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Crunching the Math On iTunes

Posted by Zonk on from the not-completely-random dept.

markmcb writes "OmniNerd has posted an interesting article about the statistical math behind iTunes. The author makes some interesting observations concerning the same song playing twice in a row during party shuffle play, the impact that star ratings have on playback, and comparisons with plain old random play (star ratings not considered)." From the article: "To test the option's preference for 5-stars, I created a short playlist of six songs: one from each different star rating and a song left un-rated. The songs were from the same genre and artist and were changed to be only one second in duration. After resetting the play count to zero, I hit play and left my desk for the weekend. To satisfy a little more curiosity, I ran the same songs once more on a different weekend without selecting the option to play higher rated songs more often. Monday morning the play counts were as shown in Table 1."

7 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Ok... by jim_v2000 · · Score: 4, Funny

    So from this we learn that the random play on iTunes really is random, and that rating a song really does have an effect. Who'd a thunk?

    Next, "iTunes really does play tunes!"

    --
    Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
    1. Re:Ok... by TheGavster · · Score: 5, Funny

      All lies! The play order is too complex to occur naturally; there must be some intelligence that selects the order of the songs!

      And, of course, looking into the origins of said intelligence is blasphemy.

      --
      "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
  2. Reminds me of... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    the time my 2G iPod seemed to have a liking for the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. It was playing a track off it pretty much every other song. Those of you who know the album can appreciate that it's not the kind of music that you'd maybe choose as everyday listening material.

    It became so annoying that I ended up removing the album from iTunes, at which point my iPod promptly died. The replacement was big on Roxy Music IIRC...

  3. that sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can't tell you how many Christian record stores I'm permanently banned from.

  4. Finally by Ed+Thomson · · Score: 5, Funny

    Someone to show how cool mathematics is

  5. Re:Interesting by Feanturi · · Score: 5, Funny

    A public moderation system, cool. That never gets abused anywhere that I know of.

  6. something i've noticed by macsox · · Score: 4, Funny

    there definitely seems to be some time-based randomness in the selection of tunes. often, i'll hear a song pop up randomly on my ipod in the car on the way into work, and then the song come up again, randomly, while being played on itunes at my desk.

    --
    go get it