Yet another background music for developer, if you missed working at cafe

Same thing happens to me with music of sufficient complexity such as a baroque counterpoint style.

It's not approachable yet, but based on the response here that may change.

It is primarily label based. By using discogs, essentially imdb for music, it uses some Foaf and affinity "distances".

Here's an example flow, let's say you find an artist you like, say Cygnus (https://www.discogs.com/artist/1932807-Cygnus-5). We pull down the releases and get the labels. Then go to the labels which have links to things like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or various other sites. The tool then catalogs the releases and adds them essentially to an unlabeled dataset. (I've been updating dead links on discogs for a while to make this thing with better btw ;p )

Then there's another tool that goes through to "label" things by you listening to them. Essentially it's designed to do a single pass. There's a REPL and it interfaces with mpv using their JSON and Lua interface.

Then you rate each release and the adjacent information, such as the people working on it (on its discogs catalog page) becomes another vector for possible traversal.

It's not a constant scraper, it'd go on forever. Essentially it's manually run and there's a tweakable threshold.

For instance. Say you highly rate multiple releases that share a producer, artist, and label. Well, by golly, if there's a few other releases in that grouping you'll probably like that too. I mean, duh, obvious, right?

A lot of this approach came from the world of italo disco where the real names often got obscured behind short lived projects and labels which required a bit of digging to find the related content. Take Aldo Martinelli for instance. Here's his fb banner which is the best catalog of his work I know (https://scontent-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.18172-8/fr/cp0/e1...). Same person doing all of that. For instance, "topo & roby" and "moon ray comanchero" are essentially the same people, but getting from one to the other or uncovering the relationships, that's the challenge this infrastructure tries to solve.

This stuff gets unusually complicated with specific regards to italo disco. See the profile of radiorama for instance (https://www.discogs.com/artist/73973-Radiorama) or groups like The Flirts, Fun Fun or Den Harrow, where models were the faces, singers were the vocals, different song writers and musicians would come and go, they were all huge tangles.

This method completely ignores popularity or what others are listening to and falls back on the networks of the people making the content. For me at least, it's produced great results.

But it's built exclusively for me at this time. I don't even have most of the traversal code posted The code is over here https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer

I'd be happy to make it more accessible but I'm multiple standard deviations from the mean when it comes to how I approach music so I've got no idea whether there's a large interest here

If you want to see what results look like, now this is exclusively catered to my tastes, I have a pretty basic hack to listen to things on the go over here http://9ol.es/pl/

I guess the focus here is to see the label/artist diversity even if the style of music isn't your thing.

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As far as listening while you work, the tool is instrumentable. For me I can press a quasimode key (say the windows key) along with some other key and do things like pause/play, label the release, track/release navigation, get info, open the webpage that it was on, etc. These are hooked at the window manager level.

This way there's as little task switching as possible and I can stay in whatever application I'm doing.

Rainwave (general VGM): https://rainwave.cc/all/

Jet Set Radio (more high-energy, but they have a lo-fi station or two now): https://jetsetradio.live/

Nightwave Plaza (not exactly VGM, but vaporwave makes good ambient music IMO): https://plaza.one/

They've been fantastic for helping me both stay relaxed and focus in on whatever I happen to be doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLU2xQ4nkk4&list=PLA9281E60D...

edit this exact page I think i've found 3x now; and then lost it in this way.

The one I've been using for years and years is A Soft Murmur [0]. You can put together a mix of a few sounds to suit your preference. I like to prioritize the coffee shop and rain (about 50% each) with some thunder (25%) and a light fire (25%). There's also a "meander" option where any non-silenced sound's volume will move up and down at random so it's not the exact same sounds for the whole time.

I dunno how you can be productive in perfect silence. If I have perfect silence I find myself getting anxious and distracted. I work best when I can hear other people around me being productive in some way.

[0] https://asoftmurmur.com

On the other hand, during the spring I would check in on a bird-nest webcam from time to time, and if I left the page open, I felt there was a net but subliminal benefit from the background birdsong.