Raga time-of-day player - long term project

SqueezeLite/SqueezePlay

https://discourse.mopidy.com/t/playing-schedule-for-pi-muscbox/1107

https://docs.mopidy.com/en/latest/ext/local/

http://www.gerrelt.nl/RaspberryPi/wordpress/tutorial-installing-squeezelite-player-on-raspbian/


http://www.parrikar.org/

http://raspberry-at-home.com/logitech-media-server/



I compiled these links back in November of 2017. Since approximately a year ago I'd had the idea of creating a raga time-of-day player with a Raspberry Pi Zero.

The original idea was to have some sort of set-up, similar to Plex Media Server, where if you visit a URL music will be playing automatically (like a radio station) with a selection of Hindustani ragas appropriate for the specific time of day.

After spending a couple of days struggling with the software implementation, using Mopidy or Squeezelite or Icecast, I realized that it's a lot harder than it looks. With time, the idea evolved to a focus on actually learning basic theory for Hindustani Classical Music. That's a good starting point and one I'm currently slowly pursuing.

Here's the project broken down into parts:

1. Hardware - Raspberry Pi Zero with youtube-dl to download music, and a 128 GB micro-SD Card.
2. Software - Pi MusicBox, mopidy, Icecast, Plex, SqueezeLite, all are options.
3. Scripts. Either:

• Create a script to generate playlists with an approximate run-time of 24 hours, by selecting mp3 files from appropriate directories and creating m3u playlists from these
• can be shorter than 24 hours as I'm unlikely to be listening to raga music in the 4th prahar of the night (3 AM to 6 AM)
• Set up an actual radio station
• Import filenames into a SQLlite database to help with song selection?
• Find software that can recognize length in time of tracks

4. Play music according to the right time. One system for classifying ragas (other two are scales and raga/ragini) involves playing them at the right time of day/night/season.
5. Collect music tracks from youtube and categorize them appropriately, or create a script that searches the filename and categorizes them automatically according to some rules, or adds id3 tags accordingly...
6. Learn the theory so you can actually know what's going on. This is actually rather difficult, as there's a lot of terminology and lots of variation between schools of playing. In fact, even the time classification underpinning this project is subject to differences of opinion. For instance, Raga Shree is classified as either an evening raga or a raga of the 4th section of the day (prahar - 3 PM to 6 PM), but is traditionally played at sunset, which is either in the 4th prahar or the late part of the 5th prahar depending on the time of year and DST.


So you see there's a lot of moving parts.