Smarty Pants nickm
Generates a playlist and makes recommendations based on one or more tracks in your library.
This is a sidebar with functionality similar to Genius from iTunes. You can select one or more tracks in your library and Smarty Pants will find tracks that are similar. It is split up into three tabs, the first shows the songs in your library, which you can play in Songbird or save as a playlist. The second has recommended songs that are not in your library, which can opened and played in last.fm. The third is a list of recommended artists along with albums from those artists that are not in your library.
Smarty Pants will try to process lots of songs and artists to get the best results, but this can be stopped at any time if you are happy with the results.
There is also a toolbar button that will simply generate a playlist for the selected track using some default options.
This addon works best if you have the Last.fm addon installed. If you don't have it installed, the artist radio will play from inside a last.fm browser tab instead of from directly within Songbird.
More information about how to use Smarty Pants can be found here.
If you find this addon useful and want to encourage further development, please consider donating.
Features to come:
- Use of last.fm's tag data to improve results
- Tag recommendations
- Added 2 more advanced options that fix the recommendations after changes to the last.fm recommendation engine, results should be much better now.
I love these kinds of addons. One of the things I miss from Windows Media Player or iTunes are features like "Play favourites from..." (WMP) etc. Sometimes, I don't know what I want to listen to. Rather than just shuffling, which often brings up a lot of stuff I don't want to hear, something like this that generates a playlist is brilliant since you can give it a starting point. I'm very happy to see all the more of these types of addons, good work, I'll be following this one closely.
Thanks for this new "recommendations"-type addon. Like alsotop said, these are all invaluable and I'm interested to see where they all go.
I would like to suggest that the addon find similar artists in one's library, rather than just similar songs. I like to listen to full albums, so it'd be cool if the generated playlist had more than just a few songs from each of my albums.
Thanks again.
martin_bighomer - Playing tracks from the playlist tab will be in the next version, but in the meantime you can save the playlist and play it from there. I don't know about playing tracks from last.fm directly in Songbird, I think they only let you play radio stations and not individual tracks but I'll look into it.
topdownjimmy - Similar artist stuff will also be in the next version but I was just going to get the top tracks from the artist and shove them in the normal lists, is that what you're talking about or did you want an option to include all the songs from the related artist?
Nickm,
Thanks for this addon. I surely would like this to focus on MY library as opposed to results somewhere else. I did a search for a song and it alerted me that it found 71 matches, but zero in my library. :(
Hopefully the similar artist functionality I'm putting in will help with that, I'm going to try to make it so that as long as you have something by an artist that is similar to a seed artist you will get some results. But I am working with last.fm data, so there will always be a lot of results that will not be in your library. This can be a good thing though, you should check it out and you might end up loving a song you've never heard of before.
I've had to revert back to version 0.1 as I can't add tracks to the playlist in version 0.2.
Still like version 0.1 but would love to be able to play from the sidebar.....
Oops, should be fixed now.
Working now - many thanks!
Just installed Smarty Pants 0.2 late last week, upgraded to 0.3 today, and I love it! Seems to be working well.
This is so amazing. I love this add-on, as in its the best I have found so far. Thank you so much! I thought i was going to miss genius, but this is way better.
What a great application, thanks for all the excellent work.
This really does improve songbird a lot :) indeed thanks for the good work.
I'd like to request or advice on a new feature though.
When it's generated a nice playlist i'm never quite sure if it goes for the mp3 or the flac file of the same track. Would it be possible for an option to set priorities for certain filetypes? Or just let it find the best bitrate available as a standard? Seems like a good idea for many people.
Best add-on by miles... great stuff... again...
jesperjesper - good idea, I'll add that to the to-do list. I was already thinking of making the track selectable (e.g. if you have the same track on a normal album and a live album you'd be able to pick which album to get the song from), but just making it default to the best bitrate would be much easier to put in.
Thanks Nick. I would like to request a new tab for Scrobble-charts.
Could you please add a new tab “Scrobble-charts”; which generates a playlist from an artist's Last.fm charts, on songs held within your own library, for a single artist. Please see a similar component in the below link for foobar2000.
http://chron.visiondesigns.de/foobar2000/#foo_scrobblecharts
If possible, this would be great.
That should already be possible, you just need to set the settings the right way.
In the general tab, deselect "Find similar tracks" and "Find similar artists", set "Ignore scores below" to 0.01. In the Track tab, deselect "diminish scores". In the artist tab, set "artist top track weight" to 1.00, and "max top tracks" to 50. Add a song by your artist and hit Go. The only thing will be that the song you add will be number 1 instead of being in the right spot, but it's pretty close.
