Funny take on Gizmodo about the NYTimes Circuits story on the iPod’s shuffle feature (like no other electronic gadget ever had “shuffle” before… duh). The (whacked-out) premise of the article (free reg. required) is that people’s iPods, when on shuffle, betray their “preferences” for certain types of music. One interviewee notes that his iPod “drifts” toward a tune by a certain American Idol.
“It really likes Ruben Studdard,” the winner of “American Idol’s” second season, Mr. Angus said. This, despite the fact that he only has one song of Mr. Studdard’s – the soulful ballad “Sorry 2004” – stored on his 20-gigabyte player. “There’s nothing worse than when you are having an intense workout and Ruben comes on,” he said, “but it seems to always happen to me.”
Here I was thinking these problems were solved by those fancy-schmancy iPod features called “playlists.” I guess I’m not really “listening” to my iPod’s secret inner desires.
UPDATE: Ok, to be fair to NYT, I should add (now that I’ve actually read page 2) that the author mentions playlists in the piece, but says most people interviewed for the story had never heard of them. The story also mentions the fact that it’s algorithms that mimic “randomness.”
Gary sends an e-mail on the algorithm favoritism issue:
You know, I had a multi-disc player that also had a tape deck. You could load in 6 CDs, put in an audio tape, hit shuffle and record and it would create a random mix tape. I used to notice that all my tapes would seem to favor one CD more than any other.
I always thought this had to do with the fact that computers can’t really pick random numbers. Although its a function of every computer language, the mechanics are really to take some known number…like seconds since 1936, or number of mouse-clicks in the last 72 hours…and put that into some complicated algorithm to generate a new number. So, if the algorithm wasn’t that great, you would always get ‘random’ numbers that were pretty similar. I figured that the guys who did the programming for the stereo didn’t put a lot of work in. I wonder if that’s the story with the iPod?