LeftFeet is a Rhythmbox plugin that generates a play queue from the library. It is designed specifically for a ballroom/Latin dancing society, but could be adapted to other purposes. Unlike a simple random generator, it tries to spread out genres that are in some way similar according to site-specific criteria.

Simply copy the entire directory tree to a subdirectory within the Rhythmbox plugins directory. For a local user on a UNIX-like system, this is ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins. One can of course also git clone the repository directly to where it will be used.

If you are using Rhythmbox 2, you must edit leftfeet.plugin to change the line Loader=python3 to Loader=python.

The set of genres is hard-coded into leftfeet/lf_site.py. To adapt LeftFeet to your music library and requirements, copy this file to the user data directory (for example, ~/.local/share/rhythmbox) and edit it.

After installing the plugin and activating it within Rhythmbox, an extra Generate play queue item appears on the Tools menu. When you select it, a window appears with a slider for each genre. Adjust the sliders to specify the relative frequency of each genre, then click OK to generate the play queue. You can also change the length of time for the generated queue.

• The existing queue is not replaced. Instead, new songs are appended to the queue. If you want to replace the queue, clear it first.
• Any existing songs in the play queue are taken into account when deciding the order of new songs. Thus, one can hand-pick a few songs to start with before adding more with this plugin, and the first generated songs will fit in. This should give better results than first generating a queue and then adding songs at the front.
• For best results, don't set the duration too low, as then the ratios won't be matched. For example, if you select a mix with 5% Tango but generate only 10 songs, there will be no Tango at all, not matter how often you add another 10 songs.

Copyright © 2014 Bruce Merry

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Additionally, leftfeet/lf_site.py is made available under an MIT-style license. Refer to the file itself for the details.