a looking-glass book

ipodding

i hate hate hate double posting. but i threw this up on my personal blog and then thought id throw it up here, mainly cause this site has comments.

i am somewhat unusual. my ipod is much smaller than my music collection. my music collection is much larger than my main computer's hard drive. in fact, here is what my music collection resembles these days: an ipod, not synced to any computer; a pc with a firewire drive containing my music collection (organized in the filesystem by me, not iTunes); a PowerBook with a small subset of music on it for the times I am sans iPod.

I recognize i use music differently than most people. I am an outlyer.

but i mainly use my ipod to listen to music. i don't wipe it entirely; i usually delete several hundred megs at a time and rotate things through every few months.

because the ipod is my primary music device, i want to use it in ways it is incapable of handling.

i have three primary types of music on my drive: single songs by an artist, albums by an artist and mix cds by djs. i want to step through these in reverse order.

dj mixes on the ipod suck. the ipod still has the annoying 2 second gap, even in the newest models. i refuse to make a mix cd into one giant track to listen to. it kills the battery and prevents me from jumping to the track i really want to hear. if apple truly is incapable of buffering for this gap (as they do in iTunes), i would like to propose something more drastic: wrappers. the ability to join tracks without losing the individual information would be fantastic. worst case still combines all the files into a single file, but with a table of contents allowing for chapters (songs) to keep their id information. best case places the files in a container where files are not joined (to save battery life) but are recognized at a lower level by the system as a group.

this could easily be applied to albums as well.

albums are the best represented on the ipod interface. the 'on-the-go' playlist also helps with this. sadly, my ipod is old and doesnt support the feature. so i have two choices - create a playlist ahead of time with several albums on it or pick a new album when the previous one finishes. distracting.

'on the go' can only aid this but so much. so here is a radical idea: why can't there be a 'suggest' feature? the system knows what i am playing. create a mode that builds a system of crosslinked files. when the album/song finishes, it offers a new one automatically, based on the metadata that is already there. (last played, genre, number of times played, etc.) if you dont want to hear it, you skip it. it keeps track of this and learns. think of the intuitive playlists that could be created.

finally, single songs. boy oh boy, do i have a lot of orphaned songs. a track or two by an artist rather than the full album. for instance, i have 2 bad mice's 'bombscare' on my ipod. but the album is long out of print and the mp3 comes from the repressed 12" i own. it's one track. and because i can't add it to a queue system ('on the go' again), it becomes annoying to listen to it. i have to dig through the menus, play it and when it ends, pick another track.

(i see you right now, reading this thinking 'well buy a new ipod -- all your problems are because of not having 'on the go'. but this isnt the case. stick with me here.)

the ipod keeps track of a lot of data for a song. (although it doesn't keep track of every time a song is played, just the most recent time. i understand this somewhat, for space reasons. but i have also wanted a smart playlist that simply says 'play all the songs i have listened to more than three times in the last week.' but you can't do it.)

what the ipod doesn't keep track at all is a file's relationship to other files. realizing this the other day made me conscious of what a travisty this is.

all i want for these orphaned songs is a smart playlist that says 'play all songs by an artist who has only 1 song on my ipod.' there are various ways of writing this in a database-like language. i could make a static playlist of these songs, but that's frustrating. there is no easy way to create a playlist like this for the ipod. there is no relationship on the ipod or itunes between songs. all information is individual for each song. and until that changes, there is a limit to the interesting things you can mine out of the data. the most interesting connections will come from the ability to query the filesystem and previous plays. (the only interesting smart playlists from the last six months have been people finding ways to create 'radio stations' -- a combination of unplayed music in rotation with 'current hits'.)

if the ipod kept track of all the times a song was played, think of the information it could produce. you could say 'play what i was listening to 6 months ago today.' you could create relationships between songs. a suggestion system would be trivial -- the ipod would know i liked to listen to 'paradise city' after 'mr. brownstone' and it would make it happen. but it can't right now. because the ipod doesn't capture all plays.

smart playlists are fantastic. i can find music more easily. i can make playlists that automatically surprise me. i can find ways to dig up songs i haven't heard in a long time and be reminded why i love them. but there is so much more the ipod could do to help me create interesting connections in my music.

(as a sidenote -- the ipod and itunes need some other tuneups. itunes should be able to watch your music folder and rescan it occassionally. i shouldnt have to manually add songs when i put them in my library folder when i am organizing the music. both systems should recognize a single file as playing, regardless of where it is. that is, i can play a song in a playlist, browse to that artist and the same song is not shown to be playing. this is useful not only in visualizing the structure of the collection, but it would allow you to shift seamlessly from one playlist to another withouth missing a beat. it also means that the systems regard the music in the playlists as different than when browsed in the traditional sense. to me, playlists are simply pointers to the files; they are not virtual copies.)

there are more issues with the apple implementation of mp3s and tags, but hopefully this is enough to get you started on realizing how much further we can go. we have the ability and the knowledge to draw interesting connections out of large amounts of data now. the question is really just if apple will implement it anytime soon.