topdownjimmy's dashboard

A totally new way to browse your music library, the Artist Web media view presents a topographical network of artists.



The arrangement of the artists is, by default, according to similarity as determined from the Last.fm APIs. Artists that are more similar are closer together. Examples of this type of mapping are available here, here, and elsewhere.

Because the initial arrangement of artists by similarity will be fairly resource-intensive, and because artist similarity values aren't changing by large degrees on Last.fm, it will probably only be necessary to re-map the similarities occasionally, either during idle time or when new artists are added, and either automatically or with user approval.

The artists may also be arranged alphabetically, if the user prefers it.

Aside from arrangement, the artist names also vary by font size and color value, based on specified criteria. These criteria can be selected in the preferences; for instance, the font size of artist names can vary by Last Played (i.e., more recently played artists appear in a larger font size), while the color value of the artist names can vary by Play Count (i.e., artists with high play counts are more white, artists with few play counts are more gray). Alternatively, the font size can vary according to Date Added, while the color value can vary by Rating. And so on.

The map is zoomable and scrollable (scrolling probably best achieved with a grippy-hand cursor), and the toolbar in the upper-left corner will also have buttons to conveniently invert the font size attributes or the color value attributes -- in case the user wants to place a stronger visual emphasis on the least played artists, for instance.

Clicking an artist name will focus the tracklist pane on the first song by that artist. Additionally there can be right-click actions and hover info (e.g., a summary of the user's collection of that artist -- total number of albums, last played, average rating, etc.).

This is only a dream of mine. I don't possess the ability to build something like this, but I would be eternally grateful to anybody who did. Fingers crossed.

It would be nice if there were a simple check box in the smart playlist dialog to "wrangle"/collect/force full albums when generating the playlist.

For instance, if I have a smart playlist of songs played in the last 7 days, I would like to check a box that would force the playlist to include not just the songs I've played in the last 7 days, but also the entirety of the albums on which they appear.

The same could be done for artists, so that even if you only listen to one song by a given artist in the previous 7 days (or whatever your criteria may be), the smart playlist will collect everything by that artist.