Slashdot Mirror
Machine Learning and MP3s
dan moore writes "Students at Caltech and Harvard have developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns. It then channels its knowledge into generating streams of music that the people themselves would like to listen to. Intuitive, accurate, and finally someone has done it. Check out the website to get one of the available plugins. Another interesting approach to digital music."
... this should put a new light on the whole 'software synthesis' issue, eh?
Heh heh. Sometimes I kill myself...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Am I supposed to install Winamp under wine to run this?
Show tunes, nothing but show tunes
Wonder what it'll make of the fact I just load them all up and then select the random play option? :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
For other programs that do this already, look for RoboDJ or AudioScrobbler. Lots of others exist.
Yet none get the job done right.
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/moeffju
from their download page:
"Who wants Synapse?
Listeners of the MP3. Students. Elevator operators. Makers of other media players. Programmers. Gangsters. Punks. Nerds. Really big nerds. Even ones from Yemen. Yeah, plenty of those. Competitors. Winners. People who exercise to Rocky music. Will Deringer. Audiophiles. Revolutionaries. Even Canadians. Quality people. Gastroenterologists. Bums. Lots of bums. Evil geniuses. Classics professors. Chinese people. Wine connoiseurs. Businessmen. Rabbis. Dew drinkers. Sherpas. Dictators. Professional servants. People with special powers. People who come through in the clutch. You. "
I like them!
Fleur de Sel
I know my listening habits aren't what I want them to be, per se...my playlist is either the songs I'be pre-assembled onto a mix of some kind, or else entire CDs, half the songs of which I don't care about that much, but I'm too lazy.
I guess it could learn something from my mixes. But overall, this sounds like a much less useful technology than those previous "find out what other people who really like this song listen to" programs...firefly was one I think, way back in the day? Sort of like Amazon's "people who bought this CD also bought..." but on a per-song basis.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Let's not forget launchcast.com...
Has anybody seen Antitrust?
I remember whenever that joyous time of the month would roll around, my ex-girlfriend would start listening to a lot more typically "chick" songs, right before she actually started menstruating.
I started working on a similar Winamp plugin to kind of give me a heads up, but then I figured I'd just see the used tampons in the trash...
But who says I want someone to know that I like to listen to songs from Barney? =\
I wonder what it would get out of my listening habits, restless jumping from one song to another, unable to choose. I'm going to try this out though.
Analysis of past choices is nice... but ultimately it will fail to play what I REALLY want to hear because it doesn't predict moods.
This type of system of past trait analysis has failed before, hasn't it???
...from that machine/program the RIAA supposedly has that can analyze a song to determine how well it will do on the charts? This program probably uses a similar algorithm. Slashdot lambasted the RIAA device for being the harbinger of even greater FM homogenization and keeping people from hearing new and different music. I this program will do the same thing, but on a personal level and the Slashdot crowd loves it!
"Who wants Synapse?"
Good question. No discussion of the technology, no source, just a bunch of marketing drivel and a buy button.
Is it too late to remove this article?
There is already something like this out there, that uses loads of cool independant and smaller label stuff as well as some massive label stuff..
.sig :)
Check out Last.FM, they are very good. I've found a load of new artists from there. It is all stream based (128kbps) and they have a massive flash development section starting for open source goodness.
There's also the (all open source) Audioscrobbler project.. see my
RJ
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
We have begun to release a series of plugins that will expand the Brain's functionality to other major media players.
Analysis indicates that I am 99.9% likely to want to see ZhAng Ziyi in a plastic raincoat going down on Jennifer Lopez in ripped SCUBA gear (or the reverse, I'm not picky.) Now, if "the Brain" can FIND such porn for me instead of just making playlists, I might get some use out of it! Teach the damn thing to know when the women are fat and skanky so it won't download lousy porn, and I'll be sold.
Seriously:
There is of course the question of our definition of self, and how it might evolve as computers become more sophisticated. The distinction between the self and the environment, when our nervous systems are physical processes influenced by and dependent on "external" factors, is fundamentally artificial.
When I use a hammer, a tool for doing physical work, it becomes like a part of me.
When I use a computer, a tool for doing intellectual work, should I regard it any differently?
The music I listen to has fundamental impact on my mood, on my posture, on my creativity and critical evaluation of ideas. If I am continuously communicating with my computer regarding my taste in music, and if my computer continuously responds by playing music, it becomes difficult to draw a meaningful distinction between my computer, which is a device, and my self, which does the thinking.
