Proposed Ideas

Visual Appearence

  • Develop the site in such a way that the entire layout can be influenced by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) alone. Have a set of 5 to 10 of the most popular site themes which users can select. Give the users the option to upload their own style sheet or link to a style sheet hosted on a third party server. Create a theme development team. * One CSS per user! * If this would be put in practice I recommend setting harsh limitations, such as not being able to change the nature of the navigation, etc., to make for a consistent user experience across libre.fm, honestly the first complaint you hear every time MySpace comes up is rage about user pages. ** I don't think the user profles should be customisable this way - this is what http://virb.com/ or MySpace (sigh) is for. Ability to use own CSS should be only for user so he/she can change the whole site's layout but is the only one who see it. Think of that like http://userstyles.org/ without the need for extension and server-side. *** Yep, the beauty of the (old) last.fm was its simplicity and consistency. Allow users a column of their user page to customise with badges / api apps / photos etc.
  • Several templates/themes should be developed for different types of users: * web 2.0 theme * HTML only theme * text only theme * mobile theme
    *From Marjolein Katsma marjoleink (Laconica): coding the web page so that it is standards compliant for the visually impaired.
    *HTML5 audio + SVG
    *Place a 'remember me' button on the login page.

Statistics

  • Make it possible through the API to show the scrobbling client. Make statistics over that. Have seen the mentioning of the scrobbling client at Last.fm only with Amarok so far. (i think its on every user page in the "listening now" section) * Last.fm mentions this info with nearly every client (possibly through the "c" parameter in the submissions protocol). Even statistics are collected (there was some post on that, number of scrobblers in each country), but internal and anonymous.
  • Import listening records (from last.fm or elsewhere)
  • Support for tracks where both the performing artist and composer are important (e.g. Orchestral music)
  • Obviously create charts like last.fm does. They should probably be stored in the database rather than generated on-the-fly. Server load has to tell if life-updating is doable or if they'd need to be generated periodically only.
  • Make it possible to reset all the scrobbling statistics (useful when the import fails)
  • Support for manual editing of your listening stats. It is often the case that wrong information is submitted (e.g. MR BIG instead of Mr. Big). Manual fixing of such things (edit + delete) is the best way to keep your stats consistent. It should be possible to edit in two ways - on per-name and per-scrobble basis.
  • Save location and time. It would be interesting to see what kind of music you listen to where, and when.

Music Wiki and Metadata

  • If an embedded wiki for artists, songs, etc. will be included, also add an option to disable this and link to an configurable external Wiki (e.g. Wikipedia) instead. * When the embedded wiki is disabled, at least first paragraph should be extracted from external wiki. * Some embedded wiki for "About me" pages would be fine though * Should we be also worried to to show the music's lyric at the music web page? Something like we already have with Amarok. * Would be cool if different wiki or markup engines could be embedded. (e.g. Markdown, DokuWiki and ikiwiki) * I disagree with an embedded wiki, at least for artist and album information. We are duplicating work already done on Wikipedia. The information there is directly accessible and reprintable under a free content license. We should show this information on the artist page and direct the reader back to the wikipedia page if they want to edit it.
  • Allow users to vote on recording quality like on Songza. This could be useful for live recordings.
  • By extending embedded wiki functionality we can provide some functions of the regular wiki software (like MediaWiki). * For example: artist name capitalization can be changed like with the Wikipedia templates. Imagine we have an artist with name "R.e.m." but the correct capitalization is "R.E.M.", so the wiki can contain: <nowiki>{{Title|R.E.M.}}</nowiki>. * Also incorrectly named artists (or albums) can be redirected to the correct names. E.g. wiki for "REM" should contain <nowiki>#REDIRECT wiki:R.E.M.</nowiki>, so the users will be redirected and also tracks will be scrobbled under the right artist. * This functionality is more endangered by vandalism, on the other hand it allows users to clean-up the database more quickly, than the Last.fm's voting mechanism ([http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/REM see the "did you mean" bar at Last.fm]) Note that MediaWiki syntax is only an example, we can create something more intuitive for Libre.fm's purpose.

