I know very little about JavaScript and XUL, but that is going to have to change. My goal is to complete the add-on described here, an Artist Web media view, or perhaps “Constellations.”

To make the task appear less daunting, I’ve broken it up into many milestones of marginal improvements. If I follow this timeline, the plugin will be usable and released to the public as Constellations v0.1 on July 27.

I’m going to create a separate blog to track my progress on this, for several reasons:

1. Threat of shame. If I emphasize publicly that I am going to do this, and I fail, I’ll be kind of embarrassed. Hopefully that will motivate me to actually complete the project.
2. Geeks love proving that they’re smarter than you. If I’m having a tough time with some relatively elementary code, maybe people will mock me in the form of writing the correct code themselves. I’m certain that what I’m attempting could be done in no time flat if I’d been formally educated in things like JavaScript. Maybe the biting sarcasm of people who need to demonstrate their intelligence will show me where I’m going wrong.
3. To encourage plagiarism. Look, I’ll admit that I’d be proud if the add-on that comes out of this bore my name. But ultimately, I don’t care. If somebody sees what I’m doing, likes it, wants it to be their own, and knows they can beat me to it, then great. At least we’ll have the add-on.

If you feel like mocking me or encouraging me you can email me at topdownjimmy@gmail.com, leave/follow comments on this post, or visit my dedicated Constellations blog to see where I’m taking this and how quickly I fail.

One of the things I miss the most, of course, is foobar. I’ve been using Songbird, whose Linux version runs just as well as the Windows version I’ve gotten used to. But I didn’t truly realize how lost I was without my library filters in foobar; I think if in Windows I had wanted to play something in Songbird, but didn’t know what to listen to, I would have used my foobar setup to figure it out, then searched for the album in Songbird. I did this absentmindedly enough that, now that I’m without foobar, I’m alarmed at how difficult it is to navigate my library. I’m sitting here with Songbird open, and I’ve got 1,369 artists. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?

In foobar I had mood tags and clusters based on AllMusic data, so if I wanted something upbeat, I’d just look under the appropriate moods. If that didn’t work, I’d at least find an artist who came close, and then could use foo_scrobblecharts to find anybody in my library who was up to two degrees of separation away from any selected artist on Last.fm.

In Songbird, the best I can do is browse by genre (eyeroll), or use the Music Recommendations add-on, which only lists the top five matches for the currently playing artist on Last.fm, whether or not those five are in my library; if one of them happens to be, it conveniently links me to their tracks in my library, but it’s not that frequent an occurrence.

Anyway. The short of it is, for the eightieth time: something has to be done. How on God’s green earth does anybody figure out what to listen to? Oh that’s right, everybody just listens to Coldplay and U2 and Radiohead and Sufjan and The Hold Steady and The Shins and Miles Davis. If I only had seven artists I suppose I wouldn’t be making much of a fuss either.

Anyway, as it’s only a couple weeks old I’m sure it will improve, and it demonstrates just what amazing things can be done with the Songbird platform. Hopefully we’ll see more daring and clever extensions like this when Songbird hits 1.0 next month. I’m considering making it my full-time player in order to collect more statistics (play dates, play counts, added dates, etc.).

I suppose traditionally that’s what the blog format is meant for, to just kind of shit out everything you consume in the form of links and video embeds. But really that’s more like just “taking notes” at a lecture with a cassette recorder, see what I mean? That’s just transcription. I need something to do with it all. This problem is addressed to some extent by my meticulous music library curation with foobar, and my desperate calls recently for somebody to improve on the way we manage our music.

I think a prevailing problem is that of linearity; I can write a post on here, then another post, then another, and they appear chronologically in a line. Tagging and categorizing helps to make the content on here a little less linear, but it’s still not satisfying enough. I mean what I want is to be able to have some very loose, scrapbook-y interface where I can just kind of swim through collages of things: albums, journal entries. Snapshots of various aspects of certain time-periods. Paper is free-form enough to serve a purpose like this, but notebooks aren’t searchable or easily rearrangeable, and aren’t as ubiquitous as the web.

