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.

...

i want to apologize publicly to anyone i might have let down, offended or been a jerk to this semester. i have spent the semester reeling from health issues that literally consumed my life from march until august of this year. i have spent the semester trying to catch up, recover and reevaluate all at once.

i have tried my hardest not to use my health (or mental state as a result of my complications) as an excuse in school. i worry that it is a cop-out, that using it only slows my recovery back to where i need to be.

but the truth is that i spent a good deal of semester overwhelmed and depressed. it might sound overdramatic, but realizing i truly almost died while in the hospital impacted my ability to concentrate on a lot of things for many weeks this semester.

in the past several weeks, i have spoken to a lot of people. and this past 8 months has not just been shitty for me. i have to use at least 2 hands to count all the people, just within the department, who have suffered personal loss or familial crisises.

we are not a large department and yet at least a quarter of us have been forced to deal with some really serious things in our personal lives recently.

i am not trying to speak for others.

but i believe many of us have been on edge at some point this semester. and sadly, i believe these outside tensions have been reflected invisibly in the way we have treated each other and our work.

i want to apologize to all of you who have had to put up with me in a less than pleasant way.
i want to send out sympathy to those of you who have (and are still) dealing with personal complications.
and i want to hope that we may all return to school in january, refreshed and renewed; our problems overcome.

i hope that we can all communicate more openly next semester - the successful completition of our thesis projects depends on an open and constructive environment for all those involved.

(i worry that these tensions impacted the department negatively this semester and i believe it is a trend, if we are all to succeed, that cannot continue. i think that this is only possible with more open communication involving everyone [fac and student alike] in the department and with more support and less anger and competition creatively. we are all going to slip somehow, sometime. i hope that we can carry each other through rather than condemn when this happens. i need all of you; i count on all of you, just as i hope you all need and can count on me.)

again, i hope everyone gets the relaxation and peace of mind they need and i look forward to working with all of you in the coming year.

(i will continue to post progress on the blog over the break, but i expect updates to come more slowly, both because i will be on dialup and because the majority of my work will be movies too big to easily upload.)

kerry for president

ive decided to use my powers for good.
there are less than 8 weeks until the next presidental election.
and realizing this, realizing i have a duty to what i believe is right. and i believe that bush should not be re-elected.
sadly, i have some people close to me that disagree.
and we can debate back and forth until we are blue in the face.
what i want to do is build up a series of (well-respected) links, information and arguments on why bush should not be re-elected.
this should be pretty easy, but i havent seen anything like this done yet.
and i figure if i can change 1 person's mind in the next 8 weeks, that's one step closer.

i know some of you have topics you like, so ill start with an easy one:

the automatic gun ban just expired. though bush claimed he would support it, he didnt raise a finger to stop this. i dont think anyone has ever given a good reason on why citizens need to own uzis. ill give you hunting rifles, even handguns. but uzis for personal ownership?

art vs. commercialism

i would like to argue that the difference between art and commercial products is user testing - that is, the willingness to modify the product based on others opinions, as opposed to your own.

(i realize an argument can be made about critiques and such with art, but the end decision always lies with the artist. this is not the case with commercial products.)

interactive vs. narrative round 1

in order to have a compelling interactive narrative, we must learn to love verbs (actions) as much as we have learned to love nouns (objects).

fakster

i swear i havent said anything to my sister. but today she posted about loving the fakesters. so there you have it, word from the street.
weird.

takes on the state of games

everywhere i look, everything i see and read points me to the same game issues - fewer and fewer xompanies are willing to take risks because of high development costs and long process cycles.

the move away from simple controls has become an inhibitor for new user bases. people gave up on systems when the buttons expanded from nintindos.

where does that leave us? amazingly, taking a step backward to the gba and moble phones might be the answer. as we move forward, we could see a larger gap in games - where the consoles really push to deliver immersive entertainment and interactive stories and the handhelds and less complex machines deliver "games".

this obviously wouldnt fix the long development cycles and high budgets of the interactive pieces, but it could allow us to back out of the pit we are digging for ourselves.

the joy of playing a sports game, a game without any immersive elements is less complicated in an immersive sense and requires less issues to be overcome (agency, avatars, branching paths, open-ended narratives, etc) than something like 'metal gear solid'. interactive narratives have not been figured out yet - there hasnt been an elegant solution to them yet. but by focusing more on the immersive elements (over the idea that it must be a game), we open a new set of possibilities. the idea of making a "narrative game" is so limiting and engrained in our heads that it is restricting us on every level. all the games have the same elements and concepts, even if the story changes. backing away from this mentality of games, of what is expected now would allow a fresh perspective and a whole new way of telling stories that could redefine everything that has come before.

think about how we make games now and realize how limited this approach is. we actually have had conversations in class about 1st person vs 3rd person. cmon. you cant tell me that this is the extent of what is possible in games. or interactive experiences. think bigger picture.

lets separate games from experiences and let each play to its strengths. games need to remain in their domain and lets take what we have learned and make even better experiences.

while we are at it

i hate talking to the air.

words my ears are not allowed to hear

• emergence
• database
• arbitrary
• random
• ai
• bluetooth

if you can use any of these words correctly, i welcome hearing them. but if i have to hear them use incorrectly once more, my ears will literally bleed.