Music for the moment - A process for organisation of your music files to support recall criteria such as mood and occasion

The software needed to organize and recall your music based on the usual criteria of artist, title + mood, occasion, tempo

This post is for folks owning a large local (not in the cloud) music collection looking to clean up the tags in these music files. The music files can be of type mp3, flac or ogg (may be applicable to other file types as well). The final objective of the process proposed in this post is to support recall - to be able to play music for a particular occasion or mood without the listener having to frequently intervene and interact with the player by searching, creating playlists (smart or otherwise) etc. ...... and all this with low effort to support the players which aid recall - so the theme of this post is to support you to stop seeking, organizing music and start listening to what you have now.

Disclaimer: The author is not associated in any way other than being a user of the software MusicBrainz Picard, MediaMonkey & JukeFox that are mentioned in this post.

Step 1. Clean up the tags in your music files

This is possible with MusicBrainz Picard (it's free). It is possible to use acoustic fingerprinting to tag your music with this tool. This is extremely accurate as compared to other free tools that tag music only based on information already preexisting within the tags.

If your collection consists of whole albums, this is an ideal solution.

This documentation of MusicBrainz Picard details how one can tag one's music collection.

Step 2. Add additional tags such as genre, grouping, mood, tempo, occasions to support selective recall

To add the album cover art and tags such as genre, grouping, mood and tempo to your music files plugins have to be enabled within MusicBrainz Picard. These are the Cover Art Downloader plugin, Last.fm and Last.fm Plus plugins. Of course all this depends on how well the files are tagged within the MusicBrainz Picard Database - this is done by the community - so expect some discrepancies. This seems to be quite minimal though. And especially if your music collection is quite disorganized - something that supports recall is better than nothing at all. But MusicBrainz Picard does provide the user good control options to not overwrite some tags etc.

The options available to give one fine control over what goes into the genre,grouping, mood and occasion tags

Contributing to the community MusicBrainz Database
If you do not find listing for any tag data for some of the CDs that you own you can add them to the MusicBrainz Database by creating an account for yourself.

It is important to note that the data that goes into the genre tag from the Last.fm plugin are many times a list of multiple genres each separated by a semicolon. For example you will find So you will see a tag entry such as Beatles; Oldies; 60S; Pop; British; The Beatles; Rock; Classic Rock in the genre tag and Classic Rock in the grouping tag. This grouping tag, as the name suggests, groups a bunch of genres together. This is also another way for one to be specific or generic towards the style of music being played.

Performance of the Tool
MusicBrainz Picard works much better on Linux than on Windows. It might crash unexpectedly when adding a large number (>750) of songs for tagging on Windows 7. On Linux Mint it performed fine even with a large number (>3500) of songs.

Step 3. Use players that support these extra tags to selectively recall your music based on criteria such as mood, occasion etc.

Now for the best part .... to listen to the sweet sound of success!

Let us say your requirement is that you are working on a project that requires a lot of concentration. All you need is look for files with the tag occasion with value background and viola! songs that blend into the background will start to play.

The next step is to find players that leverage these extra tags found in your music files to 'automagically' give you what you want to hear at the moment.

On the desktop - one could use MediaMonkey which supports multiple genres, moods, occasions and tempo tags as shown in the picture below. MediaMonkey has a free and a paid version at the time this article was written and is available on windows only. One can run it with WINE on a Linux box.

The grouping, classification tree node in MM and what it can help you find

On an android device - A quick search on google for 'smart music player for android' the top hit is Jukefox (JukeFox on the Playstore). It is free and offers some neat innovative features for someone looking to play music to suit a mood or occasion. It learns your actions (play, skip, forward etc.) and associates it with what you want to listen to at the moment. For example - In one session of using the player in a shuffle mode, it learns what music you are skipping without listening to and stops suggesting songs of the same style, genre or artist to you. It seems to have lots of other smart features as well and is worth exploring. During the first import of your music into the player the software recommends (though I feel its a requirement for it to get smart) that you are connected to the internet so jukefox can infuse some more of its grouping smartness. During normal playing though it does not require an internet connection. The video below shows all the features at a glance.

Reducing your Android phone's battery power consumption

Gone are the days when one charged a 'not so smartphone' once in 2 to 3 days. Smartphones these days are known to need charging on a daily basis. That is understandable, but my  Samsung Galaxy SII GT-I9100 reached a point where it demanded charging every day - twice a day !!!

The situation was bad, especially, when I was out & away from power sources for my phone for extended periods of time. When I needed it the most I would find the low battery warnings. I would want to use the phone for some critical purpose (like calling someone) and what do you see - a 'Low Battery' warning. I would have a wonderful 'kodak moment' to capture with the phone's lens and my smartphone's flash would not work because of 'Low Battery' ! It was frustrating !

