Skip to content

Hey Apple! Give me a weighted “random” in iTunes. Yesterday.

So, I get the “Genius” thing. Mimicking pandora.com is the hotshit thing to do, but it’s not the Right thing to do. I’ve given you my ratings: give me a “random” weighted towards those ratings. This is mathematically simple, especially since you only give me a one to five scale. (How to deal with zero-star songs is an open question, but I’ve got over a terabyte of music, and at least 250 GB of that has ratings, so shut the fuck up.)

5 Comments

  1. Lauren

    Don’t they already do this, somewhat, in the Party Shuffle/iTunes DJ with the “play higher rated songs more often” option?

    Posted on 02-Apr-09 at 07:32 GMT-0400 | Permalink
  2. Yes, but I find those pretty useless, since they source music from the whole “Library”. I want it within playlists, where the ruleset engine is pretty useless, since you only get AND (not OR) and can’t group selection rules before applying binary operations with other rules.

    Posted on 02-Apr-09 at 13:45 GMT-0400 | Permalink
  3. I usually simulate this using Party Shuffle (newly renamed iTunes DJ), with a Smart Playlist that filters to 3 stars and above (and possibly an additional genre filter, if I’m in the mood for something more focused), and the “play higher rated songs more often” checked.

    Posted on 02-Apr-09 at 19:08 GMT-0400 | Permalink
  4. Hey, maybe I should reload the comments page before hitting submit. Crazy thought.

    Posted on 02-Apr-09 at 19:09 GMT-0400 | Permalink
  5. Okay, I have now actually tried this, and I find it dismally insufficient. “iTunes DJ” selects N tracks (or N minutes, roughly? I’m not sure…) and when it gets to the end, repeats. That’d be fine if it were selecting 12 hours or more, but it’s like 90 minutes. So then after I hear something for the third time, I realize that I have to run up two flights of stairs and click “refresh”. BOOO!

    Posted on 15-Jun-09 at 22:38 GMT-0400 | Permalink

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *
*
*