Music

Introduction In my last post, I went through some of the interesting (at least, to me) insights I gained through the 1001 Albums process. One thing I didn’t discuss much was the mechanics of listening to an assigned album 5 days a week for 4 years. It turns out it can be tricky to stay the course. Various distractions can happen, such as vacations, business trips, or just really busy workdays full of meetings, that can make keeping up a challenge. It’s worth noting that if you do miss a day, you don’t miss your chance to listen and review the album. However, if you miss a week or so without reviewing, the site will pause your progression. We never actually ran into that, but it warned us it was going to do it at some point. ...

Introduction After more than 4 years, I’ve finally completed 1001 Albums Generator. Here’s the summary post. I don’t really know what I want to say about the experience. I just feel like it needs properly documented and celebrated. Statistics Looking through some of the main statistics, I think I’m not surprised by many of the results. Punk being my favorite genre is no surprise, although it could have also been metal. I think looking at the styles given, grunge and hardcore both land in the “punk” bucket, while thrash and alternative metal are in the “metal” bucket. Grunge is a pretty big deal for me, so yeah… ...

This project has been a lot of fun. The point of it is to assist in conversations in a music-related Hangouts group chat. I’m not sure why everyone settled on Hangouts as the chat standard for our group, but people like it because the barrier to entry is so low. I’m used to IRC and having bots assist in the conversation, so I was a little bummed that everyone wanted to use Hangouts. After a bit of research, however, I found that there are actually a handful of bot frameworks for integration with Hangouts, all leveraging the Hangups Python library. I looked over a few, and found one that hangoutsbot had the feature-set I was looking for. This came with all the hooks to extend it effectively, as well as a small ORM called peewee to abstract out any database functionality. I think peewee is the first ORM I’ve used in Python, and it has been fairly straightforward. I think I still prefer the feel of something like hugsql over ORMs in general, but peewee is painless. ...

Songkick is a music service that finds local concerts based on your personal tastes. You give it some info about what you like, either through an exported iTunes library, Pandora playlist, or Last.fm scrobble history, tell it where you’re interested in going, and it lets you know who is playing and where. I’ve been a happy user for at least two years now, and it’s a really good tool for tracking tours and concert history. ...