OH GOOD LORD I'M RUNNING WINDOWS XP! GET IT OUT OF MY BRAIN!
ka-blowie!
NO CARRIER
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This is a lameass Visual Basic app.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
I'm not holding my breath for the XMMS version though.
I seem to recall that webcasters weren't allowed to make the services "interactive" a while back. Users weren't permitted to select songs. Obviously this is different, but I wonder just how much a service can "react" to a user's playlist before it crosses the line to letting the user select each song?
Make cheese not war 8:)
Wow, was I surprised to wake up and find this on the main page of slashdot ;) This program originally written by two classmates senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy last spring. I remember playing around with an early version of it as well as checking out the web page (it hasn't really changed).
It appears as if one year and many cases of beer later, a lot of the kinks have been worked out. This program is great if you use it frequently enough for it to learn your preferences, or if you have a lot of downloaded music with malformed names that need correcting.
I would much rather see it as a plugin because otherwise I miss out on using my favorite software stereo expander and other DSP plugins.
-bcollier06
This sounds an awful lot like applying "weights" to music selections based on number of downloads. Doesn't Amazon have a patent on this already with their "Recommendations?"
The problem I see with The Brain is that it doesn't seem to factor out the correlation between music availability and the number of times it's downloaded. Hence, our collective "tastes" are based on what MP3 providers are pushing down our throats.
Example: MP3.com has Top Playlists. Interspersed in the playlists are MP3.com paid spots. So every fourth song or so is sponsored. This means they'll be counted as "to what people listen" more often than say, the 33rd song. If you ran The Brain on only MP3.com Top Playlists, I suspect only the sponsored songs would make it to the final stream selections.
Another 'cutting edge playlist technology" would certainly be iTunes 'smart playlists.' You can match any number of criteria, including: genre, my rating, play count, artist contains *, and year to make sick and incredibly easy playlists. Oh and live updating, perfect for running a PlayCount: Zero and then having it add new unplayed tracks as you listen. At first I didnt notice it but after tinkering around I now wonder what I ever did before (but then again I get that feeling alot using apple products).
Check it out: http://www.apple.com/itunes/smartplaylists.html
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
oops - that particular faq entry refers to synapse, not brain.
Last.FM is great, it starts streaming you music, you skip the songs you dont like, it learns what you like, and your personalised stream gets better and better!
:)
Check 'em out for some great new music from independants and small/medium label stuff
How can someone else except me decide what's good? My moods change, sometimes rapidly as well. And taste is acquired only after sampling... so will this s/w provide some new stuff ocassionally to check my preferences?
I'd rather listen to random music on the radio.. I don't like the idea of someone out there, sitting and monitoring me.... like MS does.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I wonder what they'll make of my Beethoven/Metallica mix...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
> I hate opera.
Sounds like filtering out Pavarotti and the like wouldn't be a problem with this program.
and finally someone has done it
I guess the softwave I've been using for the past few years came through a time portal!! Music Match has had this feature for a long time.
Personally my listening tastes are based on much more than what type, genre, or style of music. Most songs that make it onto my playlists are because a close friend recommends it, and that song will always (for better or worse) bring out memories of that person.
*That* would be imposibile to substitute with a learning machine.
I also think for a lot of people, they like a song because it's already familiar (they've subconsiously heard it in a store or a few dozen TV ads), and suddenly hit that point where they like that song and actively persue it. Unless the machine learning system were somehow able to track everything the person heard, It couldn't substite this either.
_______
2B1ASK1
Is not this the same sort of AI that TiVo uses? That is, looking at what you have done in the past and making future suggestions?
Sorry, I LOVE my TiVo, and give the company a plug every chance I get. Hacked to 198 hours, baby!
WWJD? JWRTFM!
Does their logic system fail (or degrade) gracefully?
My tastes in music are varied wildly, and I often will select a small set of my MP3s based on mood; will this system be able to determine that when I code I like to listen to classical but when playing games, alternative music is the thing? Or will it just play it all at once, unaware of the correlative patterns that would link the timing of music selection -- just mashing everything together into one massive playlist? (Given that nothing, not even time of day, can help determine what I want to hear, I have some serious doubts their system can handle my preferences as well as I do.)
