Status update, 17/06/2022

I am currently in the UK – visiting folk, working, and enjoying the nice weather. So my successful travel plans continue for the moment… (corporate mismanagement has led to various transport crises in the UK so we’ll see if I can leave as successfully as I arrived).

I started the Calliope playlist toolkit back in 2016. The goal is to bring open data together and allow making DIY music recommenders, but its rather abstract to explain this via the medium of JSON documents. Coupled with a desire to play with GTK4, which I’ve had no opportunity to do yet, and inspired by a throwaway comment in the MusicBrainz IRC room, I prototyped up a graphical app that shows what kind of open data is available for playlist generation.

This “calliope popup” app can watch MPRIS nofications, or page through an existing playlist. In future it could also page through your Listenbrainz listen history. So far it just shows one type of data:

This screenshot shows MusicBrainz metadata for my test playlist’s first track, which happens to be the song “Under Pressure”. (This is a great test because it is credited to two artists :-). The idea is to flesh out the app with metadata from various different providers, making it easier to see what data is available and detect bad/missing info.

The majority of time spent on this so far has been (re-)learning GTK and figuring out how to represent the data on screen. There was some also work involved making Calliope itself return data more usefully.

Some nice discoveries since I last did anything in GTK are the Blueprint UI language, and the Workbench app. Its also very nice having the GTK Inspector available everywhere, and being able to specify styling via a CSS file. (I’ve probably done more web sites than GTK apps in the last 10 years, so being able to use the same mental model for both is a win for me.). The separation of Libadwaita from GTK also makes sense and helps GTK4 feels more focused, avoiding (mostly) having 2 or 3 widgets for one purpose.

Apart from that, I’ve been editing and mixing new Vladimir Chicken music – I can strongly recommend that you never try to make an eight minute song. This may be the first and last 8 minute song from VC 🙂