Blissify - analyze an MPD library and make smart playlists

Blissify is a program used to make playlists of songs that sound alike from your MPD track library, à la Spotify radio.

Under the hood, it is an MPD plugin for bliss.

Blissify needs first to analyze your music library, i.e. compute and store a series of features from your songs, extracting the tempo, timbre, loudness, etc.

After that, it is ready to make playlists: play a song to start from, run blissify playlist 30, and voilà! You have a playlist of 30 songs that sound like your first track.

Note: you need to have MPD installed to use blissify. Otherwise, you probably want to implement bliss-rs support for the audio player you use.

Installation / Usage

You'll need clang, pkg-config and ffmpeg libraries (including development headers) to install it, as well as a working Rust installation

On Debian-based systems:

$ sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libavutil-dev libavformat-dev \
libavfilter-dev libavdevice-dev libclang-dev libsqlite3-dev

On Archlinux:

$ sudo pacman -S base-devel clang ffmpeg

Finally, use cargo install blissify to install it.

Note: if you are using a raspberry pi and its corresponding ffmpeg (i.e. ffmpeg -version|grep rpi gives back something), use cargo install --features=rpi blissify instead.

All the commands below read the MPD_HOST and MPD_PORT environment variables and try to reach MPD using that. You might want to change it if MPD is listening to somewhere else than 127.0.0.1:6600 (the default). It should be fully compatible with the MPD documentation.

Analyze a library

To initialize and analyze your MPD library, use

$ blissify init /path/to/mpd/root

It will create a configuration file config.json and a database file songs.db in ~/.local/share/bliss-rs. If you want to specify a different path for the configuration file and the database file, running

$ blissify init -d /path/to/database.db /path/to/mpd/root -c /path/to/configuration.json

should do the trick. All the subsequent blissify commands should start with blissify <command> -c /path/to/configuration.json in order to work.

Note that it may take several minutes (up to some hours, on very large libraries with more than for instance 20k songs) to complete.

You can further update your library by running

$ blissify update

If something goes wrong and the database enters an unstable state, you can use

$ blissify rescan

to remove the existing database and rescan all files.

If you want to see if the analysis has been successful, or simply want to see the current files in the database, you can use

$ blissify list-db

Make a playlist

Simple version

$ blissify playlist 100

This will add 100 songs similar to the song that is currently playing on MPD, starting with the closest possible. This will also remove all the others songs previously in the queue, leaving only the smart playlist.

If you wish to queue the songs after the current playing song but keep the current queue, you can use the --keep-current-queue flag, like so:

$ blissify playlist 100 --keep-current-queue

Changing the distance metric

To make a playlist with a distance metric different than the default one (euclidean distance), which will yield different playlists, run:

$ blissify playlist --distance <distance_name> 30

distance_name can currently be euclidean or cosine. Don't hesitate to experiment with this parameter if the generated playlists are not to your linking!

Make a "seeded" playlist

Instead of making a playlist with songs that are only similar to the first song, from the most similar to the least similar (the default), you can make a playlist that queues the closest song to the first song, then the closest song the second song, etc, effectively making "path" through the songs.

To try it out (it can take a bit more time to build the playlist):

$ blissify playlist --seed-song 30

Make an album playlist

You can also make a playlist of albums that sound like the current album you're listening to (more specifically, the album of the current song you're playing, regardless of whether you queued the full album or not).

To try it out:

$ blissify playlist --album-playlist 30

If you wish to queue the albums after the current playing album, but keep the current queue, you can use the --keep-current-queue flag, like so:

$ blissify playlist --album-playlist 100 --keep-current-queue

Make an interactive playlist

Interactive playlists start from a song, and let you choose which song should be played next among the 3 closest songs (the number of songs displayed can be set manually):

$ blissify interactive-playlist --number-choices 5

By default, it crops the current playlist to just keep the currently played song. If you want to just start from the last song and continue from there, use --continue:

$ blissify interactive-playlist --number-choices 5 --continue

Dry run mode

If you want to see which playlist blissify would make without changing the queue at all, or you wish to plug blissify's output somewhere else, you can use the --dry-run option, like so:

$ blissify playlist 100 --dry-run

Metric learning

If you feel like making your smart™️ playlists even smarter®️ , take a look at the metric-learning repo. It gives you the possibility of evaluating the proximity of your own songs, and tailor playlists to your own taste.

Once you ran the tool in the metric-learning repo, you can use the mahalanobis distance to make playlists from the learned metric:

$ blissify playlist 100 --distance mahalanobis

Note that it is all very much alpha development, so if you have any feedback, feel free to submit an issue.

Details

If you are interested about what is happening under the hood, or want to make a similar plug-in for other audio players, see bliss' doc.

Troubleshooting

If you are compiling blissify-rs for non-linux OSes, you might run into an error telling you to use the bindgen feature:

error: failed to run custom build command for `bliss-audio-aubio-sys v0.2.2`

Caused by:
  process didn't exit successfully: `path/release/build/bliss-audio-aubio-sys-fb4d0ec74b3698ed/build-script-build` (exit status: 101)
  --- stderr
  thread 'main' panicked at .cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/bliss-audio-aubio-sys-0.2.2/build.rs:34:13:
  No prebuilt bindings. Try use `bindgen` feature.
  note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...
error: failed to compile `blissify v0.4.1`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `/var/folders/pb/g43q604n6v71kwp_89ccy6840000gn/T/cargo-installoyKiUv`.
To reuse those artifacts with a future compilation, set the environment variable `CARGO_TARGET_DIR` to that path.

To fix this and build blissify-rs successfully, use cargo install blissify --features=default,bliss-audio/update-aubio-bindings.