I actually am working on a new category in here that will present entries a little differently, to accommodate the kind of note-taking that I’m talking about, but even that’s too manual. Why can’t I, for instance, while listening to a D+ album in foobar, click something that will allow me to leave a note on it? The note will be linked to the album, to the song, to the artist, and to today’s date. Later that note will turn up in searches, and whenever I focus on this song/album/artist again. There are a couple solutions for this but all of them are inelegant.

It’s almost as though this whole paradigm of nodes needs to be re-thought. Nodes don’t adequately mimic the way we think, our brains aren’t that compartmentalized. When we are consciously focused on one thing, our attention is also inadvertently directed towards related things. For instance, when you think of an apple, you’re not likely thinking only of the qualities of an apple; a small if undetectable part of you is thinking about Snow White, thinking about Genesis, thinking about pears. And when does something like an apple evolve from a confluence of impressions — their taste, their color, their shape — into something as “node”-like as “an apple”? Is an apple categorized as “fruit” (which is itself a subcategory of “food”), and tagged as “crunchy,” “juicy,” “sweet,” etc.? Not exactly. And not to mention “an apple”’s faint associations with every experience you’ve had with one. Should those experiences be tagged “involved:apple”?

Simply put I guess it’s just a problem of memory. When I listen to an album for the first time, for instance, I never want to forget when I listened to it and what I thought of it. Yet I think it happens more often than not that when I listen to something, I forget sooner than later what I thought of it, or even that I listened to it at all.

A real-world example: I downloaded the new Evangelicals record some months ago. I listened to it once, and from what I can remember, I liked it a fair amount. But I never touched it again. I forgot they existed.

When they opened for Frog Eyes months later, I barely recognized the name. I seriously believed that I had only heard their name, but didn’t have a clue what they sounded like. It wasn’t until I was at the bar ordering a drink overhearing them play “Another Day” that it clicked. Since then I’ve listened to the album half a dozen or more times and found that I really enjoy it.

So, that’s a problem. What’s the solution?

I suppose I could have rated some of their songs when I first heard them. Looking at them now in my foobar, I see that “Another Day” is tagged with 4/5 stars. But when did I do that? I don’t know! I shouldn’t have to worry about these things.

What about a world in which, on some day a couple weeks after I first heard that record, I opened my media player and it presented me with that album, as if to ask me, “Hey, you listened to this album for the first time a few weeks ago, right after you downloaded it. You didn’t rate it; what did you think of it? Want to listen to it now to remind yourself?” It’s not that far-fetched an idea. But, again: media players are largely just spreadsheets.

What about all those movies I see thanks to Netflix? What happens to them years after I watch them? It’s as though I didn’t watch some of them at all. I remember seeing Alphaville sometime in 2005, for instance, but other than some vague imagery I’ve retained, I have no idea what that movie was like. Should I have written myself a short review of it after I watched it? Where would I have put it? What is the proper receptacle for that?

Somehow I’ve been trained to think that I should be not only capable of, but in fact actively thinking about everything I’ve experienced all the time. That’s sick, isn’t it? Is that a product of the internet? Over-stimulation? Is perfect recall too much to ask?

Since I last wrote, everything I see or read seems to inspire my half-baked ideas about the better ways we can browse our unmanageably large music libraries. After telling a friend about these ideas, he said:

Yeah, it’s actually really frustrating. I intentionally keep the number of artists on my iPod small so I don’t have to sort to find things I’m currently into.

Me too.

Then there are the people who are doing a lot of (real) work towards novel interfaces like the (hypothetical) ones I’m describing; Last.fm’s “Islands of Music” (explained here) demonstrates the kind of artist-similarity topology that would make browsing your library a more pleasant experience; Lee Byron explains in more detail how he developed that Last Graph infovis; necimal releases a Music Recommendations extension for Songbird that promises to use Last.fm’s data to find within your library artists similar to the one playing; and the Aurora project, part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series, depicts a radical three-dimensional view of files and data with auto-clustering, which, if applied to a music library, would be nothing short of incredible.

