Show HN: Making Your Music Choose Your Desktop Wallpaper | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Making Your Music Choose Your Desktop Wallpaper

blog.unixcat.org

75 pointshnur11 comments

... back in the day we'd just use WinAmp overlays and 'set desktop to color', and call it a day.

(filed under: #getoffmylawn)

Fancy kids and their winamps, back in the day I used to coax musical notes out of a tinny speaker from an Apple II using PEEK and POKE in BASIC.

;)

The images linked to the songs are quite nice, they fit in a good way. That is what I think is interesting, I wouldn't have thought that the approach could work. Neither the analysis of the lyrics nor the way of getting a flickr image via a search weighted by itnerestingness. I might adapt the flickr part, https://github.com/nurh/wallofsound/blob/master/wallofsound.... is really a lot easier than what I did instead.

You aren't by any chance interested in separating that, in hosting a server which gives a link to a good flickr image when given a word? I searched for something like that and in the end stayed with my ugly approach of parsing flickriver for getting a random image from a hard-coded group with a fitting topic.

Flickr already does this if you use their search API. The Flickr part of the script in my Github repo has an example.

As far as I understood, you need a Flickr API key for that. My software runs locally, meaning keys are not practical, I want the configuration to stay simple. But seeing how simple the code is I'll just have to get over it and host this as a service myself. Thanks for the example, still very useful.

Quick link to repo: https://github.com/nurh/wallofsound It's a little bit hidden near the end of the blog post.

"First, finding the lyrics of the song that’s playing, and picking out the key words or themes from it"

I listen to Melodic Death Metal. Some of the themes in this genre are not suited to provide pictures one might want to look at. A blacklist or filter for some keywords could help here.

Would be nice if you could provide more examples for other genres.

It was a random sampling of songs that I was already playing while I was writing that. All my music is either folk (with a lot of Irish and American folk), rock, or indie. If you like though, you could try it yourself.

The great (or perhaps, not, depending on what you want) thing about the Flickr search is that it picks from a set of curated photos, so it's highly unlikely you'll get an unpleasant one. However since it is picking random pictures from the internet, don't run it where you'd get into trouble if something inappropriate does manage to come up.

I'll file that under "user error" :)

how about something like that as a visualiser http://www.geisswerks.com/drempels/

I would love to see this used widely, become some sort of a service and see improvements in the quality of the matching algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com