Today, his thoughts

Yesterday, some moments after the previous post on thoughts regarding Spotify integration and the like, Engadget wrote a thing which was re-tweeted by the Pi people. It's like someone was listening to me and then attempting to make a thing. Like that, not exactly that you must understand! Left us wondering if we could do the same again with other thoughts on the thing.

Overnight, some more thinking along the lines of "Other ways to physically interact with your digital music". A few bad but plausible ideas listed here for fun.

Strike a pose

Theory here would be for an XBox connect (or similar camera sensor thingy) to be the controller of the album / band selection process. Examples include;




Would certainly be fun watching ones mother-in-law attempting to make a banana shape in order to get her favourite Velvet Undergroun track to play?

Image search

Instead of finding the relevant item by scanning it's barcode, why not *just* take a picture of the cover, fire that into musicbrainz as an image and get Google's image search function (other suppliers of this kind of technology exist) to match the relevant cover? This would conveniently work for older music which has no barcode.

Wave it at the thing

If we combined the above two (to some extent), we might end up with a passive always on camera which took a picture of the item that the user stuck in front of it, matched up the album using the musicbrainz image search, and allowed some form of additional interaction in order to pick the track to play (hold up fingers? [limited to 10], point to that position on clock? [limited to 12], arrange tracks in a circle [needs a display] and get the user to point?).

Brilliant, so I hope to hear about someone doing all or some of the above in the very near future! Comment below, or email me at the usual address if it's you!

Post talking thinking

A bit more than a week since I chatted on behalf of SCANPI to the overly populated Oxford Geek Night and some thoughts have occurred. In general the talk went well, the story was told, and the laughs seemed to arrive at the relevant moments. The presented slidy now is available on the OGN site, or here.

1. Make SCANPI talk to Spotify instead of looking on local machine. One might need a paid for Spotify in order to actually play your collection but, would avoid the need to digitise everything before you scan it?
2. Make SCANPI talk to the many and various somewhat dodgy MP3 repositories in order to go and get (if it can’t find) and make local copy = similar gain in lack of need to digitise everything, but unfortunately *possibly* illegal?
3. Make SCANPI talk to google play, iTunes or Amazon music if you happen to have digitised your collection onto their service?
4. The man who demo’d a PI which banged things might be a partner for a bad idea – scan -> music details -> passed to the banging thing to play it?

More on 1) and a bit of 2) - Spotify has an API and a terms of use - specifically, one must NOT...

 use the Metadata in any way or on any website that
 that is associated or promotes, encourages, facilitates
 or condones the illegal or unauthorized use or sharing
 of audio and/or audiovisual content;

Definitely a stopper for 2), but not necessarily for 1) then.

It'll be time to make some form of action where there is only thinking at the moment. We'll tell you when that happens - or shout (via the usual means) if there's something else that you feel we should look at.

Imperfect but committed

Partly in preparation for speaking at OGN #30, and partly for good practise / "it's about time", all the current code from SCANPI has been committed to bitbucket.

Available immediately for download / clone / reproduction on your own PI:

• SCANPI Shellplayer
• SCANPI Website
• SCANPI Mobile
• SCANPI Disc2Music

While all files are in current working order, I am certain that they are not perfect. All comment, improvements, simplifications, etc positively encouraged. Shout at me peter [dot] arbuthnott [at] gmail [dot] com.

A 'sneak' preview of the slides I'm going to present at said OGN #30 is available at : http://www.scanpi.co.uk/scanpi/slidy/.