The next version will have "option groups" that will have a list of common option configurations so you can just select it from a list instead of changing all the settings manually, I'll make sure I add this as an option group.
Actually there's a bug in there somewhere, it looks like the list doesn't update after it gets the top tracks. You'll need to change the "ignore scores below" value a little bit to force it to refresh. I'll fix that in the next version.
NickM,
Awesome Job. Better than ever.
Really cool add-on. It's way better than i expected. Now i have no reason to use Banshee!
New tweaks are awesome. I love that it doesn't just make awesome playlists from your own collection but also awesome streamable recommendations. Sheer Brilliance. Kicks the iTunes genius' ass.
I am lovin' 1.0! Great work Nick! Smarty Pants gets better with every release!
Cool extension
The only major problem is the UI integration. The Smarty Pants pane is too crowded with options, is too large, and makes the whole of the Songbird interface seem like a mess.
It would be nice if you could improve the UI. a starting suggestion would be to use the Smarty Pants UI frame around boxes, lists, buttons, etc. darker like the toolbar in the default Songbird feather.
Great job! :)
I agree with chocobanana. How about adding in a simple 'generate playlist' button, in a similar way to this old addon. It'd mean that I don't have to keep switching between lyric master and smartypants.
Another suggestion: Could you add the ability to change or add services/websites to stream the music recommendations? Last.fm is great, but there probably are other services that can stream music.
Maybe it could come to the point where you could just simply paste a url of a website with songs on it and then just stream it from that source if the song is available
Could you include an option to include/exclude certain play lists, genres and ratings? More filtering options for which songs would be nice. Also, being able to add weight to songs with higher ratings would be nice. Not to be too greedy, but it would be nice if the UI also doesn't get too cluttered.
I'll definitely try to work on the UI a bit, but I'm no graphic designer. If anyone is willing to give the XUL a bit of a polish I'd be grateful. I'll add all these suggestions to the to do list but I'm a bit busy at the moment so updates will probably be a bit infrequent.
I'm getting a few incorrect artists when finding ones similar to Self (http://self-centered.org/). It thinks it's searching for artists similar to Mindless Self Indulgence.
That's probably because it does a search by artist first and uses the first match (so that things like Smashing Pumpkins gets corrected to The Smashing Pumpkins), to fix it you'll need to deselect "Automatically correct source artist" in the advanced options.
Very nice! It does a pretty good job of matching up similar songs in my library.
@nickm thanks, that seems to have fixed it though I'm still getting very restricted results. From the recommended artists tab it suggest many artists yet in the playlist tab only two of those have been chosen to create a playlist. i.e. using self again as example, the playlist generated has only self and wired all wrong, yet I have songs from more than 10 of the recommended artists.
First off, thanks for this awesome add-on! I love the idea of the auto-update so you can have a slowly changing smart-playlist; that's brilliant!
My question is if this add-on stays activated when I close the sidebar? It seems to reset all of the options for me when I close it, then re-open again. Not sure if that is expected?
As mentioned a few times previously: I would also love to be able to turn it on, close the window and let it do its auto-updating stuff in the background so I could just open the window to tweak settings or look at something. Maybe creating a Preferences page in the SB Options window, and have the sidebar just show things like the Playlist/Recomend/Artists tabs? This add-on is so customizable (A great quality!) that it can be a little cumbersome, visually.
Thanks again!!
Am I missing something? I can see no "Start" button or any other button related to the Smarty Pants...
@giardello - View>Show Right Sidebar, then play any song like you normally would and hit the Start button in the right sidebar. I actually just check 'Update automatically' and let it run a dynamic playlist.
I agree with smirky in that it should run in the background and use the sidebar for configuration changes. More importantly though, I wish there was a way to filter songs from the smarty-pants playlist. I'd like to be able to limit it to select songs that are 3-star or higher that way I don't have to manually skip over songs in my library that I dislike.
I wanted to create playlists similar to iTunes' Genius. So I selected a song from a band (for example Red Flags and Long Nights by She Wants Revenge) and used the "Best" setting. It then proceeded to create the playlist, sometimes adding 2 or 3 songs from another artist, but never any other songs from the initial artist (She Wants Revenge). I went in advanced settings and unchecked the feature that prohibits songs from the initial artists (don't remember the name, I am at work right now). I started it up again, but then the list only generated 3 more songs, all from She Wants Revenge, and none from any other artists, giving me a total of only 4 songs when I had requested 50.
Why does allowing more songs from initial artist keep other songs from appearing altogether? Possible bug or am I missing something?
