Flashes of Panic

Years ago, I admitted to having the most painfully nerdy playlist ever. This was in the days before Party Shuffle (now mercifully renamed to “iTunes DJ”) and the basic idea was to get all my songs out, but to play the ones I liked more, more often.

I wound up making some tweaks—exceptions, essentially—to account for things like playing and rating new music. (This tweak, for example, called for unrated songs to always be available on the master playlist; I also made an exception to treat songs in the library less than two months like five-star songs, so they wouldn’t get buried.) I suppose ultimately I wanted to be able to weight every song using an equation that takes into account rating, time since last play, time in the library, and maybe a few other things.

Moving in to the office meant I was essentially sharing the library with Noah, and we needed to make some more changes. My trick for music in this situation works like this: my library, your control. Noah has a remote for my computer; I play the tunes, and if he doesn’t like something he clicks to skip it. (The idea is that if it’s in my library, by definition, I like it.)

That led me to adopt a new rule: if a song is skipped, it gets treated like it’s been played but is rated one star lower. (For example, if I’m holding five-star songs out ten days and four-star songs thirty, then if I skip a five-star song it doesn’t come out again until thirty days have passed.) This is as close as I can get to adjusting ratings with the remote.

We also adjusted the office list to exclude all songs rated only one or two stars. This led to such an improvement in the overall quality that I considered how to apply it on the home list. The only point to playing a one- or two-star song, I concluded, is to give it a chance to earn a higher rating from me. If it has played a fair number of times and is still rated low, it’s probably going to stay low.

So I adjusted the one- and two-star lists to exclude any song played more than ten times.

It’s still painfully geeky, but then again, so am I.