Shuffles and playlists
Aug. 26th, 2004 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvin![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
iayork linked to this silly New York Times article on people anthropomorphizing their iPods' shuffle function. Toward the end it vaguely mentions Smart Playlists as an alternative.I almost never use the iPod Shuffle on my entire song library because large chunks of it are multi-movement classical pieces whose movements don't always work well in isolation. I'm much more likely to shuffle either a Smart Playlist or a manually assembled playlist.
The iPod makes a game attempt to replicate iTunes' live updating of Smart Playlists based on play counts. Unfortunately, I think I've found a bug. I have a Smart Playlist called "Not Recently Played" that just collects the tracks that were last played the longest time ago. I listen to it when I want to hear something I'm not bored of. In iTunes it works fine. On the iPod, though, as you listen to music, sometimes it starts accumulating the tracks that were played the shortest time ago, instead (which is a whole other Smart Playlist). The playlist only recovers its senses when the iPod syncs up. I haven't done enough experiments to characterize this behavior precisely.
Also, I want the iPod to have more of iTunes' host-based software features, though admittedly it would be difficult to design user interfaces for them. Ian's into writing elaborate scripts for custom shuffling methods, but as I've said before, I'd really like to have something like iTunes' Party Shuffle (a shuffle-play mode that allows preview and manual editing of the shuffle queue).
What I miss even more on the iPod is the ability to re-sort a playlist by various criteria. The iPod seems to retain the sort order that you had in iTunes the last time you synced, which is reasonable; but iTunes makes it so easy to re-sort by some piece of metadata just by clicking on the head of its column (one of my favorites is track length, for when my attention span gets short) that it can be easy to forget that you can't do it on the iPod. Besides which, it's not very smart about sorting Smart Playlists that are updated live; I think it just tacks the new tracks on the end.
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 06:31 pm (UTC)N.Rimsky-Korsakov - Ii. The Tsarina And Her Son Afloat In The Cask
The iTunes world is just biased against classical users, isn't it? I don't know what you're using to blog with, but whatever it is, just like almost every other program that links to music, the programmer never thought about classical music; you have the track and the composer (which is progress, unless you have the composer in the artist slot), but doesn't include the actual work.
I use XJournal, which exhibits precisely the same behaviour, and you'll never guess what I did, I wrote a script to get the proper behaviour.
But, damn it, it's trivial. If I can do it, why can't the original programmer?
It's people like them wot causes unrest.
-----------------------------------------------
--Copies Composer, Album, and Artist of current iTunes track to clipboard
tell application "iTunes"
set This_Artist to artist of current track
set this_album to album of current track
set This_Composer to composer of current track
end tell
activate
set Track_Info to This_Composer & " - " & this_album & " - " & This_Artist
set the clipboard to Track_Info
tell application "System Events"
tell process "XJournal"
set (value of text field 2 of window "Untitled") to the clipboard
end tell
end tell
no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 07:18 pm (UTC)There are all sorts of ID3 tags nobody bothers to support (http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt) for such things as soloist, conductor, etc. It bugs me, though, that even with all those tags, it's not obvious how to handle names for a classical piece that has multiple movements.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-27 05:13 am (UTC)You might try Rockbox
Date: 2004-08-27 02:45 pm (UTC)Re: You might try Rockbox
Date: 2004-08-27 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 07:16 pm (UTC)I never anthropomorphize computers - they hate it when you do that.
I experimented with making winamp play stuff correlated with time-of-day and day-of-week. Angry techno in the morning to wake up, soothing music in the late evening... But on the iPod, generally I just come back to shuffle-album. Even if I get an album I'm not in the mood for, it's not very distracting to have to hit a few times times per hour..
no subject
Date: 2004-08-26 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-27 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-27 09:35 am (UTC)Talking Heads
Date: 2004-08-27 10:21 am (UTC)Re: Talking Heads
Date: 2004-08-27 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 05:19 am (UTC)