You can rate songs with up to five stars, which IIRC ought to produce the weighting effect you're looking for, to the extent you're willing to rate your library. You can even rate a song while it's playing on your iPod (at least, in the generation I'm using) by clicking the center button; when the screen shows not a progress bar but a series of dots, spin the wheel to apply stars to the song.
i don't know if you can on the iPod, but on iTunes, there's a "play higher-rated songs more often" check-box at the bottom of the party shuffle screen.
Ah. Well, never mind, then.
That still seems like not enough range, though -- wouldn't you like to be able to rate songs, say, from 1 to 100? Make it really, really unlikely, but still possible, that some stuff would show up?
Or I suppose I could just listen to music less, given that I don't like much of it.
I could just listen to music less, given that I don't like much of it
LB is ogged.
Except, the thread proving it seems to have gone.
Every time I hear something about IPod's it makes me want one less. You mean you don't listen to *albums*? You don't flick down to "Big Bill Broonzy: All the Classic Sides" and press select, and listen to ther record? You mean it decides for you what music to play? I can't see the appeal of that.
wouldn't you like to be able to rate songs, say, from 1 to 100? Make it really, really unlikely, but still possible, that some stuff would show up?
Sure, but building the ability to do that sort of thing on the iPod would probably be difficult if you wanted to retain the current UI. And since one of the major pluses to the iPod is the UI, I can't see it happening.
No, no -- you can certainly do that. I just like the shuffle feature, but would like it much more if it were more controllable, so I didn't end up actually listening to most of what I've put on my Ipod.
You mean it decides for you what music to play? I can't see the appeal of that.
The iPod Shuffle doesn't let you choose what music to play. All of the other iPods will let you choose precisely what you want to listen to, or you can set them on "shuffle" and they'll randomly choose songs for you. (And even then, you can decide if you want to shuffle by song or by album.)
7 to 5.
on 6: Nah, it'd be easy. All you'd need would be a slider with 100 defined points on it -- scroll up to raise the rating, scroll down to lower it. I'm no programmer, but I can't imagine it would be hard to do with the iPod's controls.
I can't see the appeal of that
The appeal is like that of listening to a radio station—you don't know what song will come on next, so there is an element of surprise—but without the commercials and with the knowledge that whatever will come on next, it's something you like.
You can, of course, listen to albums entire, if you choose (except with the iPod Shuffle, I think).
But it's a rare album on which I like all the songs.
wouldn't you like to be able to rate songs, say, from 1 to 100?
yes, but i don't have the 40 hours in a day i'd need to organize my life at that level. as it is, i barely put any of the songs in the 1-5 ranking the ipod/itunes does provide. i just keep it handy and skip over the songs i don't want to listen to.
also, you can set the ipod to shuffle by album, instead of by song, allowing even the most recondite musical tastes to be savored in full. although if they could give you a button (or key-stroke combo) to allow you to skip to the next album in shuffle, that would be cool.
It's not a matter of the controls, it's a matter of overwhelming the user with more and more menu options. I suspect that most people don't use the ratings as it is (although if they do, it's more likely they do so in iTunes than on the iPod), and if you make the scale 1 to 100 it'll make it even less likely that people will use them.
LB, it works as you describe in 9. Be judicious with the songs you disfavor with just 0–1 stars, give many more 3–5 stars, and you won't hear the first set nearly so often.
The appeal is like that of listening to a radio station
But when you listen to the radio, the songs are not randomly selected -- there is a DJ deciding which song to put next and segueing. (sp?) -- This is not necessarily true of the newfangled robot radio stations but I also don't listen to any of those. And I'm thinking even there, there must be some programmer telling the machine what are good sequences.
Furthermore you don't want to do it in iTunes, you want to do it on the iPod: it's not a terrible inconvenience to rate songs dynamically as they come up in a live shuffle environment while, say, you're on the subway or grading papers.
Hell, I've talked myself into doing it.
I listen to albums. I have to say, when you hear a song (say, in a movie, on TV, or in a bar) off an album and the next track off that album does not play ... its a real let-down. I've started shuffling my music just to destroy my expectations about what should be played after what.
what would be interesting would be a sort of last.fm/ audioscrobble interaction with the ipod.
i also seem to recall reading somewhere that the actual rating granularity in the data files is finer than the 5 stars available in the user interface, also.
