Ah thanks for giving me this context. I can’t say I’m surprised - unfortunately getting enthusiastic and
competent engineers to not only contribute to / manage open source projects consistently is a difficult feat, even for great projects like Beets.
Yes I strongly approve of the premise. Even the self-hosted selection of music servers / streaming music players is populated by paid products that are not built with modularity or interoperability in mind. Many attempt to be one stop shops, much like the far-more-popular hosted equivalents they are trying to emulate. This is not an approach that appeals to me - I like how Beets does one thing well, and I think that it can be built upon in a way that expands its usefulness, beginning to rival what the self-hosted music library/streaming projects are doing, but without all the bloat and baked-in assumptions.
Cool. Here are some more suggestions:
- What about using Musicbrainz community ratings to surface suggestions? E.g. - you like this artist, so here are some other albums by that artist with a high community rating?
- What about querying Musicbrainz artists/albums based on intersection of tags? (I haven’t worked with their API much, but I assume there is a way to do this?)
- What about suggesting other albums from the same record label as one you clearly like?
- You mentioned suggestions based on my play history - what about also sourcing my Musicbrainz user ratings?
- What about suggesting songs by artists you like that are getting lots of listens on Listenbrainz, that you yourself have not listened to or rated highly? Not 100% clear if there’s a way to do this with Listenbrainz.
The idea of giving Beets a GUI makes sense, but I also wouldn’t want to see it turn into another one of these one stop shops that conflate the ideas of library management and music consumption.
I actually bring all of this up because I have written a very prototypey music server that reads my Beets db, exposing it as an API mimicking the responses of another (proprietary) self-hosted music server. With this, I’m able to stream my Beets library via existing streaming apps from my phone, and it’s… fine. But the apps are buggy, it’s all built on (IMO) poorly-thought-out proprietary APIs, and I have ambitions to start over using a higher quality and preferably open API standard, making modularity and pluggability a high priority, then eventually building my own cross-platform front-end as well. This is probably my biggest free time project because I need it so badly… but unfortunately even then, I get very little time for it.
Anyway, all of that aside, it sounds like the things you have in mind for Beets more or less line up with the things I want for my project, so I kind of wonder if I should just contribute to Beets instead, or at least help with planning features, particularly those having to do with finishing AURA or expanding interoperability with players.