the main thing I'm excited about today is a new plugin I wrote for pomelo which can generate collages of album covers based on recent listening data from your Plex server. but I realized I haven't actually introduced pomelo at all, so i guess i'll do that:
pomelo is one of the many projects that i've been building on and off for a couple years now. it's a man-in-the-middle proxy that hijacks requests to and responses from your Plex server and allows you to add and tweak functionality. all of pomelo's capabilities are supplied by plugins, and most of them are focused on music libraries, because that's most of what I use Plex for. the current plugin lineup is:
- AnyRadios, which lets you define custom shuffle algorithms as different "stations" on your server. I built this because I wanted a way to shuffle an even mix of songs I had rated highly and songs I had never heard before, but it's been really fun to keep coming up with new ways to shuffle my library.
- AnyHubs, which allows you to create custom sections on your library's home page that show items from your library based on criteria you define. I use it to add sections to Plexamp that show what albums I was listening to this time last year, and the year before.
- BetterTrackRadio and ExploreRadio, both of which are similar to AnyRadios, but less configurable, and more or less deprecated at this point.
- YoutubeVideos, which allows you to add YouTube videos to the "Extras" section for on movies, tv show and music artists in your library. You can define custom YouTube searches - for example, I have "{moveTitle} making of". This one only works on the web client; getting YouTube videos to stream on the other clients has been quite hairy.
- finally, AlbumCollage, which is like Topsters or other album collage / 5x5 generators, except that it's built into your Plex server and uses your Plex play history instead of Last.FM or any other third party service.
Until now, I've been using Topsters to make the album collages on these posts, but today's post links to the /collage endpoint on my Plex server, with some query params to define the size & dates to build the collage for.
This was a fun project, and was way quicker to implement than I expected, honestly. Partially because (humblebrag) the plugin framework I've set up in pomelo is pretty quick to work with, and partially because the Pillow library is very easy to use.
One day pomelo will be in a state that I can put it out into the world, but for now it's pretty messy...
- Coheed & Cambria - GAIBSIV: Never listened to this whole album before, it was sick.
- Die Spitz - Something to Consume: Really cool, all-femme band, doing a little bit of punk, a little bit of metal, a little doom. Big fan. Thanks to Zak for the rec.
- La Dispute - Wildlife: King Park is a classic; the rest of the album didn't hit me quite the same, but I did enjoy it.
- Coheed & Cambria - In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3: I'm working my way through the whole Amory Wars tetralogy. It's cool to see the story and the band evolve through the albums.
- Trash Boat - Don't You Feel Amazing?: He's So Good is a banger, the rest of the album felt a little meh.
- Jean Dawson - Pixel Bath: I wanted to like this album more than I did. A couple of the tracks are great, most are felt a little same-y.
- CVLTE - praystation 2: Love the aesthetic; thought the music would be a fun guilty pleasure, but aside from the single it didn't do much for me.
- Ray LaMontagne - Gossip in the Grain: Realized the only track on this album I'd ever heard was You Are the Best Thing - the album hits a ton of different styles, which surprised me.
- At The Gates - Slaughter of the Soul: This album is famous for sort of inspiring a lot of American metalcore - which I was really into for a bit in high school and college. It was cool to see the roots of metalcore, but I don't know how often I'll go back to this album.