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Yeah, or you can just use Smart Playlists in iTunes to do all that for you. Study your options people. It's not hidden or anything.

Smart playlists are also in Rhythmbox. Muine, the other GNOME music player, will soon have functionality similar to smart playlists - which the primary dev refers to as groups. So, yeah, shuffle, is more refined than the author implies.

iTunes Smart Playlists are, no matter what kind of combinations you are using, hardly a match for a neural network based selection system.

I found this article very interesting, and also amusing: the discussion of a mathematical equation followed up by pseudocode implementing a coin toss... kind of ironic...!

I have never used iTunes so cannot comment on how well it achieves the "what I should listen to next" aim. However, look at it from a different approach... using this method, could your "clever" music app not gradually alter the playlist to get you out of a bad mood, or cheer you up, or wake you up, or help you calm down etc...

When I can click a "cheer me up" button on my media player and it knows exactly what I want to hear, then I will know truly innovative media players have arrived.

A-Z equals 26 songs, not 28 ;-)

I like the idea, but am I the only one that values an _album_ ? ... where the artist has spent hours deciding in which order their songs should go together. I try to keep all mp3s together by album, and shy away from "shuffle" and even peer-to-peer downloading because they destroy that.

"using this method, could your "clever" music app not gradually alter the playlist to get you out of a bad mood, or cheer you up, or wake you up, or help you calm down etc...

When I can click a "cheer me up" button on my media player and it knows exactly what I want to hear, then I will know truly innovative media players have arrived."

Let's patent that, quick.

On second thought, let's not.

I like the idea, but am I the only one that values an _album_ ?

No you're not alone on that. Some albums like "OK Computer" (Radiohead), "The Wall" (Pink Floyd) and "( )" (Sigur Rós) must be listened on the order they're set...no wonder that these bands don't like iTunes, it would deface their work.

I agree with Chris to a point. Many bands produce great _albums_, but others produce great collections of songs.

I usually run a shuffled playlist of the songs that play well "out of context", and when I am in the mood for something like "The Wall", "Disintigration" (The Cure), or "AEnemia" (Tool) that is best listened as an _album_ I play the album in order.

Again... back to the whole Mood thing. We need AI in our media players.

The whole idea behind Mood mode is to forego smart playlists, and introduce both exploratory and mood qualities to music listening. Let the computer deduct a "personalized" playlist based on song relationships.

Let's patent that, quick.

Consider the osnews page cached as a case for prior art

Now wheres that "sarcastic mood" music button.....

"Let the computer deduct a "personalized" playlist based on song relationships."

Several flaws here.

#1 the assumption that a song is of a certain mood. (For some people "Fck the Police" might be a high energy pick-me0up... for others, it could be a soothing mellow tune.

#2 the assumption that a song is always of a certain mood for a certain person. ("Wish You Were Here" can be depressing to me at times, and it can also be heart warming at times.)

Conclusion: Nerds, that can't craft a good playlist (or are too lazy too) or cannot appreciate an album or a simple shuffle, just like wasting time on retarded ideas to compensate for their lack of... something.

I've been thinking about this for quite a while. It has some potential. Lots of potential.

I think this can achieve both goals: smart playlist and exploration. The two aren't exclusive.

Someone has already done some work in this, I believe called the synapse media player: http://www.synapseai.com/ , and they had a winamp plugin, but it just seemed to go short of Manuel's suggestions, or at least it seemed this way.

Another quick suggestion, you could also mine playlists for song relationships. Load your previous playlists, and add some connections between all the songs on each one.

I'm the same way, I seem to always listen to music by album. iTunes, which I no longer use (not available as Free Software ), did a pretty good job of sorting by ARTIST, then ALBUM, then TRACK NUMBER. Winamp, which is still a nice program, couldn't do that with the playlist editor. you'd have the #1 song from each album in the first part, then the #2s, etc. I guess Media Library would fix that... oh well.

I just posted a link to this article through the iTunes feedback form on apple.com. I hope they will implement it into iTunes 5

>"Let the computer deduct a "personalized" playlist based on
>song relationships."

>Several flaws here.

>#1 the assumption that a song is of a certain mood. (For
>some people "Fck the Police" might be a high energy
>pick-me0up... for others, it could be a soothing mellow
>tune.

Please explain what this has to do with the maths of the problem.

>#2 the assumption that a song is always of a certain mood
>for a certain person. ("Wish You Were Here" can be
>depressing to me at times, and it can also be heart warming
> at times.)

It all depends on which song you heard before (which probably depends on your mood). The network model will find the right "next" song for you, from a set of "next" songs you've heard after "wish you were here". No surprise here, if you actually read the article.