Truly "smart" programs often aren't really; the defining line I draw is how well they handle pathological cases. For example, have your dictation software transcribe the following sentence: "The village yeoman, Hugh, hewed two yews to use in the upcoming archery contest". I'm not guaranteeing it will choke, but it sure won't be pleased with you, despite the grammatical perfection of the sentence. However, any human hearing that will immediately make sense of it. Unsurprisingly, it is the simple algorythms (like naieve Bayesian statistics for spam filtering) that seem to best manage the complexity of real life while still failing gracefully.
Do you like Japanese imports?
Wouldnt we be all upset and things? It sounds like, "hey we know what you are listening to and we'll go analyze that and give you more of the same". Please, humans based in western civiliations have become some of the laziest S.o.b's in the past 50 years, lets at least give us something to do for god's sake.
There is a Nordic string quartet that plays metal songs like Metallica, etc.
http://www.spitfirerecords.com/Apocalyptica.htm
They rock, classically.
WWJD? JWRTFM!
just another attempt at embracing and extending. Let's hope that Milo can save us from this mess!
(if you haven't seen the movie, don't mod)
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
This intelligent mp3 playback stuff seems like a really good idea to me; learning algorithms can be astonishingly effective, and even if it only when I hit "next track" halfway through a song it would help. However, I'm still looking for an mp3 player I like. I really like iTunes, but it's not perfect because I only have OSX on my laptop (Linux my desktops, where I want mp3 playback most).
Stuff I like about iTunes:
- The integrated management software, and how if I fancy listening to a particular artist/album, I just type their name in a little box to get realtime filtering
- It doesn't look like ass
- Neato en-mass ID3 tag editing options
- Fantastic visualistaions
- Neat metadata (last played, ratings, etc)
All I really want is a Linux player to do all this too. XMMS is small and neat but the playlist feels like a clumsy management interface after iTunes. GQMpeg seems fiddly, and xtunes is ugly. Can anyone suggest alternatives?Other features I want my mp3 player to have, but which I've never seen done:
You win again, gravity!
Here's a short version of what I want to hear: "Something that challenges my tastes."
Mostly, I listen to Radio 1190, the CU Boulder station. I'd say that I enjoy about 1 song in 4. I keep listening because I find out about local bands that I'd never hear, I hear indie bands (not just bands running on the "indie" branch of a major label) and I get DJs who love what they do. (here's where I give mad props to Milkman Dan)
What's your spiffy MP3-scanning-neural-network-plugin going to do with me, eh?
--
Seems like Adam D'Angelo is also the coder of buddyzoo . Anyone know if he has a homepage?
...and occasionally provides links with no description of technology, no source, and a bunch of hype attached to a shopping cart. Keep it clean, /. and stop putting up stories like this, even if these were your college roommates.
I am not sure about this but there seems to be a certain marketing push behind the project. The description of whos supposed to download it is hilarious. But all the machine learning stuff is hidden behind buzzwords. Why do they not put up a description of the algorithm or at least about its rational. I am involved in machine learning myself and most of my colleagues are extremely careful when using words like "the brain". And there is a usually a strong anticorrelation between the quality of work and the use of such buzzwords.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
It seems that were it to actually look at the actual music that you are listening to and not by reading playlist strings, then it would actually be a better tool.
Using Bayesian classification on the signal that you get (I would assume using FFT and perhaps feeding that through a neural net), you should then bypass any need for user classification at all (as I understand the current system now, it will fail if there are poorly/inaccurately named songs).
That said, this system would still be exposed to similar issues that the other one is (although I suspect from my previous experience with machine learning - the qualms people have of it missing out on a greater reason they choose songs would actually be unfounded, but I'm sure many would disagree with me), and more importantly - it would require far more processing power.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I dont see a use for this software.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I tried to code one of these once, my system was designed to correlate which songs I typically played in sequence..for instance, if I allowed song A to play, then B, then C, it would also assume that it was ok to play A and then C.. correspondingly, if I once played A, then skipped B when it came on, but allowed C to play after A, then it would also assume that B to C was not a good transition. Seems reasonable, right? the problem is, some days A to B is good..some days it's not.
In the end, I realized the system would never work when I realized that *I* did not know what i wanted to listen to at any particular moment, so how the hell was I going to code a system which could decide?? As a previous poster said, our moods vary too much for this sort of system to work, at least for those of us who are very very picky...(I don't put on "background" music..if i'm playing music, i'm listening to it intently)
I just downloaded this GJay (well, apt-get did) and it is very froody indeed.