Absolutely. I've made a commitment to myself to get disciplined about rating my songs. It's not that hard, really, to do it on the iPod itself, and if you ever listen in iTunes, it's also a piece of cake, especially if you use something like Sizzling Keys.
The actual rating in the data files is, indeed, 1-100 but my experience with systems like that (say, LaunchCast) is that it's overwhelming. 1-5 has been sufficient for me.
18: well, if the algorithm actually uses 1-100, that suggests automated methods could be a bit more subtle than 5 stars, *not* that you would want to use it yourself.
One way around this for shuffle would be to use something like last.fm to figure out your rankings, then generate (automagically, one wold hope) a list with repeated entries, hence giving coarse weights. I don't know if you can do this with shuffles, though.
I've made a commitment to myself to get disciplined about rating my songs.
Think about that for a second, though: you're talking about it in the same terms as you would going on a diet or going to the gym or cleaning the toilet. It's a useful thing to have, but the vast majority of people just aren't going to do it. They don't want listening to music to turn into another chore.
20: that's the genious behind something like audioscrobbler->last.fm. you don't actually do anything at all (except listen to music)
20: Well, sure, but pressing Cmd-Ctrl-3 from time to time while iTunes is playing is a lot less arduous than going to the gym. Works fewer muscle groups, though.
And I didn't say I'd think less of anyone who wouldn't do it, but if you want to weight your randomness, this is one way.
I do use the Audioscrobbler plugin with iTunes, and my problems with 'Scrobbler/Last.fm are two-fold: I'd like to be able to add a rating (or at least a weighting) to certain songs so that just because a song happened to come up on shuffle doesn't mean it gets factored into my recommendations or whatever. Also, their player has always been dog-ass slow for me, which makes me kind of sad.
The Shuffle does, in fact, let you pick which songs, in which order: it plays a playlist, which you can have arranged in a particular way or shuffled. But essentially, it's all one playlist (which you arrange on the computer and then transfer).
It's certainly not the way most people use it though-- something with a screen (any other ipod) is vastly preferable for that behavior.
aaron: well, that would be a way to handle weighted shuffle, then. as long as the shuffle can handle lists longer than the number of files on it.
17, 19: last.fm was an idea I had a year ago. I'm glad someone finally came to their senses and implemented it.
That last.fm search is interesting. When you search for obscure bands, the only related bands it finds are also obscure bands. That suggests that people who listen to obscure bands generally don't listen to more popular bands as well, or that they listen to more popular bands much less. An elitism effect. Whereas a random weighted distribution one might expect without the elitism effect would have a search for an obscure band return the most related band as popular one with a similar sound.
of course that assumes that there are popular bands with similar sounds.
on the other hand, there is some nonsense snobbery in hipster/scenester circles (oh, it can't be good if people have heard of it).
on the gripping hand, an awful lot of popular music is pretty mediocre stuff.
last.fm has been around for a few years now, iirc, probably long enough to shake out the statistics reasonably.
26: Well, my technical details were inferior, and I didn't think about making internet radio a part of it, but the whole collaborative filtering thing I had covered. I just wonder how advanced and subtle their implementation is.
29: i don't know how subtle their implementation is, but they were up and running well before a year ago....
it's actually a pretty common idea, I think. The nice thing about doing it with music is that automated tools to do the histogram estimation are both easy to implement and use.
i suspect there is actually a lot of work that could be done in this area. hmmmmmmmm.
Pandora is a similar service that recommends new artists based on their musical similarity, not popularity, which is an interesting take on the problem. I spent a few weeks bouncing back and forth between Last.fm and Pandora before deciding that neither of them seemed quite ready-for-prime-time enough for me, and went slinking back to LaunchCast and/or my iPod.
31: `similarity' is pretty difficult to define. Last.fm is based more on other people who liked what you liked like this, which is fairly sensible.
That being said, I never used it to feed music. I figured out how to get my ipod usage uploaded to it, then used that for a `neighbors' search, which gave me ideas of music to check out that I hadn't heard of. I know people who stream last.fm all day though....
ooops, i meant to say that iirc, pandora is built that way also.