Thanks!
That setting is a bit misleading and it should probably be forced on all the time. If it is off, then there is a huge bias towards songs from the same artist and songs from all other artists score so low that they are ignored. The "Best" setting will only get similar tracks and not top tracks so a better option would do use the Default setting, which will get the top tracks from the source artist.
Thanks for the comments guys - I'm starting to realise what people like and don't like about the UI, I will start polishing it up soon.
Thanksnickm, I just got home, and It's called "Ignore similar tracks from the same artist". It is always on by default, I had to uncheck it. So I do want a few tracks for the same artist, how do I achieve that? Can I give less bias to them, so that other artists don't score so low?
You need to turn the "Ignore similar tracks from the same artist" setting back on and enable "Find top tracks". At the moment there's no good way to include the similar tracks from that same artist.
Thanks nickm. I found another issue: gapless doesn't work with Update Automatically...
Regular gapless playback in Songbird, in a playlist, playing two songs that don't necessarily follow each other, lets say track 1 and track 4 of a certain album, will show the song in the player switch to the next one in the playlist 3 or 4 seconds early, but keep playing the first song until the end... then start playing the next song that's showing in the player.
But when playing directly from Smarty Pants, when that same songs gets to 3 or 4 seconds of the end, and shows the next song in the player, it STARTS playing the next song right away, cutting off those last 3-4 seconds of the first song it was playing.
Does that makes sense? I don't know if it's a SMarty Pants bug, or a Songbrid bug...
Oh btw, I tried "Best Results" again, and it does, sometimes, add a few songs from the original artist... cool!
Just want to second that a "generate playlist" button is desperately needed.
Otherwise, thanks for this great addon.
@Hypersky - That's just a general problem with the way I've done the automatic updating, it has to clear and regenerate the playlist each time the track changes so going to the next track won't be seamless.
And I'll start working on a generate playlist button and maybe some other small fixes today. I'm starting to think about yet another new project so I don't know how many of the big things I'll get done, but I'll do what I can.
excelent but please update for 1.3!!!!!
REALLY MISS THIS PLUGIN!
and 1.3 is really faster
This is really a good addon, but complex.. offers a lot.
For the simple.. i see the 'create playlist' toolbar button. I play an artist while in my full library, then I click the button, and a playlist is generated, but it only has the songs by that artist. How could I address this?
Secondly, the icon does not take on the color of the current Feather, so it is different to all the other bars.
Thank you!!
Which artist and song are you trying? It might just be that last.fm doesn't have any similar tracks for the one you're using, but I might have to tweak the configuration a bit.
And which feathers are you using? I'll install them and have a look into that problem.
Thank you for responding.
The artists vary. The bee gees, for eg, only bring back themselves.. the most I get mixed for any artist is around 8.
I have a number of songs for The Bee Gees and Andy Gibb, and if i do a search for Andy Gibb, i get a total of 8 hits with them, and one of those hits is Seals & Crofts.
As for the feather: I am using Ne+ http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1655
May i suggest, is possible, a different icon, like maybe a wand, seeing that Atreiu is using the note icon for duplicate tracks with the exorcist? Or is it possible to get him to incorporate an icon with Pane Buttons?
Regards
@nickm: Nice add-on! I really like it, but could you move the toolbar button behind the search box like New Tab button or Guitar Tab button? And could you do the same with your More of the Same add-on? Please... Thank you!
@ nickm: hey this is probably the one of the best addons in songbird yet could you add the option to block some artists or songs
Pretty darn cool add-on. However, I can't change the options with the feather I'm using (Aero Bird Pro). The options for me is a white background with boxes with checks in them but I have no idea what the checks do.
It may be a problem with the feather I suppose, but thought I'd alert you to it.
@nickm
AH, actually, I like Hiromacu's idea about putting it over to the right, and then it does not matter the color so much. "recommended playlist' has its icon over there and that works pretty cool.
Once the return results issues mentioned above work out, I would definitely remove recommended playlist, as an addon, but I now use it still because of the one-click feature you just did for Smartypants, without having to have smartypants in the sidebar.
OK, a few excuses first
ghos - That looks like a problem with the feather, Ne+ seems to work well even though that also has a white font. It looks like the feather hasn't properly styled tab panels.
ha32 - I'm probably not going to get time to do that, is it an option to rate the songs 1 star and let the rating penalty do its work?
hiromacu - When I first made More of the Same, I had the icon on the right side but someone wanted the icon on the left side so I changed it. I don't really want to change it again because I don't know how many people prefer it on the left and how many prefer it on the right. I think the songbird team are working on making the toolbar layout configurable so hopefully that will happen soon.
deOmega - From what I can see, the icons are different enough to tell them apart so I don't really want to change it, I'll try to change the colour though.
