When I play music, I don’t want to hear the same song shortly after I play it. Better songs, sure, I am willing to hear them more often. But bad songs (lower rating) make for nice filler, but really, after that, they need to go away for a while and think about who they are. In the early days of my iPod life, that was working for me. And it’s only getting worse.
See if you can follow me on this one.
I go into iTunes and I make a Smartplaylist.
I tell it to look for songs that have a rating of 5 stars and that have not been played in the last 5 days.
I call that Smartplaylist MINI1
iTunes tells me that 55 songs match that criteria.
I play the MINI1 Smartplaylist via iTunes for a little while. 55 songs are on the list. After the first songs finishes, it drops from the list. 54 songs now match the criteria for this Smartplaylist. Then 53. Then 52.
At 50, I stop. I plug in and synch my iPod. MINI1 is one of the Smartplaylists that I load onto my iPod. With my clickwheel, I navigate to MINI1 on my iPod. 50 songs are on the playlist.
I put in my earphones. I play the first song. 1 of 50, it says. It finishes and the next song starts. 2 of 50. The first song I played no longer meets the criteria as defined in iTunes for MINI1, yet the song remains in the iPod as part of that Smartplaylist.
I tell the iPod to go to Shuffle mode. 3 of 50. Then 4 of 50. Because songs that no longer meet the selection criteria for MINI1 as defined in iTunes are allowed to remain a part of the play list on the iPod, as I play more songs, in seemingly random order, the odds now increase of hearing the same song again.
This would not happen in iTunes, because after being played, the song is removed from the Smartplaylist because it does not meet the selection criteria.
In iTunes, at least, there is a setting to tinker with “random.” Apple lets you influence how hard iTunes works to keep like songs from being played near eather other — songs from the same album, for example. This is, I know, because what most people percieve to be random, well, isn’t. That you hear one song from, say, Hot Rocks by the Rolling Stones, and hear another song from the same album three songs later, in true randomness, is indeed possible. But most people, identifying a patter, don’t think it’s random.
Why mention this? Random music is important to me. Random being the key word. When iTunes plays, I understand (somewhat) how it is generating randomness, and I can influence that (in a very pisitive way) through the use of Smartplaylists — the song can’t play again if it’s not on the play list.
Not so when I listen to the iPod. 50 songs — with every passing song, the odds increase that I will hear again a song I have already heard.
And I really don’t understand what happens when I plug the whole thing into the Mini Cooper S I drive.
Every time the radio goes off — manually, or when the car goes off — the play lists all start with the first song (1 of 50) and the “random” play setting it turned off. Has it lost it’s logic?
I suspect that every time power is lost, it looses its memory of what has been played. Randomness starts all over again, from scratch.
So, a song plays, but stays in the Smartplaylist on the iPod, even though it doesn’t match the selection criteria that define it on iTunes. And then, any time the radio goes off, I suspect that the Apple-provided influence on randomless is lost and randomness starts anew. Which isn’t random.
When I listen with earphones, the iPod would resume at 5 of 50 in random mode. But with the iPod adapter in the Mini Cooper S, it starts all over again. iTunes does it right; iPod does not; iPod in car goes all wonky.
Yesterday, I was on the road — three one hour segments to go to meetings. Heard two songs twice. It irks me.
