Ok, so maybe it’s a bit daft releasing a feature update a day after sharing a project, but release early, release often, right?

This update (which brings us to 1.1) completely changes the way Spautofy decides how to queue songs (that’s the justification for the .1 ). Now, every time a new song starts playing, it’s added to a stack. When Spautofy is deciding what song to play next, it tries to find a song that’s as similar to as many songs on that stack as possible. This has a couple of benefits. First, it reduces the chance of the same bands popping up repeatedly (and there’s some extra logic to make sure Spautofy doesn’t get stuck in a loop of queuing the same x bands just because they’re all mutually similar). Also, it helps prevent the queue going off on a complete tangent within a couple of songs. The main side effect is that the music tends to err a little on the mainstream now (or at least mainstream relative to the seed song you picked). Spautofy will backtrack and pick a more obscure song if it’s painted itself into a corner, but I’m looking for some cool ways to inject a bit more whimsy to make it a little less predictable

If you’ve already installed the original release you should get a wee auto-update the next time you start it up. If not, you can download Spautofy from CodePlex, where you can also peek at the source – and that’s probably the best place to let me know if things are broken too!

I’m one of those odd people who has a huge music collection lying around (my secret shame is I still buy CDs!), but it’s not always with me, and while Last.fm radio is great for a bit of background noise – it can be a bit hit and miss. When I’m listening to music, I’m a bit of a control freak too. One thing I do without really realising is I queue up songs that end up forming a sort of narrative, as I make lateral jumps from song to song, leading myself down a musical garden path.

Spotify is amazing for having something resembling the breadth of my music collection, plus so so so much more – perfect for a bit of garden path exploration. However, if I’m at work, or just lounging about, I don’t particularly want to obsess over every single song I listen to next – especially when I have some 10 million to pick from. I wanted to see if it’s possible to take that approach to queuing music and encapsulate it in an algorithm.

Spautofy is the result. It’s a lightweight app which sits alongside Spotify. Start playing a song, and it’ll query Last.fm for a similar one. If it’s in the Spotify catalogue, it’ll ‘queue’ next (but currently, without any proper API hooks into the Spotify queue this involves some truly ugly attempts to manually play the song just as the last one is ending). The process repeats, but now the algorithm attempts to look for a song similar both to the current one and what was playing immediately before, and so on…

It’s early days, and I’ve put up an early build because it at least works semi-reliably on my own box. It’s available now on CodePlex for you to try – so please leave bug reports and feel free to contribute to the source! Please note this hasn’t been tested any wider at all, so I can’t promise anything in terms of reliability. Give it a bash and if it explodes, feel free to shout at me in the comments

Later this year I’ll be starting my PhD at the University of St Andrews. So, I figured this would be a good time to dust off this domain and do something useful with it.

BEHOLD! A *blog*! How novel! Here I’ll be sharing some cool things I find over the next few years. Also, if you’ve known me from work I used to do with ‘Combustion Studios’ then some of those apps will live on here. In between all the other madness, I’ll still be finding the time to put together random little hacks that I’ve needed to solve some problem, only for it to mutate into something completely different… I’m currently working on open sourcing a couple of little musicky apps so more info soon about those.

In the meantime, things are a little bare at the moment, but hopefully awesome awaits!