Identically named artists

Deal with the multiple artists of the same name. Take a look for example at [http://www.last.fm/music/Sasha this artist]. This issue ruins relevance of recommendations and so on. We can deal with it for example by further identification of song metadata (it's very unlikely that two artists of the same name will have songs with the same name on the same named album) and/or by further integration of MusicBrainz database ([http://musicbrainz.org/doc/IdenticallyNamedArtists see the documentation]).
About the MusicBrainz integration: current submission API supports "m" parameter for the MusicBrainz Track ID. * Yep, the sooner the better IMO. Is it easy enough to compare album/track name to find correct artist? Would need someone/users to establish which album belongs to which artist first? wiki:User:TrouserJazz|TrouserJazz 04:41, 10 May 2009 (UTC) * If there would be tight integration with MusicBrainz database it's possible to make most of these things automatically. Otherwise we can use at least MusicBrainz model of distinction: artists can have a "comment" line, which identifies them further. Take a look at the 2 top artists in [http://musicbrainz.org/search/textsearch.html?queryh1.iron+maiden&type=artist&limit=&handlearguments1 these search results]. Users should be able to "split" artists and assign album (and maybe individual tracks) to the right artist. Then it depends how these artists are handled in database. --wiki:User:Syntax|Syntax 08:31, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Artists/Albums/Songs with multiple names

Some of them can be registered under different names. For example, japanese artists names can be stored using japanese characters, or using a romanized version (it's easier to manage a music library like that for people who can't read japanese). In the end, you can get funny things like: * an artist being recorded twice, having his stats splitted in two * an album containing twice the number of tracks (when the official japanese names are written is latin characters, but the song names are not)
LastFM sometimes redirects the two versions to a common page. I don't know if their deduplication process is manual or automatic.

Music Discovery

  • Language-tags for the lyrics. It would be great to have music tagged by lyric-language. The Last.fm radio got messed up by people tagging everything from Norway "norwegian" (thus lumping together a whole slew of different genres); having special language-tags (and maybe artist-homeplace tags?) would ensure that regular tags stay musical, but also allow users to listen to the "most popular music from Norway" or even the "most popular music in the Norwegian language [http://tinyogg.com/watch/misKH/ as sung by Italians]"
  • Voting and tags would both be useful to help categorize new music. I envision attatching as much data to these songs as possible, votes, tags, genres, reviews, artist data, related media for further exploration, reddit-style comment hierarchies, etc. Allowing for discussions to be bundled with songs will allow for semantic analysis of these comments later, which would allow much more effective recomendations. * Allow personal ratings to be sent to libre.fm. In Rhythmbox for example, rating songs should send the information to libre.fm. Rhythmbox should also be able to receive new personal ratings from other connected clients for the same person.
  • Killer feature: Microformat that stores your music preferences. How come every time I log into a new computer, my music program is tabula rasa wrt my preferences? I want to be able to know what my favorite songs are, and make sure that I have each of those songs on that computer.
  • Be able to filter by music distribution license (e.g. CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc.)
  • Be able to filter music by language. (Could be done via tags, pull down menus or a language guesser if the song texts are available.)
  • A "this song reminds me of" option could be nice, allowing for more explicit connections between music. Be able to tag that relationship with a reason why would be good too. ("the vocals are so similar...")
  • Connect different Libre.fm instances, maybe via OMB (as implemented by laconica): * Allow making friends with users on other Libre.fm sites. * Compare your music taste with users on other Libre.fm sites.
*Browsing the catalog manually, incl. lists by genre, tempo, mood, etc.
  • "Who listens to" feature for libre.fm * Have each page for a song show a tag cloud depicting who listens to the song. Larger tags means more listens. (Or a larger percentage of personal listens.) Click on the user/name tag and go to a page showing what all that person listens to. (Make this filterable wrt Free.) * I have been thinking about this since I first emailed it to myself this morning. I think if there is to be only one of the two possibilities above, it should be the percentage one, but perhaps this could be a toggle instead. --wiki:User:zotz|zotz * added thought on Dec 11/09 as a result of irc chat. when viewing another's songs colour code for common songs and ones you have not listened to. and / or filter by same. all|unheard --wiki:User:zotz|zotz
*It would be interesting if we had a few interfaces that set us apart and ahead of the rest of the social music sites for browsing: A visual grid of music generated from the library would be one approach, with different dimensions being configurable to dfferent musical attributes, again, tempo, mood, etc.
*Steerable Tag-Clouds. saw this recently on http://music.tastekeeper.com/ - the tags are each resizable, a great way to say "a little less pop", "more rock", "no 80s". and so on.
  • Colour difference between Free and Non-Free Music (and artists if possible) in all lists, tags, & etc.
  • Where possible, provide download links to the Free Music wherever it is mentioned.
*Get CC music from Archive.org, CCmixter.org, Jamendo.com, Kompoz.com & etc.
*Integration with Hype Machine and related sites.
  • Allow users to add 'Covered by (artist)/Original by (artist)' and 'Sampled in (track/artist)/Samples (track/artist)' links on track pages.
  • Get recommendations based on tracks instead of artists, this is a better way because of many reasons: * 1- Sometimes some guys just like few songs of a artist and its unfair to this guy get recommendation based on every song of the artists. A example is metallica, some guys hate their new songs and like the old ones. With artist recommendation instead of track recommendations, the listeners that like those new albums, that problably listen to things that they dont like. * 2- This help to solve (but not fix) the problem of different artists with different names. With track recommendations, you dont get wrong recommendations just because there is a mainstream artist with the same name that the underground artist that you listen.
  • Use the last 3 months chart instead of the overall chart to make the recommendations. The last 3 months chart is the chart that best represents what the user listen. Lets imagine that the user listened only to few artists, and then he started to use libre.fm, after some months he discover some artists here, artists that he likes more than the old ones that he listened. Because in the old days he listened to just few artists, they plays were split between just few artists and those artists got many plays on his chart, now he listen to many artists and his plays split between many artists, so its unlikely that those artists that he likes more will top the old ones, or at least its will take more time.
  • Use also the things that the users dont like while making the recommendations. In last.fm, britney spears is the 4th similar artist to Lady Gaga, but I bet there are many Lady Gaga listeners that dont like Britney. If what the users dont like also influencied the artist recommendations, britney woulndt be so on top on the list of recommendations. * How that "I dont like" thing would work? I dont have any idea, at least yet. But if we find a way to do that would be really good.

