I'm sure I'm not the only one out there that has favorite tracks that they'd like to hear more often in Shuffle mode than other tracks. I did a search and didn't find anyone requesting a feature that should be added to increase or decrease the odds of a track being played in Shuffle mode. For example, I have about 100 tracks that are my all time favorites. And I'd like to hear those more frequently than my other tracks. I'd like to have the ability to rate each individual track and determine how often the track would be played in Shuffle mode. Maybe a "Track Rating" that goes from +/- 100 points. 100 point rating = track played much more often (# total tracks/100) than the standard shuffled track (# total tracks/1) and -100 point rating = track played much less often (# total tracks x 100). My mathmatical analogies might be off but I think you guys get the gist.

What do you guys think?

Curly

Check out tanstaafl's post here. It works well.

...[shuffle weighted by preference]...

This was going to be a 2.0 feature but never made it. In fact, the 2.0 player already supports it: if you manage to give your player a custom integer tag called, say, "rating", that goes from 0=tepid to 5=houge, then you could set up a custom shuffle mode that would preferentially put houge songs nearer the front, except for ones you've heard recently.

Then, every time you got into the car, you'd shuffle your whole player (or shuffle whichever genre you fancied, or whatever), and it would tend to pick highly-rated songs you hadn't heard for a while. The shuffle parameters (discussed to death by me in various shuffle threads findable on this BBS) could be tweaked to adjust the rating/recent trade-off.

Sadly, with the current 2.0beta of emplode, there is no way to add custom tags such as "rating" (it will preserve such tags if it finds them, but it won't display them). You'd have to use emptool, or do it all by steam (rewriting the *1 files and rebuilding the database).

Peter

In particular, see this post, and the whole of that thread on creating custom shuffles.

Sadly, with the current 2.0beta of emplode, there is no way to add custom tags such as "rating" (it will preserve such tags if it finds them, but it won't display them). You'd have to use emptool, or do it all by steam (rewriting the *1 files and rebuilding the database).

Is the custom tag editing expected to make the 2.0 final release? Or will we have to wait until a post-2.0 release?

Is the custom tag editing expected to make the 2.0 final release? Or will we have to wait until a post-2.0 release?

Getting 2.0 final out with the current feature-set, is a higher priority right now than adding new features. So the latter, I guess.

Peter

No, it's not. You'll have to wait for a post-2.0 release for it.

Thanks for the info, guys.

Yeah that's it. I'll try Tanstaafl's solution.

Next i'd like to see on-the-fly track rating with the remote Imagine, playing a track and rating it 1-9 with the remote. The higher the rating the more often it will play, ala GrooveRadio.com. Oh man that would be SWEET!

Curly

Yup, on the fly track rating has been suggested before.

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=wishlist&Number=24132

Don't know if it's under consideration for an upcoming release though. Usually if an idea is suggested and it's going to be implemented, one of the guys chiimes in and says it sounds like a cool idea. I didn't see that kind of response when ratings were talked about before.

I Am Not An Empeg Programmer, but it seems it'd just require a few bits on the player's scratch partition per song to store the rating, and, obviously, assigning a remote button to "rate" the song, and then to take the numbers 0-9 from the remote and then store that number. Then it could be integrated with the custom shuffle algorithms, so that when you put RATING in a custom shuffle spec, it uses that rating as a multiplier or whatever.

Hmm...

I think it would be much more interesting to have a music system that discovered what you like simply from observing your listening habits. Without the need for a user to intervene and hand-rank songs.

Tony, how would it observe your listening habits without some kind of user feedback?

Curly

It does have some user feedback. The player gets to see which tracks you play regularly and which ones you skip if they come up randomly.

Well ok. I thought Tony came up with something beyond the skip button, like a serial to cerebrum connection

Curly

It does have some user feedback. The player gets to see which tracks you play regularly and which ones you skip if they come up randomly.

That is precisely my point.