You win again, gravity!
OK, I'm sure it's a useful program and that they've done a great job, and I'll try it out. But please, couldn't they have just explained it in plain English?
Yahoo!'s Launchcast Music http://launch.yahoo.com/ already allows users to listen to/rate music. Your "personal station"'s music is then catered based on your user ratings of songs you have already heard.
last.fm might be for you then.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
You know you're too damn lazy when your computer has to decide what music you like and when to play it for you.
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I think amazon has a copyright on this :) They've been extrapolating what you'd like based on your purchasing habits (and what other's bought) for years.
I downloaded it, I hope I will never have to use Winamp's random anymore, I think after listening to the same song over and over I gave up and just let it play normal.
I did have the decency of reading their site :)
-bcollier06
ahhhh xmms :D
I am a simple man, with simple needs...and winamp does just fine there. Altho...winamp 3 sucks proc power like crazy...
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
So now the RIAA can use this technology to say what you *would* have stolen, and add another fine with a lot of 0s =)
He has discussed Mr. Pujol many times.
That is, say I have all my music appropriate tagged for artist, year, and music type (say through MusicBrainz or something similar). Maybe each track has it's own classification for those CDs that have 'various artists' or that the artist goes into a number of different styles, or whatever. You also have tracks from some CDs that are meant to be played without a break between them ("Dark Side of the Moon" for example has a couple of tracks like this).
Now, what I'd LIKE to do is to have my mp3 player look at the current song, then using a combination of random factors and some expert knowledge to select the next song to play as to have a nice subtle shift in music tone. Right now, the random feature in most music players could easily put up a grunge track right after a classic track, then into some 60s rock. This is not necessarily wrong, but it's a bit drastic.
I've considered a way to build up a finite state machine of the various musical types as typically defined by the MP3 ID tags, such that each type is a state, and you can only effectively move to very related types in the FSM. (A random factor with possibly some weighting would be used to determine which state to go to: if you are currently at "80s Synthpop", you have a good chance to go to "70s Pop" or "90s Pop" and a slight chance to move to "Electronica", for example). Such a FSM would need a lot of community suggestions, and maybe the end result would require some net-lookup table as to get the current FSM status.
So the program as I see it would look at this FSM, the artist, and other details (again, if there's a song that should follow it, it gets higher weighing), the program generates a weighted list of tracks to go to next, hits the RNG, and pulls out the next track. At which point it repeats itself. Various aspects, such as the weighting on the genre, artist, or play order, could be included. Additionally, the FSM should allow for a "completely unrelated" jump to a different genre that's not necessarily related to the current one, but with some chance as set by the user. Thus, with this program in play, if you have a good select of CD tracks, you can have the playlist progress slowly through genres, thus not having massive mood changes during the playlist, unless you have set it up as such.
I know there are programs that can generated weighted playlists from your input , such as LongPlayer, but this only looks at your ratings, and doesn't try to do anything tricky on the list otherwise.
Mind you, the way current MP3 players work, this would most likely be done by generating a playlist from your current song selection, which you then feed to winamp or whatever. A plugin that does this dynamically would be best, but I don't think a lot of these mp3 players have that type of ability builtin, and instead, you have programs like LongPlayer that call out to WinAmp to only play the song, LPlayer doing the playlist selection.
Does anyone know if such projects exist yet, or is this even something the community would be interested in?
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Seems interesting, but there are problems which I don't see being overcome.
Say you spend most of your time playing Unreal Tournament 2003 with winamp in the background, and so this software learns that you like ripping violent music about 90% of the time.
Then you bring home the aforementioned Chinese girl and you put on some soft guitar music and just and things are becoming interesting, the song ends, and the idiot "Brain" decides a little Rob Zombie is just what you need, based off past experience.
Half the time I don't know myself what I want to listen to...It's too closely linked to my mood to be modeled in a purely statistical manner unless my mood levels out because of some wierdness (i.e. I smoke a lot of pot so I listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, or my significant other dumps me and I listen to really depressing breakup music for a month.) Otherwise, I'm going to be oscillating all day between different types of music, so something which may please me in the morning may get skipped bigtime by the afternoon.
But even THAT isn't reliable; I could be mellow, listening to mellow stuff on Friday morning, then WHAM! Major programming meltdown at a big client! I have to mobilize my tired brain cells with brain crushing rock/metal! A reversal of my otherwise "normal" progression from violent to mellow during the course of the day, which itself is often severly affected by how much I have to deal with my boss.
