Observations and suggestions regarding the new "Infinity" feature

[haehnle]

Dear Volumio Team,

First of all, many thanks for implementing the “infinity” feature! This is very useful and it mostly works well. I’d like to share some observations that hopefully can make it even better.

I noticed several times that the selection algorithm converges on a rather narrow set of choices and gets stuck there. For example, yesterday I started with a jazz piano trio and ended up with seven Adele songs in a row. Today, I started with Acid Jazz, which went to piano music and somehow got stuck here:

It is well know that local search algorithms get easily stuck in local minima. Therefore, I suggest to trigger a random “jump” from time to time to a less likely destination.

I would also suggest to make sure not to repeat the same artist or song, at least not if it was played recently.

The algorithm seems to prefer “popular” songs, so that one often quickly gets into mostly well-trodden territory.

It would be great to have an “adventurous” mode that is not based on similarity and popularity.

Thanks again for your work!

– Reiner

[jsneff]

Indeed. I played ‘Small Car’ by Marvin Pontiac and all the songs that followed had the word ‘Car’ in the title. A nice idea but more work needed to make it as useful as the radio feature in Tidal, say.

[chourmovs_vs]

What volumio need is something like “Don’t stop the music” plugin in Logitech media server, this plugin serve playlist indefinitely and there is various smart options to autogenerated this playlist based on musical distance between tracks ( musicip, bliss, lastfm db, Spotify db…etc). Distance can be theoritical (genre for example) or measurement (musicip or bliss). Of course AI can’t replace measurement but could improve theoritical approach…

[volumio]

Thanks guys for the super useful suggestions We are taking them all into consideration (I like the “Adventurous mode”