James Lelyveld's Blog

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot while listening to my iPod. I’ve a 60 GB iPod which I’ve filled, listening to in on shuffle gives a varied experience – sometimes fantastic, sometimes awful. The awful is not from the music being bad per se (it is on my iPod after all – I should like it) but the clash with the adjacent songs.

So my thoughts went along the lines that if I rated my music then the iPod would have more to go on and maybe I’d get a better selection. However rating any tunes would prove problematic, how much I like (read want to listen) to any given song depends massively on my mood and environment not to mention previous songs I’ve listened to, how much I’ve listened to the artist recently etc etc. Trying to give a rating is an oversimplification, so I then thought about adding categories as well (I already have play lists by mood which improves things a bit). Verdict – still too basic a system to improve things much and a lot more thought / work involved to set up, a problem that just gets worse the more you try an categorise / rate things.

So I don’t bother…

A postscript to this – genius bar for itunes gives a slice of this functionality. If you can choose a tune that exemplifies the mood you’re in then it will select similar sounding tunes to follow. I’ve been very impressed by this but it still has limitations, what if it’s the lyrics of the song which really capture you. Also what if you want to change your mood – i.e. start with some mellow music and gradually pick up the pace till you’re ready to go out on the town. There’s no real replacement for playlists you put together yourself.