iPod nonsense

[ivyfic]

I love and hate the most played song feature on iTunes. It's cool to see how often I've listened to something, but once I figured out how the count was happening (it goes up when the track ends), I immediately started trying to manipulate the system. The thing is, there are some songs that have a count of zero even though I listen to them because I never listen to the end. Like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Layla (I love you Eric Clapton, but I'm sorry, the piano outro to that song is just too cheesy). And it's started making me listen to things on my iPod when I would not otherwise (when I would normally just play the CD, or listen to it on winamp on my work computer) so that those listens "count."

What ends up happening, even so, is that my top 25 are invariably from one or two albums I just purchased. When I get a new album, I usually listen through it ten or twenty times to get to really know the music. (One of my recent purchases has a playcount of 40, which means the top 25 playlist is pretty much that album, slightly out of order.) Then I'll go away from it for awhile, and if it's good, give it another listen every now and then. So those albums that I never get tired of, that I listen to a couple times a year, aren't on the top 25. But the album that I haven't figured out how I feel about is. This makes the top 25 playlist singularly unhelpful to me.

Perhaps I am overthinking this. Do other people use the top 25 playlist?

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The most I use it is to incorporate the listens into the shuffle function such that more played songs turn up more frequently. (Thereby generally guaranteeing that I get songs I really like when I'm only shuffling them to play in a short time.) This has come to bite me in the ass a few times as what I've "listened" to according to my iPod or iTunes often includes songs that it kept throwing up when I had it on normal shuffle and I didn't turn it off even though I didn't love that song.

Now, I mostly just ignore the "times played" function.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I feel like an old version of RealPlayer I used in college did that--the more you listened to a song, the more often it showed up on Randomize; and that would occasionally result in songs getting constantly played purely by random chance.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

If you had a weighted random play that increased play frequency by times played, you would very quickly start playing only a few songs. Hmmm...and my brain starts trying to write the computer program for the simulation...

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Obviously, less than 50% of the weighting was from times played. Either that, or it was going towards that, and I screwed it up by occasionally picking what I wanted to listen to.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you use the playlist, songs can definitely cascade like that. Sort of like bestseller lists for books or movies (or at least, we hope). I don't every shuffle my whole collection. With it being over 40 gigs, that would just pull up a lot of random crap. I feel like that function works better on smaller collections. Since for a while I was acquiring music with the intent of owning a copy of every song I recognized, and a lot of those songs are on my iPod, the signal to noise is too high for shuffle to pull up stuff I want to listen to. Plus there's nothing quite like having Cake seque into the second movement of Peer Gynt.

The thing with the most played function is, even though I don't use it, if you give me a metric I'm going to analyze it for its inaccuracies. I suspect as it collects years of data it will eventually represent my favorite songs, but right now, the individual spikes of new acquisitions are too high relative to everything else.

(Right now I know I've listened to my new Apocalyptica albums about ten times not on iTunes. Don't think I'm not plotting a way to artificially up their play counts.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think you need to make use of a smart playlist function and then set that on shuffle. Smart playlist would group things by categories (or obscure characteristics like bpm and such) and then you could shuffle it and not have the dissonance.

And yes, the frequently played thing is going to be inaccurate in the short term. It will also be annoying as hell to go back and listen to songs you were obsessed with for one second in time and now have 450+ play counts and come up all the time. Because I get song crushes, but I hardly ever go back to them (unless they're favorites of a favorite band or something). So I would just ignore the metric, but that's your call.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always the option of listing the song you want to boost ten times in a row, hitting play, and putting the iPod back in your bag.