I have some ideas along these lines, and I keep meaning to talk to Hugo/Rob about them, and every time I meet up with them, I forget to bring up the subject.

Can you clarify how this might work? How will it know how much I like a song? Just because I listen to one song 20 times and another song once doesn't mean I like that song 20 times more than the first one... Would you use the Plays and Skipped fields? Would it use Time of Day as a variable? Will it try to make decisions like "well he listened to this and then this, so now he wants to listen to that."?

I think a ratings system is clear-cut and understandable. It's more like how a radio station might work, certain songs get into heavy rotation, others only occasionally played, etc. If a particular song falls out of favor, you can just turn down the rating a few notches... Plus it's more easily combined with the custom shuffle modes that already exist.

Obviously, it has the major drawback that it requires manual entry of the ratings, but that gives you more control of which songs get more weight, rather than letting the algorithm try to figure it out. I just don't understand how the algorithm would work in practice... Any ideas?

Can you clarify how this might work?

I could, but I'm going to keep my ideas secret for the time being. It's possible they might actually be worth something. I've got PLANS, you see.

It's true that a ratings system is simple to implement and use, and my concept could be augmented by a ratings system. But it's not a necessary component.

I agree with your idea: a rating system might be simple to do, but could be a huge work if your collection is quite large... imagine rating 5,000 songs!

An intuitive/predictive rating system is what Empeg deserve. Maybe playing state could be divided into two mode: normal and predictive, further divided into Auto and a sort of 'mood selection'.

Of course it would need some apprentice period, and I see some problems with other persons in car: what if your friend hate a song that you love and skip it?

Well we could talk about features.. or we could just get in some more beers..

Rob

In reply to:

---

a rating system might be simple to do, but could be a huge work if your collection is quite large... imagine rating 5,000 songs!

---

Agreed. That's why it would be great to rate them on-the-fly. All songs would be given an initial rating of, say, 5 to give them even odds. Once it's played, you can change the odds by rating it 1-4 (giving it less of a chance to play next time) or 6-9 (giving it more of a chance of playing). That way you don't have to go through Emplode and rate them all before hand. Also every time the song is played you can rate it differently. So, just because you heard it frequently the last two days doesn't mean that you'll be hearing it a lot in the future. All you do the next time you hear it is just rate it a one (or any number below five).

Now, we can either keep a running average of the ratings or have the rating reset everytime you rate it.

What do y'all think?

Curly

Don't get ahead of yourself. No track will play "more often" - shuffle will only play each track ONE time. You have to re-shuffle to get the track to play again. So what you're doing is getting your favourite tracks to play near the top of the list, not "more often."

I just thought it would be a good idea to point that out before we get into confusion when talking about feature requests and what's currently already on the table.

If you want something to play multiple times you can insert or append it multiple times as mentioned elsewhere (I think someone's already linked to that thread).

Bruno

Don't get ahead of yourself. No track will play "more often" - shuffle will only play each track ONE time.

Not if you use the deduplicate=0 trick that Doug described. Then a track linked more often would genuinely play more often.

Did you see that post?

I did see that post. And I also noted that it was a very specific addition, at Doug's request.

But, even with that setting, shuffle will still only play each playlist entry once per shuffle. You need to link multiple entries per track. Doing this on purpose just to get something to come up more often isn't exactly ideal. Especially if Curly will change his tastes from time to time.

A weighting that can be matched with different shuffle criteria is a cool feature idea, but shuffle list building should still continue to work like it does now: by generating a list that it walks through. One entry per unique track or, as modified, one entry per playlist-link.

The beauty of the empeg's shuffle is that it's a tracked shuffle and not just a simple random number generator.

Bruno

[quote]
The beauty of the empeg's shuffle is that it's a tracked shuffle and not just a simple random number generator.
[/quote]

Are you referring to some Neo 'features'?
(although it was a 'bugged' random number generator)