Context Aware smart playlists

Feature requests
1

Feature description:

Way back in the long long ago (late 90s), I built a computer for my car, and used it for playing music. Being the nerd I was, and am, I also used it for navigation by adding a serial gps receiver.
Having these two things, I then built a rules engine that could take context such as driving speed, time of day, and location into account and play from specific playlists in specific situations.

We can do much better now. Our phones know when we’re walking, biking, driving. They know what day and time it is. They know the weather. They know how fast we’re going and possibly our destination. They know our next appointment. They know how much traffic there will be. Sometimes they even know our heartbeat.

I’d love a modern reimplementation of the context aware playlist feature, where I could write rules to play from songs with particular tags depending on current situations.

Example: It’s after sunset, in October, and the weather has recently turned foggy. Play something from John Carpenter’s Lost Themes.

Example: It’s a weekday, I’m biking before 9am, and on a steep hill. Play something from Rocky.

Example: I’m stuck in traffic and my stress levels are elevated. Play something calm and ambient.

Problem solved:

No problem. Just another way of personalizing the soundtracks of our experience.

Brought benefits:

Playlists are often already created based on mood or occasion. Allowing this level of curation and automation lets people better coordinate their music with their experience.

Other application solutions:

 
None known.
 

Additional description and context:

 
Known complications:

  • this would require extra permissions to get the necessary data
  • Building/editing such rules can become complex. I suggest a simple UI like the existing smart playlists to begin with.
  • testing these rules might be difficult
     

Screenshots / Mockup:

    

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2

This is why it won’t happen, those permissions does not really fit a music player. (Also the reason why I don’t support automatic connection configuration by ssid)

You can easily build the playlists you want for the cases and use the API to start them from tasker or automate that have the permissions and are suited for such tasks.

3

@flax I for one really like this idea. I do think you may be able to do this with some workarounds. Firstly in Symfonium you’d need to create the rules for the smart playlists you’d like.

In your “Play Something from Rocky” example so long as you have tags that can be filtered by Symfonium the app can gather those files in a playlist.

You can then add that playlist as a shortcut to your homescreen (I’D put them all in a folder) & using an app like macrodroid or tasker im sure you could setup some macros that will launch a “shortcut” (your playlist) based on whataver triggers you’ve set.

In apps like those you can have a trigger for “Driving” between 8am - 9am.

Its not all done in one app but it is possible.

I’ve made a gross assumption that you are on adroid though (im not sure tasker or Macrodroid are available on IOS)

4

No need for shortcuts Symfonium expose an API.

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