Live Streaming, Playlists & Radio

  • Enable integration with Jamendo!
    *This would be great, but there will probably be licensing issues that need to be worked out.
  • Music repositories, that could be subscribed to and streamed from in some way, allowing for total decentralization. Potentially: RSS feeds for music (Techno, playlist of the day, best of yesterday, etc.) , which then could be manipulated and filtered as personal preference warrants. * Make the streamer a standalone app that acts as a music repository to the network as well as a streamer
  • A filter for 'awkward for work'-ness. Not necessarily profanity, just songs with any trait (subject matter, sample noises, etc.) that would be awkward to have on in the background while trying to seem professional. (Could be implemented easily using tags and whitelists)
  • The ability to go back a song, and listen to it again.
  • A "Fill my iPod" option. Give it a couple of songs, and it generates some sort of p2p based download link for any requested #of megabytes of music.
*As well as the "Fill my iPod" option, a "freshen my iPod" option would be good as well. It would keep the songs you had listened to the most, and clear out the old ones, replacing them with songs similar to the ones you had liked. It should also keep track of all the songs downloaded, so if you hear a song and can't remember you can find it again.

	
    
	
  • I guess that the iPod should not be mentioned directly. Music player or even better playlist would suit better (iPod not only is likely to be register trademark but is also non-free software - beside it is not only iPod-only features).

	
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  • Spin the dial - Create a station of music that is as unrelated to your music as possible, and where every song on the station is as unlike all the others as possible. Discover new music through randomness. * Can work the same way like Last.fm client Discovery mode -- it selects only tracks you haven't listened before. Available only to subscribers though.
  • Flexible exchange of playlists with other music tools * Uploading playlists or libraries from the users collection * Importing from other sites: Last.fm scrobbles, Pandora's radio stations, etc. * Playing recommended non-free music from private collection
  • There should be a simple way to generate an RSS feed for any given playlist we generate.

Hobo radio (pseudocode) 

foreach({SELECT streamurl FROM Track WHERE streamable=1 LIMIT 100 ORDER BY rand()} as $url) echo $url;

serve as m3u :)

Income for Artists

I write lyrics for [http://packet-in.org Packet In] and have been developing Income Ideas that could work for Free Music at [http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=Income Packet In's Income] page. I would like input on expanding these and making it more general as well as customizing them for libre.fm use.

