied with its iPod-specific design and GUI, so I decided not to strive
> for its inclusion. But I have the code working and ported to Amarok 2.5, so it
> can be used to fast-start this project.
>
> Another interesting note is that scrobble-from-iPod-to-Last.fm was functional
> in Amarok 1.4 days, but this feature got dropped during rewrites leading to
> 2.0, so this will fix one long-overdue regression.
>
> Speaking about Last.fm integration, Last.fm provides rather nice RESTful API
> [5] a subset of which is already used through liblastfm [6] library in Amarok
> to submit (scrobble) currently played songs. I plan to reuse this library and
> Amarok code dealing with it; the Last.fm API is powerful enough to support all
> claimed features. There is already even Last.fm on-line service Collection,
> but it focuses on playing Last.fm radio streams and doesn't handle individual
> tracks. In order to implement actual synchronization with Last.fm, user's
> Last.fm Library (that contains relevant track data) can be represented as a
> new (invisible) Collection or as special case in synchronizer, I have yet to
> decide this design choice.
>
> Timeline
> =====
> [To be done when the general idea is accepted.] Generally: inter-collection
> synchronization will be first and will be done by the midterm evaluation,
> Last.fm support will be second. I'm already quite bound to Amarok community,
> so I can finish the design, iron-out some details and perhaps present some GUI
> mockups during the community bonding period.
>
> If accepted, GSoC will be my main commitment during the summer, I plan to have
> a week-long vacation and a few 3-day trips, but I'm used to work during
> weekends on open source projects, so the vacation will be compensated.
>
> About me
> ======
> I'm a 24-year-old student of mathematical informatics from Prague, Czech
> Republic. I've been passionate about FLOSS since high school and recently I've
> started contributing to a couple of projects (manly KDE related), most notably
> Amarok where I worked on fixing various bugs singe last autumn [7] and recently
> I've rewritten the iPod collection from scratch [8] as suggested by Amarok's
> Bart Cerneels; I plan to submit a review request for this in coming weeks.
> I've been also particularly active on KDE's bugzilla where I've commented to
> more than 300 bugs.[9] I know C, C++, Python, Java, a bit of French (pun
> intended) and some other less relevant languages. Thanks to my work on Amarok
> I have some experience in GUI programming in Qt & KDE libs.
>
> I've chosen Amarok because I fell in love with it last year, and statistics
> synchronization because it is an area where I found it a bit lacking; I'm a
> music enthusiast who dislikes to listen to the same song twice in a week and I
> believe more Amarok users are that picky and will therefore benefit from this
> work.
>
> I can be reached via e-mail matej at laitl.cz which serves as my Jabber and
> Google account, too. I sometimes hang on #amarok under nick strohel.
>
> [1] http://www.last.fm/user/strohel
> [2] http://www.last.fm/group/Amarok+Users
> [3] http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod/docs/libgpod-Tracks.html#Itdb-Track
> [4] http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok/2011-June/032736.html
> [5] http://www.last.fm/api/intro
> [6] https://github.com/mxcl/liblastfm/
> [7] https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/strohel
> [8] http://goo.gl/B3Odu
> [9] http://goo.gl/afJN3

Hello,

I concur with Bart about a hidden Last.fm collection being a can of
worms, and I'm glad you've already proposed a way around that.
That being said, you proposal looks very good. I'd like to see a more
detailed timeline, but you already know that :)
Good job!

Cheers,
-- 
Teo