I wanted it to play The Beatles at random for a project I had on them. It ended up giving me ACDC, Queen, anything but The Beatles....
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Apple Hiring Genre Experts to Program iTunes Match Stations
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I wanted it to play The Beatles at random for a project I had on them. It ended up giving me ACDC, Queen, anything but The Beatles....
iTunes Radio is horrible in playing songs similar to what you like. It keeps going further and further away from what you would "like". Even when I hit never play this song again/don't like - it keeps playing songs similar to that one. The algorithm used is horrible.
Pandora is the extreme opposite. If you thumps up/down enough times, it will literally only play the same 20-30 songs and start looping. It never adds new variety into the mix.
This is a very difficult task as one person who may like similar artists of their favorite may not like those.
Pandora is the extreme opposite. If you thumps up/down enough times, it will literally only play the same 20-30 songs and start looping. It never adds new variety into the mix.
This is a very difficult task as one person who may like similar artists of their favorite may not like those.
I've found this to be correct as well. Being fairly OCD myself, I maintain organized iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
I've tried many iTunes organization app's, from "TuneUp!" to "Song Sergeant".
"TuneUp" is terrible. It wreaked havoc on my library; incorrectly matched/renamed songs/albums, compilation albums were removed as tracks were shifted to their original artist/albums, lacks user preferences for better "tuning" - read the reviews for more.
"TuneUp" - Mac App Store ($39.99)
"SongSergeant" is one of the few app's I recommend. Results have been on point while allowing owners to set personal preferences in media organization.
"SongSergeant" - Mac App Store ($19.99)
I have no connection to the company/developer. I've simply been down this road many times over the years and hope I can help others with media app's.
Agreed. Sometimes an algorithm isn't simpler (Or even close to simpler) or better.
I'd think a team of programmers vs this initiative would cost more anyway, so even from a money standpoint this could potentially be cheaper. ^_^;
I'm an iTunes Match subscriber. I hear no ads, but I certainly can't skip an unlimited number of songs...
In a radio station, it's a TERRIBLE thing. You hear the same 150 songs in a different order every day. Radio stations are horrible for music discovery.
That said, with Apple doing it, it may be great, or it may suck. iTunes Radio is pretty cool so far, but I do like the ability in Pandora to directly rate some songs up or down.
Skips are unlimited for Match subscribers, same as ad-free. The undecided subscribers (or freeloaders) get limited skips + ads.
Huh? you make no sense...lol
If a song "doesn't make sense," that's what the thumbs-down feature is for.
Personally, I'm saddened to hear that this is how it's going to work. The "radio" in "iTunes Radio" was correct, I guess. If a list is assembled by humans then it's really not much different from how traditional radio works.
I love Pandora as both a music listening service and as a music discovery service. I listen to a lot of music that isn't mainstream and before Pandora I had next to no way of discovering many of these artists. Being able to influence the "station" by indicating which songs I really liked and which songs I disliked was huge.
I've purchased many songs and albums through Pandora (and would have purchased more, but not all were in the iTunes Music Store). It seemed like such an obvious thing to have a service like that built right into iTunes. I'm not going to disparage iTunes Radio without trying it, but when it comes to obscure songs, artists, and genres, I trust algorithms more than humans. iTunes Radio might not be the threat to Pandora that I thought it would.
"20-30 songs" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's true that you begin to loop songs over the course of a few hours. In some ways it's nice to have that, as it's almost like a "perfected playlist." New songs are added in over time, as Pandora expands their music library.
Variety-wise, Pandora resolved this issue with the "add variety" feature of choosing songs from multiple "stations" as you listen. Have you ever tried it? It works pretty nicely.
Actually the song name does affect what it is matched to but it's not 100% reliable. I've had this happen to a bunch of songs in my library.
I've had it match songs named "track 1" and it renamed it and gave me the right song. What I don't like is when replaces my explicit version with non explicit version. And it blurred out my cover art for the new Tenacious D album, lame.
I sure hope so. Match just didn't work for me. About 10% of my library matched maybe. And I could manually find at least 95% of my music on the iTunes store so it isn't that my music is too obscure.
Celebrity Playlists redux
So, basically, this is like the old celebrity playlists with a new coat of paint. They were awful, by the way. Just because you're famous and/or you have music to sell doesn't mean that you have great taste – and even if you have great taste it doesn't mean that you're going to put a lot of thought into the songs you select and how you sequence them (like the nice custom-build mixtapes from the days of cassette and burning CDs.)
Here's one reaction to the old celebrity playlists:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/05/beyonc_your_mix_tape_sucks.html
On a tangent, has anybody assembled any of the playlists from Scott Miller's book "Music: What Happened?" It's an awesome book. I'm midway through the 70s.
http://www.loudfamily.com/mwh.html
So, basically, this is like the old celebrity playlists with a new coat of paint. They were awful, by the way. Just because you're famous and/or you have music to sell doesn't mean that you have great taste – and even if you have great taste it doesn't mean that you're going to put a lot of thought into the songs you select and how you sequence them (like the nice custom-build mixtapes from the days of cassette and burning CDs.)
Here's one reaction to the old celebrity playlists:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/05/beyonc_your_mix_tape_sucks.html
On a tangent, has anybody assembled any of the playlists from Scott Miller's book "Music: What Happened?" It's an awesome book. I'm midway through the 70s.
http://www.loudfamily.com/mwh.html
I would like to see a combo approach. Humans define what artists etc go in what categories and then genius etc data enhances the 'shuffle'. It would be not unlike how Lala.com would let you build a sample playlist from a batch of similar artists or even all the albums by one artist.
Maybe they could even create an option that would like you pick a song or artist and hear a station of 'people who like . . . Also like . . . ' for discovering new stuff.
And perhaps they could clean up the meta data for tracks in iTunes itself, including allowing multiple genre listings (and then there's the whole compilation bug)