I think Pandora my have some social recommendation stuff built in to it as well, but its core is the Music Genome Project, which is an attempt to define the difficult-to-define concept of "similarity" between songs/artists.
Using Last.fm to look up new bands? Makes sense. If the streaming worked better, I'd use that too.
oh, i'd forgotten about the `music genome project'. I did look at that a while ago. I'm not at all convinced it's worth anything, though, in the sense that what can be done in that direction is to superficial to be useful. icbw, of course
I can see a country song coming out of this: "Yesterday #1 on your shuffle, today #1500".
Probably needs some work.
Emerson, don't think I don't know what you're doing.
36: I remember, baby/when you would ffle me/i used to be your #1/now i'm #2083
I've been streaming last.fm for an hour now and I've heard one pause. I'm on a run-of-the-mill DSL connection.
The setting for song ratings in iTunes really is 0-100 behind the scenes, but it is only effective up to the rating you have for the song. So if you manually rate a song as 50 it will show up as 2 and a half stars (40 would be two stars, 60 would be three, etc.).
However, in shuffle playback, giving a song a 50 rating is treated the same as giving it a 40 rating. Whatever formula iTunes uses for randomization discards the remainder, so a two star song will be played as often as a two and a half star song.
In addition, the shuffle playback formula plays 5 star songs more than 4 star songs, 4 star songs more often than 3 star songs, etc., to more than a fair amount. I can't remember whether it's an exponential curve, or a logarithmic curve, but you will hear 5 star songs much more than 0 star songs. Maybe not 1/20th as much, but there's been experimental research done on the formulas used.
on the gripping hand
Man, another sf nerd joins the gang. I'd do the spock symbol or something at you, but as I'm commenting Becks style, take a tired wave and a grunt instead.
Oddly, despite double-jointedness, I could never do the spock symbol on either hand until I sprained (bike riding) and, that same summer, broke (rock climbing) my left wrist when I was 8. After that I could do it with my left hand only, but never really wanted to. I think this is why I didn't follow Star Trek much as I grew older.
Incidentally, having broken my right arm at 4 (shopping cart), and having broken my wrist at 8, I was irrationally worried about what would happen to me at 12.
Hey apo, remember when you were helping me figure out what was wrong with my itunes? And you wanted to know whether I could run Quicktime? The answer is, when I try to run Quicktime, a Quicktime screen flashes for an instant, and then goes away, and QT is not listed among the applications I'm running. Itunes doesn't even do that--I get my mouse arrow turning into an hourglass, but then it turns back into an arrow and nothing has happened.
When you say "not listed among the applications I'm running" -- are you using the Task Manager to get that list? And do you look at the rightmost tab of the task manager, which lists what is actually in memory, rather than the useless leftmost tab which lists only a small subset of what is in memory? Or are you using a Mac, in which case these questions are not useful?
Here is one of the experiments Trickster Paean mentioned.
The relative frequency weights appear to be:
0 stars= 0.28
1 star = 0.42
2 stars= 0.72
3 stars = 0.86
4 stars= 1
So the 4 star songs will play about 3 times more than the 0 star songs.
Just upload twenty copies each of the songs you like. Duh.
I don't own an ipod, o I'm not terribly familiar with the technical details, but I'm glad that you can set it to shuffle by whole album. It would also be great to exempt certain tracks from shuffle entirely or to create separate playlists and then have them shuffle.
I always thought that it would be weird to have a track of a symphony drop in while you were listening to a bunch of songs for two reasons. First, you only get a snippet of the piece--probably not even a whole movement. Second, if I'm in the mood to listen to classical music, I probably don't feel like listenign to rock at the same time.
It might be nice, though, to shuffle whole symphonies or various lieder. Setting something like this up wouldn't require anything too complicated from the end user's perspective. I think, though I don't know, that all of the music is classified by genre. It is in iTunes. So you could click something like shuffle Classical by whole work.
49: you've basically got it right, bostoniangirl. At least for the normal ipods (i think the shuffle only has one list, bicbw), you can upload playlists you've made on itunes. You can also select by genre, etc., and every playlist (including the entire one ---- not so useful as in your example you have a broad range of stuff on the ipod) can be shuffled by song or by album....