Contextual Music Retrieval

It is possible to automatically play a continuous selection of music appropriate for your current listening context. To make it work, your songs need be categorized for retrieval based on when you listen to them. If music is important to you, going back through your library to tag tracks is probably worth it, since the goal is to make your library easier to access, and if you are reading this, then clearly that could be improved. While a full prowl back through the stacks can be enjoyable, it's a substantial time investment, so it's best if you can get things set up properly in the first pass. I didn't, but after several passes, contextual retrieval is finally starting to work pretty well, so I thought I would write down what I've learned about what works and what doesn't.

Contextual retrieval keywords

Figuring out keywords for contextual retrieval is one of those things that is simple to get started on, and hard to finish well. To start, identify situations when you commonly listen to music. Your typical day, your typical week. Write those down. Next, think about your occasional situations, like having friends over or whatever else you do. Write those down also.

Now factor those contexts into as few keywords as possible so you don't have too many tags to fill out for each track, but you can still pull appropriate music for your listening situations.

When factoring, consider what varies based on general criteria like energy level or approachability. I've found that for music I've tagged as "social", the difference between a quiet dinner and a larger party later is mostly energy level, with a little more edgy stuff later (I use digger to contextually pull music from my library for listening).

The rest of this doc is notes about various keywords. Hopefully you'll find it helpful.