My first assumption was that the battery was kaput and needed replacement. Before building on that thought, I checked if the software was not party to the crime ! I was right, the operating system software of the smartphone was indeed a major suspect in the 'battery drain' case !

Hence this post that articulates some of the steps I took to work around this problem. With these measures taken, nowadays after a full charge I am still left with around 60% of battery even after 10-12 hours of normal usage and without hampering any communications via the phone. Earlier I would have needed to charge the phone once in that period.

Some points mentioned below may be specific to the Samsung Galaxy SII GT-I9100 but similar configuration screens would be available on your android phone.

So, what are the things that you can do to save yourself some smartphone juice when you 'really' need it ?!

Phone settings to pay attention to for battery conservation & usage stats

Reflect on what is consuming the battery ?

• Tools to support this reflection
• In the phone settings you will find the Power saving settings
• Use this to setup your phone for power savings
• In the phone settings you will find Battery 
• Here invariably most phones will show the display is consuming most battery
• So how can you reduce your screen usage 
• Check the display settings for and set them appropriately to consume lesser battery.
• Brightness - what brightness settings have you chosen ?
• Screen timeout - how long do you want your phone to stay on ?
• No Smart stay ? 
• Is the phone's GPS on ?
• (this is a very quick battery drainer - you forget to switch off GPS after using it and in a short time you might not be able to make calls on your smartphone! Read below about AutomateIt on how to not let your slacker memory be cause of a battery drain) 
• Is the phone's Bluetooth on ?
• In addition you will find some apps seems to be consuming lot of battery
• Reflect on whether you need all the apps that you have on your smartphone, it is so easy to go overboard with installing apps and with time forget about them as they idle in the background and consume battery power. In some cases these apps are pre-installed and come from the device manufacturer. If you do not have the liberty to root the device perhaps you will not be able to get rid of them. Some examples of heavy battery consumers are apps such as Google Now. This is because of their data connection requirements. Also synching of your google accounts causes a battery drain especially if you are using it to synch your pictures.
• You might also want to review your smartphone's data and wifi settings
• Is your phone constantly searching for a wifi connection ?
• Are apps on your phone constantly trying to get onto the network ?

      ......... now, this leads us to review and reflect on your smartphone usage habits.
      

Reflect on your own smartphone usage habits

• Do you need to be online all the time?
• If not, you have a very good chance of saving unnecessary power consumption by your phone - read below about AutomateIt and how it can help make your smartphone smarter in terms of power consumption.

    b. What are the main uses of the smartphone
        You might come up with a very finite small number of apps that will help you meet those uses, this is a very good input for your making the most of the AutomateIt app !

AutomateIt - Make a smarter smartphone with AutomateIt !

Disclaimer: I am not associated with the makers of AutomateIt in anyway that I an aware of. I  only use the Android app and find good utility in it!

AutomateIt - read as Automate it

Would you like your android phone to

• go mute and stay silent automatically when you are in meetings?
• go mute during certain times of the day?
• seek for WiFi networks only when you are in certain regions (for example only at home)?
• make the WiFi/Data connections active only when the apps that need them are activated?
• routinely schedule a data or wifi connection to allow apps?
• switch on GPS only when you are using Maps or any other such application?
• keep the screen on longer only when you are on certain apps and otherwise go off sooner to conserve battery power?

The above are just a very small set of what you can use AutomateIt for (and most of them help conserve your battery power).

AutomateIt has a very simple model - A rule consists of a trigger that results in an action.

You select the triggers from one screen and then select an action in the next, you name the rule and schedule it if necessary. That's it.

AutomateIt configuration options

The video here shows how a simple rule of setting your phone to silent on a schedule with AutomateIt.

AutomateIt has a free version and a paid pro version. Personally for me, playing around with the free version for a while convinced me that I could do more with the pro version. The pro version comes with composite triggers, calendar triggers and sensor triggers. I have heard that iOS devices do many of the battery conserving activities by some blanket rules. Again personally, I appreciate the better, configurable control that comes with the Android phone and the apps in its ecosystem.

Where to get AutomateIt?

• On Amazon - Free version & Pro version
• On Google Play - Free version & Pro version

Do you already use and like AutomateIt ? How do you use it ?

References

1. Samsung Galaxy S 2 website
2. The AutomateIT app website
3. AutomateIT on the Google Playstore and Amazon's app store
• On Amazon - Free version & Pro version
• On Google Play - Free version & Pro version
4. Other tools for further analyzing and fine tuning battery usage 
• Wakelock detector