[HN Gopher] Show HN: Selecta - Tune Your Own Spotify Recommendat...
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Show HN: Selecta - Tune Your Own Spotify Recommendation Algorithm
I posted here a while back with this app I'd been working on. In
short: It allows you to talk to Spotify's recommendations API to
specify musical features you'd like recommendations similar to.
It's loads of fun to mess around with, and I've given it an
overhaul to include many more dimensions ito. musical features, as
well as the ability to log in with Spotify, and save things you
find to a playlist. You don't need a subscription to Spotify to use
the app either. Thanks to @Mockapapella for the tagline when I
posted the first version:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35907215
Author : parabyl
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-07-28 14:42 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (selecta.ciaran.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (selecta.ciaran.co.za)
| liminalsunset wrote:
| I have been playing with this and I really like the concept. A
| few nitpicky points of feedback
|
| 1) It would be nice if the button to play a sample of the song
| was located on each song or somewhere close to it, so that you
| wouldn't have to move your mouse to the bottom
|
| 2) The volume slider isn't super obvious as to its function, I
| originally thought it was a seek bar. Maybe a Volume icon would
| help here
|
| 3) Most importantly, it would be great if the app could play full
| tracks for users with Spotify Premium, preferably automatically
| as well, so that this could be useful as a "radio". One feature I
| really want is to have a "tunable recommendation radio" of songs
| that all sound a certain way and this comes very close.
| parabyl wrote:
| Glad you're enjoying it, always open to nitpicky feedback. I'll
| put all of these suggestions on the backlog and see how they
| play together - thanks!
| yosito wrote:
| I got a message that says "Try signing in with a different
| account".
| Maxion wrote:
| Seems to ask for quite a lot of data:
|
| > Your email > The type of Spotify subscription you have, your
| account country and your settings for explicit content filtering
| > Your name and username, your profile picture, how many
| followers you have on Spotify and your public playlists
|
| > Take actions in Spotify on your behalf > Create, edit, and
| follow private playlists > Create, edit, and follow playlists
| parabyl wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the feedback. Sign-in and saving to a profile
| was the most requested feature across the board when I
| previously launched Selecta, and as such it needs access to
| enable features that were requested by those who enjoyed using
| it.
|
| I'd be more than happy to share what each of those datapoints
| is used for (and, in some cases where I only need an auth scope
| for one permission, but they're grouped together). Selecta is
| strictly open-source and anonymous analytics.
|
| You can find the auth scopes I use in this file:
| https://github.com/knightspore/selecta/blob/main/src/app/api...
|
| and the related access they provide here:
| https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/concepts...
| BohdanPetryshyn wrote:
| It would be great if the tool could load your liked songs
| parabyl wrote:
| Thanks for giving it a try - I'll take a shot at that one.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I will try this out later, I find spotify recomendations a pure
| torture. The best I got was old last.fm recomendations, while
| they still had streaming, then soundcloud and pandora. The best
| ones had dislikes, not just likes.
| parabyl wrote:
| They really can be terrible sometimes. I loved last.fm too -
| still sporadically scrobbling at
| https://www.last.fm/user/Knightspore. But today my profile
| mostly serves as a record of music I had come across more
| 'organically' prior to mainly consuming via streaming services.
| phaedrus wrote:
| A feature I've long desired would be to be able to ask what lies
| between or along the average or sum of the vectors representing
| two arbitrary songs or bands. For example what music is midway
| between "Florence and the Machine" and "Primus"? Or, what happens
| if you take the vector from Green Day to Modest Mouse and extend
| it - do you land on another (presumably obscure indie) band?
|
| If Spotify won't give me those toys, are such things possible via
| the API that Spotify has provided?
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| There's a webapp called Boil the Frog that does exactly this!
| parabyl wrote:
| This is very cool, hadn't heard of it before. Thanks.
| nemo8551 wrote:
| Cheers, going to give it a look.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I mean... Spotify tracks a bunch of cool (algorithmically
| measured) sets of metadata for each song. Basically the ones
| you have on this site. And there are APIs to retrieve them for
| any song, and you can use them all as arguments for search. I
| don't see why you wouldn't be able to find a thing in between
| two things.
|
| Keep in mind that the actual accuracy of those metrics is
| debatable. They are cool... But mostly for funzies, or for
| approximate sorting in 3rd party tools.
| parabyl wrote:
| If I understand correctly, what I'm getting back from their API
| is basically what lies between, but without any of the
| interesting data they're using the do the calculation. One can
| hope, but I'd imagine that data is priceless to them and won't
| ever be available to us.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| This is great! I've done a similar thing with knn clustering and
| it had fun results. Would you mind sharing a bit about the data
| science behind this project? One issue I ran into was the numeric
| features I clustered with didn't care about genre, so the
| resulting playlists had some interesting mixes.
| parabyl wrote:
| Thank you! That's super cool - I'm not nearly as familiar with
| data science as it sounds you are, I've just made some choice
| placements in building a UI around the Spotify API. They're
| hiding the nuts and bolts of turning a set of music feature
| parameters into a list of recommendations.
| ShakirWorks wrote:
| Great discovery tool!
| parabyl wrote:
| Thanks! Glad you're enjoying it :)
| digging wrote:
| Interesting! Too late for me; Spotify's declining recommendation
| capability was one of several issues that allowed me to cancel my
| subscription.
|
| I really wish streaming services would just let us give conscious
| direction instead of trying to hack our brains. They're not as
| good at as they think.
| parabyl wrote:
| If you still want to give it a shot, you shouldn't need an
| active subscription for it to work. But I do totally get moving
| away from the streaming world. Even bandcamp is losing its
| ground as a safe a haven for making sure artists are paid their
| worth.
| jmholla wrote:
| Did you end up switching to a different platform? If so, which
| one?
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