I don't see how such a thing could be truly accurate unless it has the facility to somehow read my mood. I can think of several ways to do this, but I doubt blush reflex scanners, heart rate/ekg monitors, voice stress monitors, or neural feedback chips are included with the software.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be accurate anyway. Seems like it would be too easy to get lulled into a pattern, with no new input. Kind of stale. Unless it can read a new song and figure out, statistically whether or not I would like it, which sounds more like a Turing test than anything else. Maybe worse; my S.O. can't figure out what the hell I like, so if a computer COULD, well, I'd probably finally be able to write off the opposite sex.
I'm not holding my breath.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I've done something like this on a network campus, wrote a shared file logger program people used to see what weird songs people liked to listen to.
The funny part is ACTUALLY finding a pattern, and then confronting them with their bizarre tastes. Or, better yet, replace their favorite song with something just really random but leave the name same. Well, what else are you going to do?
I've written a similar functionality, it's open source (will be), in perl. It keeps track of what you play, what you cancel, how many times it's been played, when it was last played, etc., then makes a weighted random choice. That's the good news. The bad news is it's not quite available right now.
It was originally a patch to Otto 1.0 (sourceforge), and you can get the code from that patch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/otto - patch 1.0.2), but there's a new Otto codebase. I'm in the process of re-writing / integrating my features to Otto 2.0, including smart random play.
Eventually, this will be available at sourceforge, either as a new rev. of Otto, or a fork named Calliope. So non-windows people, don't dispair....
I'll post to slashdot when this is downloadable, perhaps within 2-4 weeks.....
cheers,
neilv
I dont run it, I just like it!
I typiclly stream my mp3 to multiple computers in the house.. a client server version of this software would be very usefull.. as to have a central stat list to recall.. of couse a linux version of the server side would be a must
I think i'll pass on this ;)
...does all that for you. It autorates the tracks depending on how many times played & skipped. It then creates auto lists like best rated or weekend music...
Synapse is great idea and all but the name calls to mind the movie Antitrust -- which then calls to mind evil Microsoft. I know this was developed under linux and by students at universities, but WHERE IS THE SOURCECODE!?
Honestly, i'd feel safer if this was under peer review rather than just some downloadable exe or linux binary that does who knows what and sends out god knows what to people I dont know.
-- -=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
At least how I use winamp is I have a HD with all my mp3's organized into folders by musician then by album. I usually just queue up a bunch by right click enqueue to winamp. I don't think I even have any playlists saved since it changes daily.
I hate to think what would happen if, say, I put "Yellow Submarine" on repeat...
Ignore you. You're not the target audience.
Yeah, how about the number of times a tune as been played? or the last time?
What I want is to be able to find the stuff I haven't heard recently in my music collection.
s/chinese/thai/g
i can sort of see why; you've got piles of music and you want to sort as you play. wouldn't you get a bit bored though? i feels to me like a tool for homogenizing your music collection.
You can vote on songs, and skipping a song reduces it's probability of playing again. It will play the song to a sound card or stream it to an IceCast server.
It is a GPLed package that runs on Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.
I just want to know what the "Black Jesus Algorithm" is!
From the FAQ: What should I do if I get a "Would you like to send this error report to Microsoft" box? --- Don't panic. You're not going to die, Sweet!!! I NO LONGER FEAR MY OWN MORTALITY
Perhaps we could parcel out the grammer/spelling nazi functions into focused solutions.
Somebody has obviously already taken then/than (which is a known high runner) as their special calling.
So, if you always wanted to be a spelling/grammer nazi, but didn't have time to police ALL of Slashdot, get involved in the new paradigm: focused spelling/grammer nazi activism!
Act fast before the cool ones are taken:
* there/their
* to/too/two
* you/your/you're
and the ever popular:
* it/its/it's
Hurry! Some other spelling/grammer nazi may take your choice!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
This component works in conjuction with the SmartName module (codename: Black Jesus) which looks at each individual song and the collection as a whole, and then figures out what each song is actually supposed to be called. This is incredibly useful in a world where MP3 searches are restricted and almost every filename and tag are distorted to filtering.
The dynamic library, powered by the Black Jesus Algorithm, will organize all of your music into accessible and logical groups for easier use.
