Ramus - a genre-first hierarchical music client (Open source, windows/mac/linux/android/ios)

[1337raspberry]

Edit: Keeping everything below for posterity, but i’ve just put the project live now. Feel free to give it a shot, it’s free and open source so hopefully somebody like myself out there finds it and enjoys it. The github page has a pretty comprehensive rundown of all of it’s features.

GitHub - 1337raspberry/ramus: A genre-first hierarchical music client for Plex.

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Okay so this essentially comes out of a deep want for over a decade now to be able to browse and discover my music by hierarchical genres. Tried to build it in the past with foobar and got a half working prototype then gave up. Finally got around to doing it for real.

More screenshots below

There are some other features (cached local fuzzy find search with AND etc operators) that aren’t shown but the screenshots should give you a good idea of what i’m going for.

Any interest at all or is this just extremely niche and only for genre nerds like me? I plan to just release it fully open source i have no interest in anything commercial. It’s cross platform and I’ve so far been testing on MacOS mostly but also a fair bit on Windows and Ubuntu.

I am building it to be as they say fairly “opinionated”. I don’t want to build a fully feature complete thing that supports every possible little type of interaction. I just want it to do what its meant to do, and do it well. It’s basically just built entirely for what I personally want and…well hopefully some other folks have similar tastes to me.

Comes with a set of open source hierarchical data from the Beets music tagger project (which in turn is just a whitelist of last.fm genres they use to tag from), but you can also create your own heirarchy if you want and import it in a standard tabbed/spaced format that is easy to build (Featured in screenshots is my custom example, to really show it off)

It will feature your album in all genres where it is tagged (did you know plex supports more than 2 genre tags, even if the api doesn’t give them out as standard…hence we have to do a little local caching to make it work), and will deduplicate results and let you browse at any parent/child level and see all results. Cool right?

Lemme know what you think, open to suggestions or critiques while i’m still sharpening everything up:

[1337raspberry]

Having some fun with some non genre related features. Did you know that all the plex rating data that feeds the “hot” icons in plexamp is just there in the API to use, and you can do kickass stuff like this?

[1337raspberry]

Been putting a lot of work into the taxonomy that I want to include with this.

I realised that it’s not actually about having a perfect taxonomy that users should fit around, but having as much wiggle room as realistically possible, covering as many eventualities as possible, with as many akas as possible with alternative names and spellings and with and without hyphens and different naming schemas etc… so that whatever a users library looks like, it should give them a nice rich experience by doing the heavy lifting for them.

the whole feature of the thing is that you can explore by genre/taxonomy, and if you have plex, you already have a lot of this data, even if you never bothered trying to use it!

we now pull in the styles tag from plex as well (which plex treats as sub-genres anyway) and these are pulled from allmusic and musicbrainz (if the user asks for it that is…if you’re like me and you obsessively multi tag your own genre metadata locally you can ignore that )

i’ve integrated almost all of these (leaving some out that just dont make sense/are too vague) and also buffed up the tree a lot from various music resources all around the internet, just to cover as many eventualities as I can.

the end result is that my friends very large music library, that previously was just showing 1 automatically matched (or manually and often poorly lmao sorry) genre tag per album, is now showing rich data per album, and the tree is fully matched from their plex instance auto tagging all the style data. Their previously mass amount of albums that just fell into “other”, is now down to very few stragglers that are just combination tags like “Folk, World & Country, Pop” (which, ew)

Their previous response upon asking them to test it was “if this needs me to retag my library why would i bother” has inspired me to actually make it work for other people, instead of building an app that only insane people like me would ever use. Now it’s actually kind of plug and play and you can see your music in a cool new way just…straight off the bat.

combine that with fuzzy genre matching at like a 0.95 match cutoff, and yeah, even poorly manually tagged files that plex couldn’t automatch, still can get included in most of the fun.

(Also i realised i keep posting tonemapped images that look a bit dull, thats my bad. The app is actually nice and vibrant i promise and looks great on sdr or hdr, i went out of my way to adjust for that!. I just keep forgetting to toggle off hdr before taking screenies but oh well.)

[1337raspberry]

put it live now, hopefully somebody out there enjoys or finds value in this.

if not, i’ll keep using it every day, as i have been for a few months now in one form or another

GitHub - 1337raspberry/ramus: A genre-first hierarchical music client for Plex.