So yes, the summer has started burning down on us and things are not moving as fast as they could (or maybe would in a less holiday-like season of the year), but I’ve been busy adding some new functionality to gmusicbrowser: namely “similar artist queue”. (Some would refer to this feature as “smart playlist” or “smart queue” in our case.)

The new queue-mode I developed retrieves “similar artists” from last.fm and creates a random queue based on the resulting group of artists. This means that you only have to select a first “seed artist”, as we decided to call it, and gmusicbrowser/last.fm will (supposedly) play similar music from your local library. You can also tweak this plugin with the options you already know from the similar-artists tab, meaning a similarity limit (as in: only display artists that are >=30% similar to the currently playing artist) and a result limit (as in: only show the top 5 similar artists).

There are a few catches with this implementation. What might lead to unexpected results for you is last.fm’s mode of determining similarity: it is based on users’ listening habits, not on a technical analysis or genre/tag-comparison of artists. This means that you will get to listen to music in your library that a lot of other people tend to mix with the “seed artist”.

OK, last but not least: the queue automatically fills up, so if a song from the queue gets played (or removed) it automagically chooses a new song for you based on the above mentioned criteria. The cool thing about the queue is that you can 1) monitor what’s coming up and 2) modify it (add, move, remove entries).

This upgrade to the existing artistinfo-plugin is currently available in a separate Git branch (testing) and will be merged after some more testing and tweaking (and hopefully your feedback). Afterwards this will definitely land in our PPA and hopefully upstream as well.