Whities need not apply. Seriously, though. Don't you guys think some right-wing (and even more liberal) nuts are going to see this as some sort of (school sponsored?) political or religious statement? I think they should have been more careful with naming their algorithm. I admit I think it's cool, but what exactly does "Black Jesus" have to do with sorting and organizing MP3s?
Or is it "Hezus", as in Mexican Jesus? Now, that would really throw me for a loop.
This sounds like a tool for control freaks to find patterns and reinforce those patterns in themselves over and over. Patterns breed stagnation. This is the whole problem with commercial radio.
I say embrace randomness. That's why I prefer to listen to streams instead of local mp3s anyway. In fact I would like to see a tool which mixed hundreds of streams into a single stream. When a song ended on one stream, it would find another stream where a song was just beginning and switch to it.
Besides, consciousness interacts with random physical systems. How can you be sure you didn't really want to hear that song?
I want to offer the following information about the project. The majority of development effort went into building the Brain. The Synapse player is just something we threw together to get the most from the Brain's functionality. We will probably never port Synapse to other systems since more than enough players already exist. Synapse does work under Wine though. We do have plans to bring the Brain to other systems, and we've begun by writing a plugin for Winamp 2.x, which you can get here. An XMMS plugin is coming soon, and then hopefully there will be one for iTunes in the near future.
And a note about privacy. None of your musical listening data will be available to anyone other than you. We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else.
Unless you have a really small music collection or or willing to spend hours and hours makes hundreds of playlists there just aren't any decent players for linux yet. The only one in recent memory that has half a chance or turning into something decent like someone else pointed out it Rythmbox(although dev has stalled??), maybe the fork will do better.
For now I use Zinf since its the only one which seems to makes an effort to let you organzie your music library in an easy manner. See a screenshot here http://www.zinf.org/images/zinf_mymusic_shot.png
Zinf lets you graphically manages your Artists,Albums, and playlists by default. It still doesn't have everything I want, but its still better than Xmms. Xmms has albumlist but really that not nearly the same thing that Zinf has.
Linux mp3 players are stuck in 1997 and I'd use something like WMP9 in a hearbeat if it were ported to linux. Minimalist, featureless mp3 players are for people with minimal mp3 collections.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
There are many types of songs that I listen to that have no similarity to each other than the great memories I've associated with each one of them; There's no way to program that. Here's a sample list of songs that I have memories of:
:P
Bush - Breathe In, Breathe Out
John Mayer - Your body is a wonderland
Linkin Park - With You
And a couple of songs from Metallica.
Now, the program will select songs that are similar to these songs (which, are obviously NOT similar). But what if I told you that these were ALL makeout songs?
You'll need more than a vibrating cell phone and a smart mp3 player to figure that one out...
Try saying that sentence to someone over the phone and asking him/her to transcribe it. Read what he/she writes and tell me if you still feel the same. My guess is that a human listener would mangle this pretty badly too.
Sean
Whitepaper here:/ personalization_whitepaper_021106.pdf
http://www.musicmatch.com/info/company/press/docs
nonsig. unsig. desig.
that is a TERRIBLE mp3 player. there is no equilizer and it has a bad interface.
http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot
Play it 50-100 times and get back to us on just how unpredictable you really are.
I downloaded and installed Synapse. Damn thing scanned all my local and network shares for files, giving me no option to manually specify. Since I have lots of drives, this took a good ten minutes.
What's worse, the app stayed on top of all my other apps, smack in the middle of my primary monitor, with no way to move it. So, I had to work on my secondary while it chugged away.
Ok, fine. Told it where the MP3s were, and it imported all the song info. I believe I was allowed to move this window, although I can't totally remember.
Fired it up. Black on dark blue background. Um, tough to read to say the least. Switched to the 'playlist' screen and tried dragging n dropping an m3u playlist into the screen, a la winamp. No dice, wouldn't load.
Ok, can't find any place to manually add files without exploring the little music database it built. Open the database tree and, holy crap, what a piece of shit. I wanted to listen to Linkin Park's Meteora CD, so I scroll waay down to linkin park, and expand the tree. Ugh. Flat file listings, by song name. Crap. Can't find Meteora.
Now, I know that this is kind of a different MP3 player, and I had every intention of RTFMing before really using it, but come on. It should at least be intuitive enough for me to be able to load some songs without having to read the instructions.
I closed Synamps and fired Winamp 3 up. Maybe I'll go back and try it out again, but I'm not as interested as I was when I started.
