My kid was showing me the iTunes genius feature and I was a bit intrigued. Although I have a 2nd gen iPod Touch I *hate* iTunes and only use it when I have to. Slow and stoopid IMHO, but I digress.
My music and tag manager of choice is MediaMonkey. One of it’s features is support for plug-ins and there is this cool LastFM one. It works in conjunction with MM’s AutoDJ feature which normally just adds a random song to the PlayNow list, but with the plug-in, it will automatically add a similar artist based on LastFM data.
Go to this forum post for a link to download the latest LastFM Auto-DJ plugin. To install, just double-click the plug-in file (like it was an executable file). The .mmip file extension should be associated with MM, assuming you have MM already installed. After the plugin is installed, complete the following steps:
1. Choose ‘Options’ from the main Tools menu.
2. Click on ‘Auto-DJ / Now Playing’ in the Player group of options.
3. Enable ‘Auto-DJ’ and set ‘Automatically maintain at least’ to 1.
4. Set ‘Add tracks from:’ to ‘Last.FM DJ’.
5. Unless you’ve rated most of your music, click the Configure button and enable the ‘Include unknown rating option’–this is very important!
6. Click ‘OK’.
Finally, start the Auto DJ playing mode by choosing ‘Auto-DJ’ from the Play menu. Make sure you do this last step or nothing will happen. Note that there is a toggle button on the player. The location depends on the skin you are using and, at least for me, it’s not a very recognizable icon.
Now, just drag any track to “seed” the process and the Auto-DJ feature will start adding similar artists. Since it isn’t analyzing the song, like iTunes Genius or Pandora might do, you get an interesting chain of songs.
Thanks for this guide. I’m looking for a Genius clone so that I can convince my friends to start using better software than iTunes!
I followed you guide to try this, but I think I might have to fire the DJ.
It seems to be playing only tracks that I have already played by myself. I have only just installed MediaMonkey, so that means it chooses from the same five or so tracks. Sometimes it chooses nothing at all.
I have a library of about 4000 tracks! Surely he can find something he wants to hear…
Hello,
Thankyou for this clearly detailed post. I love Media Monkey for being near perfect when it comes to music management. The only reason I have been using iTunes is the genius feature. And it’s still a pain considering how regularly I add and delete music from my music folder and iTunes seems to be too dumb to give an easy option to update the library.
It’s a pity though that MM doesn’t have the genius like features right in front of the user – like how Songbird suggests important addons when the software is being installed.
Also, to find such important addons and scripts, one has to hunt through the MM forums instead of easily finding it on the Addons section of the main MM site.
Anyways, enjoying MM a bit more now :)
I agree. I’d love to use MM for more than just management.
The last.fm plugin you link to is not up to date. the newest one is on the addons page (v1.0.2.21)
not sure about the last.fm auto DJ script… but I feel like there must be a version that’s newer than 18 months old…..
Nice trick… but this only solves the problem on the desktop side
when you are on you ipod, you will not be able to press genius and create a nice songlist since information seems to be passed when you do you “genius update” from itunes to ipod
regards,
agreed. Better than nothing though.
Nice one, somehow this plugin had escaped me in the past. Cheers!