Tuesday, June 23, 2009

iPod Playlist Genius ain't so smart

If the iPod playlist genius is so smart, how come it's always repeating songs from playlist to playlist?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you've hurt its feelings. I think I heard it muttering something like "... still smarter than a hairless monkey ...".

I don't use the genius playlist feature so I can't help. In general I know that people complain that random playlists from software (not just iTunes) aren't properly random. My guess here is that humans' perception of "random" is different from mathematical randomness (or pseudorandomness in the case of software). I would be tempted to leave out those features because of the difficult of concocting an algorithm that feels sufficiently "genius", "random", or whatever to all the users.

Leo said...

I'm not looking for random in the pure mathematical sense, I just would like it if when I create a new Genius playlist it doesn't contain any of the songs from the previous one, at least for some configurable period of time, such as within the past 30 days.