[hasselhof]

I'm excited to announce version 1.9.0 of this plugin. This release has a feature I've been wanting to add for a while now - collection radio.

This feature will play a radio station of songs that are in your collection, based around a seed artist. It only chooses songs that are by related artists of the seed artist, so in effect you get a genre themed station consisting only of the songs in your collection. Even better, this feature works on other users' collections as well, so you can play the collections of your friends too!

You access this functionality by choosing an artist from your collection (or someone else's) and selecting "Play collection radio station for this artist".

The algorithm that it uses to choose songs is kind of complicated so I won't try to describe it in full, but I'm interested in hearing any feedback you may have on it. It works more or less like this:

• First track is always a track from the base artist
  
• Subsequent tracks are chosen by scanning related artists of the previous track (recursively to a depth of 3 if necessary) until it finds an artist that has tracks in the collection. It then chooses a track randomly from those.
  
• It tries not to repeat tracks from the 5 previously played artists.
  
• It tries not to repeat any of the previous 25 tracks.
  
• On average it returns to the base artist every 5 songs (maybe less if base artist only has few songs in the collection).
  

I've found this algorithm works fairly well even on small collections. Let me know what you think.

Enjoy!

Hi ampedandwired,

I'm using XBMCBuntu 12.2, with Rdio v1.9.0, Confluence skin, using remote control.

I've had the time today to put your new feature, "Play collection radio station for this artist" through it's paces, and I must say what you have done is very clever, and I like it a lot. I would never have been able to blend the songs together as pleasantly as this feature does. You have succeeded in the genre themed station creation with all the tracks being very similar genre.
I've listened to two genre themed stations today both with the base artist of "Erasure" and both I let play 25 full songs each - see playlists

As you can see from the "Play collection radio station for this artist" generated playlists in image, the base artist did in fact start the station, subsequent songs were on genre with a very random selection of tracks . None of the songs were repeated in there own playlist of 25 songs, and even better only one song "The Human League - The sounds of the crowd" was repeated out of the two playlists.
The base artist was randomly chucked in the mix as well so I would say it's a great success
The "Now playing" feature in xbmc worked nicely with Rdio.
I was able to save both playlists via xbmc gui, and play back the playlists no problem, which is wicked.

I do have another request if you don't mind, when your in "Your Network" it would be nice to see if your friends are online & what they are listening to, what do you think ?.

Have you made any more progress with the Rdio add-on ?.

Thanks again, I'm of to listen to some more music