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Poster: Diana Hamilton Date: Aug 17, 2009 5:09pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

The items here are set up more like in a library where you'd pull a specific book or record off a shelf to experience it. For a radio-style experience of some LMA bands, you can try approaching it indirectly through this last.fm tag: http://www.last.fm/tag/live%20music%20archive I was adding to it myself a while back but it's incomplete since there are *so* many bands now. One's ability to play it easily as a radio may depend on country of residence, subscription status and of course the present number of tagged bands having their music streamable at that site.
This post was modified by Diana Hamilton on 2009-08-18 00:09:22

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Poster: sevenxbb Date: Aug 18, 2009 9:51am
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

Thanks Diana,

I was starting to wonder if it was a taboo subject around here or something. I'm not a last.fm subscriber so that won't work for me. It seems a shame that we can't randomly stream mp3s from the lma directly. Here we have this ridiculously huge goldmine of live music but to play any of it you have to navigate to a particular show and mouseclick to start it playing. Seems that it would be a trivial programming task to alow us to either randomly play automatically or even just have a constantly playing "station" that we could connect to that would rotate through the lma like the monter jukebox that it is. I wonder if there are legalities that prevent this?

Thanks Again,

Bruce

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Poster: Diana Hamilton Date: Aug 18, 2009 10:39am
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

I'm not a last.fm subscriber

If you happen to live in US, UK or Germany though, I think you can play the global tag radios there, without a sub (though definitely worth 0.10/day for me, I must say).

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Poster: Diana Hamilton Date: Aug 22, 2009 11:15am
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

Hi Bruce, thinking more about this random-play idea (because I'd love this kind of feature if it were doable), do you have thoughts on how someone could approach it at the site? My thoughts so far: If a tool chose a LMA track at random, radio would skew to bands with the most material here, like moe. or SCI. So, you'd want the tool to choose the band at random first. Then, how to pick a track at random from their collection after that? Tracks are named, not numbered- nor numbered systematically across the collection, so that step seems like a toughie. As a personal hack on the first step, I pulled the band list into an Excel file, so I can sort randomly with a random-number column and just explore manually from there.
This post was modified by Diana Hamilton on 2009-08-22 18:15:51

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Poster: sevenxbb Date: Aug 23, 2009 9:02pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

I wish I could be of assistance but my database experience is nil. :-) It just seems like a feature to use the LMA like a radio station is sorely missing...

Thanks

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Poster: Diana Hamilton Date: Aug 24, 2009 5:30pm
Forum: etree Subject: Re: Is it possible to use a player to play randomly?

AFAIK the tracks aren't stored in a database, though. Part of what makes it a toughie.