And I'm still looking at the bad results, it looks like it's caused by a low number of last.fm results, but this can be overcome by using a different setting configuration. The solution might be to make the button into a dropdown list that allows a selection of settings but I was hoping to keep the button as simple as possible.
but you can do that for specific artists?
When using a smarty pants generated playlist, whenever it changes songs it pops songbird back to the front making playing music in the background impossible. I'm not 100% sure that its this add on causing it but I think it is, is anyone else having this problem?
Thanks for your feedback...I agree on keeping the button as simple as possible.
Just wanted to drop by and say thanks for the add-on (just realized i hadn't already)!
The "Artist's top tracks" feature is my favorite!
Thank you for this addon! I often make playlists of songs I want to listen to, but they end up being comprised of songs I've recently downloaded and keep playing. This addon allows me to listen to tracks of a similar theme/genre etc without getting bored! :D
My understanding is that when you play streamable recommended tracks, smarty pants opens up a tab with the track in last.fm and starts streaming it. I can't get it to work - the player doesn't come up. I think the problem might that Flash player isn't working in my Songbird. When I open the track in Firefox, it works. How can I get it to work in Songbird?
Hi nickm, When I select a seed song, the playlist sometimes doesn't include it? And sometimes it does, but as it searches, it removes it and adds another song instead, so the playlist is no longer based on the seed song but on another similar song instead? And sometimes it works fine.. what's going on?
Hypersky - it is probably searching for the artist and using the first match, disable the option about automatically searching for the artist. I will make that option disabled by default when I get a chance, it was meant to clear up problems with mistagged artists that start with "The" but it seems to cause a lot of issues.
mulluysavage - sorry I have no idea, you might need to ask the songbirg guys about that
I have a similar problem to Hypersky, but it seems to go further than just removing the seed song. If I select a song, and use the Default setting to create a playlist, all is well. A good playlist is generated from the song. However, if I play a song in the playlist tab, then turn on "Update Automatically", the seed song disappears from the list and either very few or no other songs are added. Then, if I turn off the "Update Automatically" and try and create a playlist from a song using the Default setting again, I get no results and an empty playlist window. I know for sure I have the correct similar artists in my library, and I've tried both reducing the minimum song score and turning off the automatic artist correction, to no avail. I can only use Smarty Pants properly again by swapping to a different right pane addon then back again.
Hi nickm, I noticed it only happens when i choose "best results", that's when the seed song gets removed. It did happen with Radiohead though, no "the" there... I'll try your suggestion tonight.
Im having problems saving the completed playlist in Songbird. It worked fine the first time, no problems, but since then it only saves one or two songs once its completed its list =[
ok, it seems to be working now.
I had changed the "Limit to 125 songs or 3 Minutes", which i changed back to "Limit to 100 sougs or 0 Minutes."
maybe both instances cant be filled in without causing problems.
anyway, great app, love it =]
It will save the playlist until either limit is reached, so it was getting to the 3 minute limit before it got to the song limit and stopping after it had at least 3 minutes of music. 0 minutes means to ignore the time limit and just go by the number of songs.
This is awesome.
I got used to Genius when I was using iTunes, but I don't particularly like iTunes very much, and Genius didn't work all that well...it put "Crooked Teeth" on EVERY playlist I made, no matter if it was seeded from Motion City Soundtrack or Metallica. EVERY PLAYLIST.
So far every playlist I have made with Smartypants has been much, much better about matching songs I like together. Bravo!
A+++ would download again!
in the Playlist results tab I will double click a song to play it but instead it plays the song listed above it.
Congrats on the addon, It's one of this things that onece you got it you say how did I live without it so far?.
One small request, an option to save the "Recommended" list, text file or html will do.
Ref
tedrock - This is probably an intermittent problem, if you close the sidebar and try again it will probably work. It's a very hard problem to track down but I'm aware of it.
ref - Will do (when I get a chance)
Great addon. I'm using it with 'Update automatically' turned on along with Auto mode preferences and shuffle turned on, and I seem to encounter 2 issues.
First, maybe it's on purpose, but in that particular mode the start/stop and reset buttons are all unavailable, so in order to start another session I need to turn 'Update automatically' off and then switch it back on.
Second thing - I seem to get a nice variation of artists, and yet it seems as the first results for most artists are basically very few songs, so along with all this 'shuffelness' enabled I seem to be listening to very similar tracks (which are probably from within the artists' top 5 tracks on Last.fm).
