{"id":691,"date":"2006-10-09T10:58:35","date_gmt":"2006-10-09T10:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/09\/radio-simulation-1\/"},"modified":"2006-10-09T10:58:35","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T10:58:35","slug":"radio-simulation-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/09\/radio-simulation-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio Simulation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thinking a little more about the <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/my_soundtrack_19712002.php\">soundtrack post<\/a> from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don&#8217;t seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;m buying less music, I don&#8217;t think, but rather that iTunes and the lack of good radio has changed the way I listen to music.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, I miss good radio, and I wonder if it would be possible to get iTunes to simulate the sort of thing I&#8217;m after (explained below the fold).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In my opinion, a really good radio station playlist breaks down sort of like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>50% recent songs (last six months, say)<\/li>\n<li>40% really good songs from the last several years<\/li>\n<li>10% oddball stuff that the DJs like<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first category is part of what fixes songs in my mind as associated with a specific time and place. It&#8217;s not just the super-mega-hit songs that are completely inescapable&#8211; &#8220;Hey Ya&#8221; a few years ago, for example&#8211; but the general repetition of whatever they&#8217;re playing at the moment. &#8220;Hardest Way Possible,&#8221; listed in my soundtrack post and known to almost no-one else got a fair bit of airplay from WEQX a while back, which is what got me to buy it.<\/p>\n<p>The second category gives you a wider sort of context. You end up relating songs to each other, and seeing connections between new hits and good tunes from a few years back. The third category just provides a little individuality&#8211; you get the occasional album track from a ten-year-old record thrown in, to spice things up.<\/p>\n<p>The current problem is that I really don&#8217;t have a radio station that does that. Well, a combination of that, and the fact that I&#8217;m not really satisfied with the current state of pop music categorization. <a href=\"http:\/\/weqx.com\/\">WEQX<\/a> is pretty good, but it only comes in well in my car, and I&#8217;m not 100% happy with the music they play. <a href=\"http:\/\/kexp.org\/\">KEXP<\/a> goes overboard on the &#8220;wide variety&#8221; thing. They&#8217;re great for discovering new bands, provided you listen really closely, because they hardly repeat anything.<\/p>\n<p>The other issue is that I can&#8217;t really get iTunes to do what I want. I tend to shuffle-play (well, &#8220;Party Shuffle&#8221;) my &#8220;recent purchases&#8221; playlist when I&#8217;m at home (unless I have a new purchase that I particularly want to hear straight through, like the Hold Steady record this past week), but this has the problem that songs purchased a month ago are dead to me, no matter how good they are. At work, I tend to shuffle-play the four-and-five-star playlist, but given that there are 2730 songs on that list, it doesn&#8217;t bring up recent stuff all that often, or repeat tracks very quickly. And it doesn&#8217;t do anything about the  4122 songs that still aren&#8217;t rated.<\/p>\n<p>What I&#8217;d really like to be able to do is construct a weighted playlist. I&#8217;d like to be able to set things up on iTunes so that if there&#8217;s a probability <i>p<\/i> of any single track coming up, the probability of a song rated four or five stars is <i>5p<\/i>, and the probability of a song added in the last six  months is <i>10p<\/i> (or something like that&#8211; I&#8217;m pulling these weights out of the air).<\/p>\n<p>I have absolutely no idea how to do that on iTunes, though. I can construct smart playlists for the different subsets of songs that I&#8217;m interested in, but if I merge them and shuffle-play the result, they all get equal weight, which isn&#8217;t what I&#8217;m after.<\/p>\n<p>Does anybody know a trick for making a weighted playlist in iTunes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thinking a little more about the soundtrack post from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don&#8217;t seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;m buying less music, I don&#8217;t think, but rather that iTunes&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/09\/radio-simulation-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Radio Simulation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}