Marshall's Weblog

Ever since the dawn of mp3 and portable music, I have been listening to music mainly using some sort of random play mode. Winamp’s random was better then many music players at the time. You could even randomize the playlist and then randomize the selection of songs to introduce more randomness. Then came Apple, iTunes and Party Shuffle. I love Party Shuffle. I currently have it set to play my higher rated songs more often, which presents me with a decent selection of the best hits from my library.

I began thinking about how I have listened to music in the past. When I first started listening to music, I listened to the radio and MTV. Radio and MTV play, what I thought at the time, a random set of songs. (I realized later that radio and MTV play songs based on what record companies pay them to play). Once I got sick of hearing the same 10 songs every 2 hours on the popular rock station, I started to buy CD’s and listening to music on a per-album basis. Now I no longer had the “randomness” of the radio, but I now had the control over what I wanted to listen to.

When Napster first came out, it provided people (and myself) the opportunity to download the songs that they like. No longer did we have to purchase an entire album just to get the one song that we like. We just searched, downloaded (and waited, because we only had 56k modems), and listened to the songs we liked. Now I had a playlist consisting of a few dozen tracks on Winamp, but listening to them in order got boring and sometimes I never got to the end of the playlist. Enter random play.

Faster computers, bigger hard drives, and faster internet connections helped grow my digital music collection until it became almost unmanageable by Winamp. Winamp 3 added a Library which provided a way to easilly call up any song or artist you wanted to listen to. You could still put your whole playlist on random and listen as Winamp played songs based off of a psuedo-random number. Interesting for a while, but you never had control over what was going to play next.

This is where iTunes and Party Shuffle come in. Party shuffle has 3 options for you to tweak. The number of songs to queue up, the playlist to pull songs from, and the most important one, the ability to play “higher rated songs more often.” I utilize this last option almost exclusively. Now I get a randomized playlist of my favorite tracks and every once and a while, Party Shuffle will pop in a song which I have not rated. Now I don’t know what is going to play next and every once and a while, I get a song that I haven’t heard for a while. This is very much like the early days of radio for me. (Plus, if I really want to modify the upcomming tracklist, I can do so. This is especially useful when I want to hear more from a particular artist.)

I have recently realized one shortcomming, which was pointed out by my favorite online radio station, Radio Paradise. Tracks are still chosen at random. On Radio Paradise, “Each hour of music is carefully blended together to flow smoothly between different musical styles & genres – just like real DJs used to do on FM.”

My musical tastes are really all over the place. Hearing Ricky Skaggs’ Rocky Top followed by Watching Me Fall by The Cure followed by Mother and Child Reunion by Paul Simon doesn’t really flow together. What Party Shuffle needs is a few more options and an updated song selection algorithm. Here is my vision:

Music files have a genre associated with it. Certain genres are similar to other genres (Indie Rock, Alternate Rock, Singer/Songwriter). Party Shuffle 2 should blend songs according to genres which are similar to one another. What else to songs have in common. Some songs are fast paced and some are slower. iTunes can even calculate Beats Per Minute. So why not Shuffle songs on some sort of a sine curve, playing a couple of slower paced songs which build up to faster paced songs. Add this to the current Party Shuffle and you would be enjoying the music you like the most, whith random un-rated songs thrown in there for kicks. Musical genres would cycle so that you hear similar artists and songs which gradually progress to other styles. And you would also have a progression from chilled out/slower songs to more upbeat/faster paced songs.