
Show HN: Making Your Music Choose Your Desktop Wallpaper - hnur
http://blog.unixcat.org/?p=91
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fennecfoxen
... back in the day we'd just use WinAmp overlays and 'set desktop to color',
and call it a day.

(filed under: #getoffmylawn)

~~~
hnur
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.

;)

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onli
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....](https://github.com/nurh/wallofsound/blob/master/wallofsound.py#L40)
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.

~~~
hnur
_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.

~~~
onli
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.

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huangc10
Quick link to repo:
[https://github.com/nurh/wallofsound](https://github.com/nurh/wallofsound)
It's a little bit hidden near the end of the blog post.

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1011_1101
"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.

~~~
hnur
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.

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jlebrech
how about something like that as a visualiser
[http://www.geisswerks.com/drempels/](http://www.geisswerks.com/drempels/)

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b1gtuna
I would love to see this used widely, become some sort of a service and see
improvements in the quality of the matching algorithm.