*Donation buttons that make it easy to send money. They should be prominent when downloading music. The backend may be complex to implement as each artist will need to submit payment info.

Promotion for Artists

[http://packet-in.org/wiki/index.php?title=Promotion Packet In's Promotion] page. Not as developed as the income page but again I welcome input for extending, making more general and fitting for libre.fm use.

*Alerts for local concerts that are filtered according to your music tastes and preferences.

Embrace New Ways

I feel this can be a very important section and I don't think I can do it justice on this first attempt but I will try and make a decent start.

  • Deal with multiple legal entities per song or album.

The idea of an artist or band as an entity to deal with may no longer be the only way to play the game. I would like to see the various music sites come to grips with this and adjust their practices to facilitate new ways of doing things.

Libre.fm has an opportunity to lead in this area.

Not only do I write [http://packet-in.org/repo/user_drewRoberts lyrics] for [http://packet-in.org Packet In] but I also write for various projects at [http://www.kompoz.com Kompoz], [http://zotz.kompoz.com zotz at kompoz]. What I see happening more and more is that ad hoc groups of people come together for a single song. They may get together for another song later in the same configuration but they may not. Perhaps next time it will be almost the same but with a different bass player, etc.

Sites should not force the creation of multiple legal entities so that they can deal with a single legal entity per song or album. Rather, they should adapt their end and allow for this ad hoc grouping to be specified and should deal with the group as individuals as specified on setup of the song or album.

I have more ideas for new ways but this is one I wanted to document up front. I feel I can make this clearer but would appreciate comments, input, questions, improvements, etc. (Also, the personal perspective should perhaps be removed.)

  • Have the site and business model be able to function with only the rights granted by the Free licenses. Extra features may need more rights, but the site should work as fully as possible within the rights granted by the licenses and nothing else.

Tv and Video

  • I have a mythtv box and am recording my favourite shows. It should be easy enough to write a script to submit the recording schedule. Could we create a sister site where we could submit our recording schedule and create a recommendation system for tv?
    *Search video-sharing websites for music videos/concerts of the songs.

Profile and Settings

  • Privacy settings: it took last.fm quite a while to recognise this and they still didn't go the full way but I think that privacy settings are something where libre.fm could lead the way. * I waited for the last.fm setting to turn off all live data for years so it'd be nice to have that in libre.fm as soon as possible. :-) Basically: not display last played tracks and now playing info for a user anywhere if they don't want that. * Another privacy setting, if libre.fm continues to use Gravatar, would be to turn that off since it has privacy issues.
    --wiki:User:Shepard|Shepard 14:27, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Remember Login

  • This is a minor issue but a "remember me" option would really be comfortable. -- wiki:User:Dasdestillat|Dasdestillat 11:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC) * Thanks ;) --wiki:User:Dasdestillat|Dasdestillat 14:55, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Groups

  • RSS feeds for groups. wiki:User:kmf|kmf

Song Case

  • Seeing things like "Theatre Of Tragedy" or "Pain Has Taken over" is going to bug the hell out of me. There should definitely be some easy way to address song capitalization, perhaps allowing the case to be editable by anyone? wiki:User:Retsu|Retsu * I've proposed one option through embedded wiki, see the second part of wiki:#Music Wiki and Metadata --wiki:User:Syntax|Syntax 10:17, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Custom services/daemons

  • I believe there must be some places where libre.fm could engage custom written services/daemons in order to take off some load from DBs and frontends. Different kinds of statistic data, graphs, lists, artist/album/song search - this is what comes to my mind first. If you have any particular ideas - let me know, I'd be glad to help. wiki:User:tony2001|tony2001 (tony at daylessday * org)

Self Scrobble

  • When a logged in user listens to a song on the libre.fm site, that listen should be scrobbled to the users stats.
  • I don't know if this should go here so please move if it belongs elsewhere. --wiki:User:zotz|zotz

Russian Interface

  • Why not? I ready to do it by myself.

Badges

  • Make it like a game (Simular to foursquare), have badge achievements for listening to all of the albums by a band, be the first to listen to a band or badges for play counts. I think this would make the experience fun and appealing to new users.