I’ve also thrown together a pitiful little mock-up of what Songbird might look like when you start it up with the kind(s) of extensions I’m hoping for:

The two core components depicted are the Start Page and the Timeline View. The Start Page I feel would be seriously valuable, one of the ideas behind all these blatherings of course being that one doesn’t always have a destination in mind when opening their music library. The Start Page would offer a number of convenient “jumping-off” points, pulling you into your library to explore it further — by artist similarity, maybe, or by play history proximity, after just a couple clicks.

The Timeline View is a zoomable timeline, shown here zoomed to a daily view. Zooming out could show you albums played within recent weeks; then months, quarters, etc. These albums might be sorted by Periodical Impact, something I explained in depth here; essentially they would be sorted not by the raw number of times they were played within any given period, but by how distinct they were to that period.

Even these meager ideas are leagues ahead of what’s available, and I’m not even a data analyst. Just imagine how a library’s play history data could be exploited by somebody trained in these things.

Advantages of sorted lists include:

• one can easily find the first n elements (e.g. the 5 smallest countries) and the last n elements (e.g. the 3 largest countries)
• one can easily find the elements in a given range (e.g. countries with an area between .. and .. square km)
• one can easily search for an element, and conclude whether it is in the list

The first two advantages are things you almost never need to do with music libraries. And the third has been supplanted by now-ubiquitous search boxes: if you know what you’re looking for, you search; and if you don’t, an alphabetized list is not the way to find it.

Web visionary Ted Nelson (<mst3k>Dr. Ted Nelson?</mst3k>) has been paraphrased as pointing out that “electronic documents have been designed to mimic their paper antecedents,” and that “this is where everything went wrong: electronic documents could and should behave entirely differently from paper ones.” If the folder metaphor is inadequate for digital documents, no wonder it’s so pitiful at handling music. The proximity between pieces of music in a library should least of all be based on the first letter in a band’s name – it’s as arbitrary as sorting them by the vocalist’s month of birth – yet this is how it’s universally done.

Music library organization needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We need to consider how it is that people used to listen to music before it was all on their iTunes. How are your CDs organized (or disorganized) on your shelf? How are they organized in your head? What is it that prompts you to listen to what you listen to when you listen to it? And how can we use computers to adopt and enhance these ways of thinking, rather than forcing us to think like computers?

Multi-Dimensional Sorting

The most natural method for organizing music (if you can escape alphabetical thinking for a moment) is by similarity. Last.fm does this, and it is invaluable. When you are at an artist’s page at Last.fm, you feel that you are in that artist’s “neighborhood,” with links to similar bands, tags, listeners, and related groups. The Last.fm architecture was designed to manifest organic, bottom-up communities around bands and genres. This is an experience that cannot currently be replicated in any music player, at least not easily (with the possible exception of Amarok). But because Last.fm’s data is extraordinarily accessible, there are virtually no obstacles to incorporating this sense of “musical neighborhoods” into a piece of software.

If you don’t already have an artist in mind whose neighborhood you’d like to browse, you probably at least have some idea of the kind of mood you’re after, and there are several approaches here. One (perhaps the least viable) is using Last.fm’s tags. These are actually less often concerned with mood than they are with genre, a taxonomy well-known as being inconsistent and, I would argue, misguided: When I want to listen to Lullatone, it’s not because I want to listen to electronic music; it’s because I want to listen to “whimsical,” “delicate,” “innocent,” “sparkling” music. Who cares what genre it is?

AllMediaGuide began a project called Tapestry some time ago, an application of their vast mood/situation/genre dataset. It is an ideal solution for browsing music, and its integration into desktop software would be hugely rewarding. It’s possible to simulate Tapestry with foobar2000 and some elbow grease, but the results are not as robust as they could be.

Again, if you already know what you’re looking for, it would be difficult to find it through these channels; but this is what search is for.