>Conclusion: Nerds, that can't craft a good playlist (or are
>too lazy too) or cannot appreciate an album or a simple
>shuffle, just like wasting time on retarded ideas to
>compensate for their lack of... something.

Ah, now I understand. You're a troll or this post is flamebait. Or you own like 14 MP3s.

When I first ripped all my albums and started using a PC for playing music I spent hours creating playlists. But I don't think I've listened to any of them more than once or twice and I hardly ever shuffle tracks.

Albums are simply much more satisfying and enjoyable, I like to hear tracks in the context that the artists intended. Even when I'm listening to singles I like to hear multiple tracks by the same band, rather than a mix of different artists. Now I don't even bother using a music manager, it's just as quick to keep my main MP3 directory open and right-click on the album's folder to play them.

Have you ever watched "High Fidelity"?

I actually enjoy selecting what album i'm gonna listen today, bet Rob (the guy in the movie) loves too. And yes, i rather listen to an entire album, just like others have said here.

But i find the idea nice anyway, keep it up.

Victor.

What your talking about is basically an The Interactive Activation and Competition Network some links for more info:

http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~cogs2010/cmc/chapters/IAC/

The beauty of this kind of network is its error redunancy and generalisation abilities. You could also easily mix into a users personal network external influences from other sources such as Audiogalaxy (and amazons what other users like feature). You could also use other data such as bpm of the song and average frequencies.

I would love to see this feature as an extension to the normal shuffle mechanism, yes it has some downfalls as other people have mentioned but it also opens up a whole spectrum of new oppurtunities for the traditional shuffle.

"Conclusion: Nerds, that can't craft a good playlist (or are too lazy too) or cannot appreciate an album or a simple shuffle, just like wasting time on retarded ideas to compensate for their lack of... something."

Oh please. Just because the concept doesn't appeal to you personally doesn't mean it it' not a good idea. Not everyone approaches the same problem in the same way, and your solution-of-choice isn't necessarily the best for everyone, or even for you. Some of the best ideas of the past have been judged as "wasting time" and chances are you're benefiting from a few of those past ideas today. But hey, reject innovation if you wish.


"And no, you are the one which seems to have a lame preference for music. (Ace of Base?) I have about 900 CDs from Jazz to R&B to Hip Hop to Rock to Funk to Reggae. And this represents a very small portion of the music that I know and love."

Are you implying your "superior" tastes make you an expert on the topic? I've enjoyed Ace of Base, does that make my opinion less valid? No and no. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

Personally, I think this idea has potential and I'd like to see an experimental implimentation of it.

"Are you implying your "superior" tastes make you an expert on the topic? I've enjoyed Ace of Base, does that make my opinion less valid? No and no. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life."

He was the one who brought up my taste and selection. I have no opinion about it whatsoever.

But, yes, njoying Ace of Base makes your opinion less valid.

First off, your initial response on this topic had some good merit and deserves to be heard, so don't think I am arguing against you on those points.
---

"He was the one who brought up my taste and selection. I have no opinion about it whatsoever."

The size of your selection, yes, but he never mentioned your taste. You did that first. As for the size of your collection, it's still a valid point that, for many people, the larger your music library, the harder it is to find a song that suites your mood, particularly when you yourself aren't sure what you wanna hear. Now, this isn't a mission critical problem, but then few problems are.


"But, yes, njoying Ace of Base makes your opinion less valid."

To you, perhaps. It's not uncommon to judge harshly those who differ from you, be it in tastes or whatever. People do it all the time. It's called bigotry. But my opinion is less valid, so don't listen to me.

---

To everyone else, don't worry. I won't perpetuate this any further. My tolerance of personal attacks and ingorant remarks is relatively low, however, and once in awhile I just can't resist.

I shuffle inside a single genre at a time.

it would make sense to have the correlation be a function of play time.

Check out irate.sf.net it's a collaborative music player that correlates your taste with that of other people and tries to download new music that you might enjoy.

I use Soundplay for my mp3 player,it has features that utilize the the advanced attributes of the BeOS file system,but basically I just drop my selected tunes in a folder and drop it on the Soundplay window,kick back and enjoy the show,there's no typing involved unless you want to name the folders,by category,plus if I get bored I can play a few tunes backwards or mess with them using the tons of VST special FX Soundplay supports.

For XMMS there is a plugin called IMMS which basically scores the songs you listen to depending on whether you jump to them, from them etc. It then chooses among those songs with those scores as weights.

It can monitor X idleness as well so if you leave your computer while it's playing, you won't get wrong results.