Buy a Mac, iTunes does both of those things amazingly, it's very impressive how well it allows me to manage my 8500 mp3 collection.
Their website is near useless for information (I think it mentioned something about Chinese hookers). What does this thing do? It tells me what songs I like? I already know that; they're the ones on my hard drive. It tells me my favorite songs? I already know that, too; I've got a playlist of my favorite songs. It tells me what songs I like to listen to together? Again, I've already gots playlists for that. What does this do that I don't already know? Tell me I'm 9.2% more likely to listen to song A rather than song B?
The Brain just sounds like some stupid marketing gimmick to get demographical information. Why is this so great? I'm sure I must me missing the point. Can someone clue me in?
While using this program, a graph of my cpu's performace is equivalent to about a 9.5 on the Richter scale.
I've updated the FAQ, so some of the questions people are asking should now be answered. There are also some work-arounds for a couple of the bugs people have reported. Thanks for all the feedback guys -- keep it coming!
After trying this it seems the thing only picks the songs I have already played and plays them in a slightly more random order than I did.
What I thought/was hoping this thing was is something that picks songs from my 30 GB mp3 collection based on similarity (it does rate song similarity). But all it seems to do is repeat the songs I have already played.
Sindri Traustason.
The Black Jesus algorithm may be swell, but I can't find out because this isn't a very good player. At best, there are annoying pops during playback. At worst, it plays the songs too slow, too fast, or not at all and then immediately crashes to the desktop. Obviously, this renders the Black Jesus function useless. IMHO, unless they are going to put as much work into the player as they did the Brain, they should shelve it and stick to the plug-ins. I'm running Win2k and use MP9, and it sounds better than the other players I've tried. I liked WinAmp 2.x, but I think 3 is a piece.
Imagine this (and RIAA's reaction):
1. User downloads the plugin
2. User spends a couple of hours a day over the next few days listening to music
3. Plugin determines user's tastes and automatically goes out on WinMX or Kaaza to download just about everything the user would ever want to listen to.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
I just downloaded the WinAmp Plugin, and played with it for quite a while, meticulously feeding in long playlists. It does NOT try to find you new music based on what you like. It attempts to give you semi-random playlists, based on the playlists you have used in the past. The elements of that playlist are culled from your mp3 collection, and, more specifically, from the parts of your mp3 collection that you have played since starting up Brain. Also, if you want to give it data faster, note that the way it tells how much of the song played is where in the song the track ended. In other words, if you want to fast-add 400 tracks to it, just play them all and click to the last second of every track. It'll still think you played all of the track, and add it to its records as though you did.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Why in Gods Name do they need to open up TCP port 8541 to give me control over my own songlists when winamp is sitting there staring me in the face?
.dll in my plugins directory and manually delete it. Only "Black Jesus" knows where else this thing installed itself in my system.
The uninstall did NOT work. I had to find the
I felt SO stupid for spending time on this. "Brain" is either some very bad engineering or it's a latent trojan.
Yeah an uninitialized variable (or stack corruption) in your code which is causing the Run Time Error Check #3 is clearly Microsoft's fault.
Nice program, but a reality check is in order.
That was a joke. It's obviously our fault, and it will be fixed in the next version. I just thought it was a bit random that code that worked well under VC6 wouldn't work the same under VC.NET. And if it wasn't going to work the same, you'd think it would work better, especially since the same code compiled under .NET was 60K larger...
will winamp 3 ever stop sucking balls?
apparently not.
I really wish they would release a new version at some point...
I don't have a spare CPU sitting idle to let Winamp 3 just sit there and suck 18 percent, nailing 100 everytime I do anything. Especially when v2 only pulls 1 percent.
Actually, it turns out that one of the programmers (Mark Zuckerberg) has a Chinese girlfriend. I guess that explains why he was in bed with a Chinese girl...and it probably means he's not racist.
Click on P, click on R, click on I, click on N, click on T, click on F, shift-click on 9...
Am I the only one thinking that the mouse to a programmer is the same as a tricycle to a fish?
It was, after all, a failed (but close) attempt at first post.
Nothing, it's not that type of plugin, if you would have bothered to look at the website/article. :P
Synapse would be fine if it would actually *play* something when you loaded a playlist into it and press play, instead of sitting there, without producing a single sound. Like many others around here, I appreciate your project; it has led me to search for something with similar functionality that actually works, and with my existing media player (wa3), too.
But anyway, thanks for trying.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius