Linux Multimedia Hacks

Shuffle Your Music the Smart Way

Use IMMS to weight your music collection based on your listening habits.

Think of all the ways you interact with a computer each day. Any action you take, or even don’t take, conveys some meaning. For example, when listening to your music collection, you might sometimes skip songs. What does that mean? There are a number of possibilities. Maybe you do not like the song that was playing, or it does not suit your current mood, or, possibly, you’ve listened to this song too much and would rather it be played less often.

Is it possible to build a system that uses this information to learn which music you prefer and play it more often? Yes! Intelligent Multimedia Management System (IMMS) is an attempt to create such a system—an adaptive playlist framework that tracks your listening patterns and dynamically adapts to suit your personal music tastes. Plug-ins are currently available for two popular Linux media players: XMMS (http://www.xmms.org/) and Beep Media Player (http://beepmp.sourceforge.net/).

The main feature of IMMS is its complete transparency to the user. It is incredibly unobtrusive—you never have to interact with IMMS directly. Just continue using your player as usual and, over time, IMMS will influence the song selection to cater to your preferences. When your music player chooses the next “random” track in shuffle mode, IMMS weights its choice, based on which songs you’ve played and which songs you’ve skipped previously.

IMMS also offers a number ...