I've used it since I discovered it, and it really works well once you've trained it, which is the only drawback, really. It can take a while training it on thousands of songs.

http://www.luminal.org/wiki/index.php/IMMS/IMMS

I really like this article...the idea is very cool and it hits home because, while I am also a lover of albums, more often than not I'm on shuffle just for the variety. And every 5 songs or so I find myself clicking "next" 20 times to find the song I really want to hear or that goes well after what I've just heard.

But here's a suggestion for improvement: instead of picking an arbitrary percentage of the song, like 25%, after which you mark the relationship in an "all or nothing" kind of way, why not simply mark it proportionally to the amount of the song you've heard? And perhaps not even in a linear proportion. Perhaps greater than linear: for instance, if I listen to 1% of the song, the amount of relationship is, say 1 relationship unit, but if I listen to 100% of the song it is more than 100 times more, say 1000 relationship units.

Just an idea.

If I leave my PC for an hour, I don't want this thing decided that I now like all the songs it has strung together. I think it needs to be aware if there is any activity on the PC when deciding.

Also, I like the point about "albums" and how the artist has spent time making the album order mean something. And I respect it. But I also respect my own opinion about these things, and want to shuffle. I tend to listen to music where the songs are so good that they can indeed stand alone, as well as in the context of an album. And that certainly includes OK Computer, right at the top of the list.

... I'm surprised nobody mentioned them:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MarkovChain.html

iTunes has a leg up in the race to implement something like this. (Oh, there's no race? Why not?) The latest version has a "Party Shuffle" which lets you see at a glance what the last X (usually five) songs that played were, what the current song playing is, and what the next X (I use 25) songs will be. It shuffles out of whatever playlist you choose, or your entire library. Since you know the songs coming next, you can delete them so that the entire queue moves up and a new randomly-selected song is added to the end, or you can drag-and-drop rearrange the queued songs.

If Apple starts to assign weight in the "shuffle" algorithm based on your choices in this mode, it could be very useful indeed. Much better, IMO, than just waiting a certain amount of time after the songs starts.

If Song A is playing and then Song F starts and I decide it clashes and change the song, my new choice might not be based on what best follows Song A, because I've already had a jarring experience with Song F. Also, if I'm in shuffle mode, I'll just click Next until I find one that's "good enough," or until I get bored of clicking Next and give up. iTunes' Party Shuffle mode doesn't completely eliminate these types of situations, but it cuts out most of it.

Shuffle is never random enough for me. It's better in RB than it was in xmms, but I still notice patterns.
I know full random is impossibly, but there are interesting sources for random seeds; far more interesting than the current second past the minute.

Well, if already this is approached from a sort-of mathematic standpoint, let's compute a bit more.

How many songs is this system supposed to manage? It must not be too few, because that'd be overseeable by the user herself, so no real point in an AI-like scheduling mechanism.

From my own experience, my collection used to be around 6000 songs, and, since it was collected gradually (thus I had time to know most of it), it just *started* to be un-overseeable. So, let's just raise the bar a bit - I'm not a real music addict, so I'm sure others must have greater collections. Anyways, according to Apple's iPod ads, 10000 songs in your pocket, let's just use this number.

So, we have 10000 songs to manage. That means almost a fifty million individual song pairs to rate and track. Since this system is supposed to represent and follow a personal taste (so community effort doesn't play in developing the relationship database), the user would have to listen to and rate 50 000 000 song pairs. And that just means one occasion for each one - which must be a quite low-fidelity representative of the real relationships, because the user may just not bother to skip a song she usually would, or vice versa.

I guess in order for the relationship system to be as reliable as to select *one* song and then play the right sings through the whole night automatically based on this Markov-chain, the relationships must be *really* strong and reliable. Way more than a single reinforcement/denial per pair.

Also, as the author pointed out too, this would require a significant amount of computational power to operate. Maybe not that much for one-level direct evaluation - but as mentioned in the article, a two- or more level process would have to evaluate this same 50 000 000 possibilities for each song transition...

Not to mention the storage requirements. If we only consider one byte per song pair, that's 50 megs. This is not too much on today's harddisks; but would this 50 megs be scanned through from the HDD for each song transition, or would it be held directly in RAM? That'd already be quite much, just for this purpose. And I guess for the system to be really useful, 1 byte per song pair would be *waaay* too few. Much more likely somewhere between 10 and 50... Just multiply it up...

Has the author considered these aspects?

I find the obsession with keeping albums together an odd one... If you've ever been to a concert from a given artist, it's pretty unlikely they'll play all of an album from beginning to end. They'll play bits of it, in a different order most likely.

Basically: if you feel like you want to listen to an entire album in one go, listen to it. If you want a random selection of songs, don't. I don't see what all the fuss is about.

itunes is great you can do a lot with it but it still pisses me off because its so macish grr stupid mac users