But, again, all in all, really great addon!
Thanks a lot. Yftach.
Would it be possible to get a version bump for Songbird 1.4?
yftach - Yep the reset it turned off for auto mode on purpose. And I'm going to turn down the default for the top track bias a bit on the next version, but if you want better results you can try using turning off auto-mode and trying a different settings preset (e.g. Varied Results).
devonharper - coming in a few hours hopefully
Hey, awesome add-in, but I'm having a couple issues!
It is very slow to make playlists. Often, Songbird locks up while Smarty Pants is making a playlist. Can you do a caching feature like iTunes genius (where your whole library is analyzed)? Also, I experience the same issue when using the side-bar.
I have around 60,000 tracks in my library. It is running on a 3.0Ghz Quad (AMD) with 8gb of Ram (Windows 7 Pro).
nickm - Thanks for the update!
The name, Smarty Pants, is the awesomest parody of the genious feature in itunes. I love it! :D
srlake - Sorry that's just the way Smarty Pants works, I use last.fm's recommendations so that means I've got to make lots of requests to last.fm, then parse and process some large XML files that it sends back. Also because the track or artist names are not always the same, I've got to search through your library for names that are similar but not exactly the same. I'm not saying that it couldn't be faster, but it's just a very different process to what Genius does so it's never going to be as fast to make recommendations.
Hey nickm!
Can you update you toolbar buttons to be 23x20 instead of 16x16 in Smarty Pants and More of the Same for 1.4. (http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Maintaining_Add-Ons/Updating_Extensions_for_Songbird_1.4.1#Toolbar_Buttons)
Thank you!!
Done, Vandelay might take a bit longer because there are some other issues I need to fix up.
Oops, I've got to fix MotS as well. I'll do that first.
Perfect! Thanks for the quick update! And I saw you had trouble deleting images(lol, there so big now!). It looks like since all your images are 'tall', the Delete button might be getting covered up. Here's where mine are: http://s3.amazonaws.com/satisfaction-production/s3_images/136102/Capture.PNG
You might wanna file a bug on it if you still can't get to them.
Yep, definitely not there, I'll log a bug.
The seed song is still deleted when choosing "best results" (on some songs, not all). It's like it's disqualifying the song used to make the list. Maybe somehow making it so that the seed song itself can never be disqualified for having too low of a score?
I'm having a MAJOR problem....Ive just updated both my Songbird & Smartypants & it has stopped working correctly =[
now when i select a song using the default option it only finds between 8 & 20 tracks, most of which are all by the same artist, & then stops claiming it has processed all similar artists & albums. well it hasn't. Ive reinstalled it & nothing changed. is anyone else getting a similar problem, ie; it worked on other versions of songbird & then has since stopped working once updated?? HELP i used to LOVE smartypants & now I am lost without my playlists ='[
I am having the same problem as ziggypink - everything was fine, now I get a few results from the same artist. In the details I can see what I would consider good matches being found, but they aren't added to the playlist.
I'm having the same problem as ziggypink and squid_ca. I get about 8-10 tracks from the same artist, and sometimes 3-4 songs by other artists, and that's it. The results seem to be the same no matter which option I select from Preferences, or which advanced options I toy with.
It used to spit out 50 songs from my library in new time, so this seems to be a relatively new issue.
A separate issue: I use the Aero Bird Pro feather, which is mostly black and gray. All the text in the Advanced Options panel is white-on-white, so I can't read it. The labels for the input fields below the playlist (next to the save button) are also affected.
I am having the same problem.. songbird 1.4.3.. windows 7.
Only gives me results for one artist. No mix at all, no matter what I try.
OK I'll look into it when I get the chance. Last.fm has probably changed their recommendation algorithm again.
Various score problems should be fixed now and hopefully Hypersky's problem too.
wmbenedetto - That's something that the feather developer needs to fix, either that or a feather developer needs to tell me how to fix it.
Hey nickm
Great addon! I have one problem - the options I tick on or off in the display pane do not seem to be persistent (whenever I switch to lyricsmaster, and then back to Smarty Pants, I lose the options I just ticked). Could you possibly add these same options to the tools -> addons -> Smarty Pants -> options menu? This way my options can persist even if I don't have Smarty Pants in my sidebar.
based on 30 ratings
martin_bighomer
great ... I really like it and it's totaly useful!
however, I'm not able to play a song in the normal playlist of this add-on!
In addition, it would be great if a song in the recommendation list can be played without opening a last.fm tab.