Blissify

Blissify is a wrapper around Bliss to compute and store values in an SQLite database.

It is done in an attempt to bind Bliss to MPD to be able to play smooth mixes with MPD, à la Grooveshark radio.

Dependencies

To build it you will need sqlite3, plus the required dependencies from bliss (see https://github.com/Polochon-street/bliss).

Build

git clone --recursive https://github.com/phyks/blissify
cd blissify; mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..
make

This will build a blissify executable.

Usage

This repo contains several codes and scripts.

The main blissify executable

The main blissify executable can be used to compute the values necessary to use Bliss for various song files and store them in a SQLite database.

This executable takes a first argument being the basepath and a list of filenames relative to this basepath as argument. It will compute values using Bliss and store them in a SQLite database located in $XDG_DATA_HOME/blissify/db.sqlite3 (defaults to ~/.local/share/blissify/db.sqlite3).

You can do whatever you want with this db afterwards.

The MPD server-side script

In the mpd/ folder of this repo, you will find a server.py script. This is a simple Python script to easily build the database from your MPD music library. It calls blissify under the hood, so note that the blissify executable SHOULD be in your $PATH.

It takes a mpd_root argument to set the top path of your MPD music library. You can use either

• --full-rescan to purge the db and perform a full scan of your MPD music library.
• --rescan-errored to scan failed files stored in database (from a previous run). This option is usable even if you do not use MPD.
• --update to perform an update based on new additions to the library.
• --listen to listen to MPD IDLE signals on database update and update the database accordingly in realtime.

Connection to your MPD server is handled by $MPD_HOST and $MPD_PORT (defaulting to localhost and 6600), as described in mpc man page.

Note: This step can be quite long. It took me around 50 hours to build the database for a library with 50k songs.

The MPD client-side script

Once you have built the database, you may want to play a continuous mix with MPD. This is the purpose of the client.py script in mpd/× folder.

This script also uses the same environment variables as mpc does to connect to your MPD server.

Note: This script needs to have access to the database you built previously. Then, you should either copy the database on the client (in the same $XDG_DATA_HOME/blissify folder) or run it on the server.

It takes a single (optional) argument which is the number of songs to add to the playlist. Default is 20.

It builds a continuous mix starting from the latest song in your playlist. If your playlist is empty, it will start from a random song.

Note: If random mode is enabled in MPD, the script will warn you about it. Indeed, in this case, the mix is no longer continuous.

The cache building script

Finally, in scripts folder, you will find a Python script build_cache.py to build the distances cache.

Whenever you want to create a continuous mix, the client script will iterate through your music library, compute pairwise distances and take a close enough song. These computed distances are stored in the database as a cache, to generate a playlist faster the next time.

This build_cache.py script can be used to precompute the pairwise distances and build the cache, if you are willing to make some extra computation to generate mixes faster.

License

This code is distributed under an MIT license.

Feel free to contribute and reuse. For more details, see LICENSE file.