Today's Random Idea .:. grubbykid.com

Today's Random Idea

who flag, originally uploaded by lomokev

Premise: modern music players (iTunes, WinAmp, etc) are great, but they lack a fundamental option for Randomizers. For those with lack of patience, skip to the problem or today's random idea.

First, I think we can all agree that the MP3 has, and is, affecting the listening habits of a wide swath of culture. Where radio started the move away from the album as the smallest unit of music to the single, the MP3 has accelerated this effect.

This is of no real consequence to me, or my listening habits - except modern music players are built around this paradigm of the single track. Besides not capturing all of the data available, I find the listening options which modern players often breaks when outside this single track paradigm. You can listen to songs in whatever order you choose - by artist, album, length, etc. This is good. In iTunes you can even create Smart Lists - which is also good.

There is also "Party Shuffle" in iTunes which pulls out random songs from any playlist you want. I listen to music extensively under Party Shuffle - it just makes the day go by faster. I admit that I have truly embraced my Randomizer side. But this isn't without pain - I hate orphaned songs; songs which exist with direct relation to neighbor songs on records. These orphan songs on Party Shuffle must be cared for.

For instance, I am a big fan of The Who's Tommy (who isn't?). Here you have a band who until Tommy was released was an expressly single oriented band - Pete Townshend is pretty unapologetic about this fact. Tommy came around and you had a full album where the parts were less than the whole. Throughout Tommy are several intro's and outro's which, while integral to itself, are musically linked to other songs.

Except, if you listen to music using Party Shuffle (or some other randomizer) then you will inevitably hear either the intro, the outro, or the main song without context.

This is bad.

How can Sally Simpson exist without the intro Miracle Cure preceding it? Or how can you listen to Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) without first listening to the great intro The Happiest Days of our Lives? Similarly, how can you listen to Polythene Pam without the segue into She Came in Through the Bathroom Window which then goes right into Golden Slumbers?

The answer is, of course, you can't. There are a whole host of different songs which need (need) to be played together. Additionally, there isn't a definitive list of these songs; rather, this is a highly personal link which is the result of just not the music itself, but all of the collected memories, emotion, and cultural baggage.

That brings us to Today's Rrandom Idea: modern music players need a method to link songs together. This song link would allow continuity between music - which often occur over multiple music tracks. This option would be used whenever the user chooses to play music in Party Shuffle (or some randomizer), so the linked song is also played. Thus musical harmony would be restored to the world.

For example: if the randomizer chooses Sally Simpson, the the linked song would be Miracle Cure - this is queued up before Sally Simpson automatically so that the music is played how you want it to be played.

This seems pretty easy, at least in iTunes, because you can set up to 100 song queue in Party Shuffle. It isn't like there would be any sort of last minute reshuffling of songs. If there would be any collisions, you could always have higher-ranked songs act as the "tie breaker." But this doesn't seem all that necessary, but just to be on the safe side. Additionally, you would need to be able to link songs both before and after the "main" song itself and allow for song nesting.

The key design problems to Linking is the linking interface. The interface must be both easy, intuitive, and can be able to be overridden by the user. If I had the time, I would learn how to write an iTunes plugin - this seems pretty straightforward.

So iTunes hackers and Apple, what is it going to take to link music songs to each other?

Comments

sweetchuck says:

A part of me wants to tell you that you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, however I do agree with you that some songs are meant to be listened to together. I myself am an album man. I refuse to buy single songs, and will continue to only buy complete albums. This is part because I do not want to encourage an atmosphere that seems to be a breeding ground for one-hit-wonders, and love a well put together album. As for songs that need to be together, my solution is somewhat different. I simply do not include these songs in any playlist that may be shuffled. I somtimes keep entire albums out of playlists, because to hear those songs out of order and context seems to lessen the impact, not to mention the intent of the artist.

One other problem of the random play, and one not fixed by linking, is that some music styles simply do not lend themselves to it. A lot of rap, hip-hop, and especially electronica, include numerous tracks that overlap and fade into each other, sometimes by a minute or more. These simply do not work when played randomly, and to link one or two together won't help either, as most trans albums are to be thought of as one long song.

Posted by: sweetchuck at June 10, 2005 10:22 AM #

plemeljr says:

Good point on the Rap/Hip-Hop/Electronica problem. But, you could link the whole album together - a handy "Link Whole Album" feature would be great.

I've never heard of people leaving songs out of randomizer so they don't get played because of this issue. But it makes sense - but you lose so much music because of a broken player.