Personalization

We also need to consider the less objective and more personal reasons that music becomes relevant in specific contexts, analogously to the way in which CDs become disordered on one’s shelf. I, for instance, usually have about 20 albums littering the top of my receiver and speakers. These include, roughly, (a) stuff I just bought, (b) stuff I just listened to, and © stuff I haven’t bothered putting away because I know I’ll listen to it again soon.

The main obstacle to browsing in this way is a prevalent shortcoming whose symptoms are far-reaching: the fact that music players “think” in terms of songs, not in terms of albums—or even in terms of artists, for that matter: My music software doesn’t know that these 38 songs are all by Electrelane; it just knows that their artist metadata is alphabetically adjacent. Sure, you can sort iTunes libraries by data such as “last listened” and “added”; and you can use CoverFlow to simulate a pale approximation of a flesh-and-blood record collection; but the only way you can sort albums or artists is alphabetically. I’ve written about the ways in which MP3Toys addresses this problem, and it remains a commendable pioneer in music management, but its difficulties (a steep learning curve, a buggy interface, a rapid release schedule) outweigh its advantages.

Browsing your own music library is a very impersonal experience, despite enormous potential for personalization. Rich info visualization “toys” such as Last.fm Extra Stats and LastGraph are seen as novelties, but would, in fact, be revolutionary as library browsing environments. There is nothing to prevent this from development, either; even users who are not plugged into Last.fm could have their listening history stored locally by their music software, which could then be used to generate small, cached, infinite-resolution SVG histograms, browsable by zooming, panning, and clicking. Far from being cumbersome and CPU-intensive, it would actually be rather elegant.

Continuing on the theme of chronology, what about a simple calendar charts view, with varying granularity by day, week, month, quarter? Presentationally, these charts could even be made easily to resemble vertical stacks of CDs, with spine art generated from a cropped cover image and overlaid text. This would arguably be eye-candy, of course, but just imagine how it would “feel” to see your music this way. If there’s one thing Apple’s been consistently right about, it’s that functionality is not at odds with a pleasant user experience, but rather that they are meant to be mutually supportive.

When I was helping to establish some playstamp tagging standards with the foobar community in 2005, it was jokingly suggested that when songs are played they be tagged with the current weather. Despite the sarcasm, I couldn’t help but think, “What a great idea!” I know my listening habits are affected by the weather, and I can’t imagine other people are not the same. There is, after all, a frequently-used “rainy day” tag at Last.fm.

What about a histogram based not on play count, but on hotness values over time? What about artist similarity webs based not on Last.fm data, but on proximity of play times within your personal history? What about taking lessons from the DONTCLICK.IT project, BumpTop, and the pile metaphor for unprecedentedly fluid user interfaces?

What Now?

All the ingredients are there. Everyone is rapidly moving towards an exclusively digital music collection, and the technology is embarrassingly outmoded. Music has become a major component of computing, at levels once reserved for word processing and gaming. Our relationship with our digital music collections is poised for reinvention, a looming difficulty that has been made invisible by custom and habit. Digital music management is hell, and users have complacently accepted this.

The obvious solution at this point is Songbird. Songbird’s media views (present since 0.5) allow more easily than ever for custom browsing environments. Previously the only way to alter your music browsing environment was to switch programs entirely; besides which, nearly all available programs simply mimic the well-known disk/directory views or iTunes’ browser pane view (which is just a glorification of a disk/directory view anyway). Songbird, on the other hand, boasts an unprecedented extensibility, coupled with media attention, ease-of-use, and the Mozilla platform, for which people have been developing extensions for ages (in computer years).

The prospects are thrilling and the potential for innovation is virtually limitless. Promisingly, there are some glimpses of where things might be headed for Songbird media views: Catalogue View demonstrates a novel visual presentation of your library, though it doesn’t do much in the way of organizational presentation; and Metrics Media Page is the beginnings of the kind of infovis view that could be (but currently isn’t) adapted to allow for actual navigation. Nevertheless, I have a bad feeling that this opportunity will be missed, as the status quo continues to obfuscate these possibilities.

Update: Part II

There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.

Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.

And on that day…