More iTunes Math

markmcb writes "OmniNerd once again digs into the math behind iTunes. The 5-star ratings in iTunes are actually stored in a variable allowing values from 0 to 100, with 20 = 1-star, 40 = 2-star, etc. Known to few, if you set a rating to 30 (manually), it will show up as 1 1/2 stars in the program's GUI. Matt Schinckel provides interesting statistical evidence showing that not only do non-whole, non-half values (e.g., 47) not increase the amount a song will play, but neither do the half-star ratings (with the exception of .5 star)."

Comments

How does it handle values outside the range?

[CyricZ]

Do values outside of the range 0 to 100 cause the program to crash, for instance? Or does it just show zero or five stars, depending on which end of the range is being exceeded?

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[frostilicus2]

I've just tried this - If you insert a value outside the range, iTunes assumes the nearest value to 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 and doesn't crash.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[CyricZ]

That sounds like something Apple would do: write high-quality software that even resists unexpected tampering.

Indeed, the consumer software world would be far better off if it followed Apple's model. It really makes me wonder how good Windows applications today would be if they had put more effort into developing YellowBox. We might not be faced with a future of slow, resource-intensive .NET applications, but rather small, fast applications written in Objective-C.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[spectre_240sx]

I'm really suprised that something like this hasn't been built on OpenStep actually. I like Java, but I'd love to be able to write software in Objective C that was capable of being compiled accross all three major platforms.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[CyricZ]

GNUstep is a possibility. Licensing issues have been raised, however. Many people have reported difficulties getting it to compile as a usable DLL under Windows, which of course makes it virtually unusable for commercial developments.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Moridineas]

Um, AFAIK, iTunes isn't written in Objective-C.

Last time I checked it was indeed a Carbon app.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[laffer1]

Yeah and the fact that most OSS development is with gtk or qt. It would be nice if we standardized on a toolkit/library for some things. If it were GNUstep, it would help promote sharing apps with macs which would give apps that much more market share.

I don't know if its true, but most people online tell me that GNUstep developers are a bit inflexible about enhancements/patches to keep it more in sync with Apple's offerings.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Millenniumman]

Carbon applications are usually written in Objective C. Carbon and Cocoa are not programming languages, and generally utilize Objective C.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Eccles]

Carbon applications are usually written in Objective C.

No they aren't. I'm a professional programmer for a Mac (and PC) program using the Carbon interface for Macs. As Wikipedia says, "Carbon is more versatile in that it may be accessed using C, C++, Pascal, Ada, or any other language with suitable interface headers, whereas Cocoa exclusively uses Objective C and Java." Most cross-platform apps use Carbon because Objective-C isn't widely used on PCs.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[hunterx11]

Carbon and Cocoa are APIs. Carbon supports C and C++, and Cocoa Objective-C, Objective-C++, and Java, though there are third-party bindings. Of course, you can make Carbon calls from an Objective-C program since it is a strict superset of C. However, most cross-platform programs use Carbon because they don't want to use Objective-C since it is much less popular, and GNUstep isn't as mature for other platforms as Cocoa is for OS X. iTunes, by the way, is a Carbon program, though I don't know if it's written in C or C++.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Millenniumman]

I'm sure you're right. My point about Carbon and Objective C not being the same thing and being used together still stands, though.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't sound like high quality software. They only support a whole number of stars (nothing wrong with that), but since they represent 0-5 as 0-100 they've unwittingly allowed this bug to show up where they don't treat an entered value of 47 properly.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[shawnce]

Actually Cocoa can work with C++ easily via Objective-C++.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Moridineas]

No actually your point is wrong.

Carbon and Objective C are not the same things--that much is correct. However it stands that Cocoa apps are written in Objective-C (and formerly in Java) and Carbon apps are written in languages like C and C++. If a program is a Carbon app, you can pretty much guarantee that it is not written in Objective-C. When you have the case of a program like iTunes that has always been developed as a Carbon app that could even dual run on OS9/OSX in previous versions, you are pretty much guaranteed that it is both a Carbon and a C/C++ app.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Moridineas]

No, actually you're wrong as several other posters have pointed out.

Carbon and Cocoa are not programming languages, correct. Cocoa is accessed via Objective-C and formerly Java (formerly as its being deprecated). So, if you have a Cocoa app, it's pretty much guaranteed to be written in Objective-C.

Likewise, the prime languages that are used by Carbon are C and C++. I cannot think of an example of a Carbon program that is written in Objective-C (I'm not saying that they don't exist at all, just that I know of no examples). Generally Carbon is used by several types of programs--
1) crossplatform apps that have large codebases in C/C++ and don't want to mess with Objective-C at all..
2) Older mac apps that have codebases originating pre-OSX (LIKE iTUNES, Photoshop [crossplatform eg too], the Finder, etc)
3) mac programmers who don't want to mess with Objective-C.

Carbon is the API for people who DON'T use Objective-C and Cocoa, is one way of putting it.

Apple recently posted a job ad for someone to work on the next gen of the Finder. It's written in Carbon. So is the next gen. Guess what language they were advertising for--that's right! C++ with STL (and Boost nonetheless).

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[Anonymous Coward]

47 is not an entered value. Its a hack. And How is it not being handled properly, because the user interface is rounding the display to a "user freindly half star? Perhaps they envision a future application that makes use of the extra resolution their rating system enables?

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[muuh-gnu]

> I don't know if its true, but most people online tell me that GNUstep developers are a bit inflexible about
> enhancements/patches to keep it more in sync with Apple's offerings.

I also have heard that the developers at Apple are even more inflexible about enhacements/patches to keep their systems more in sync with GNUstep's offerings.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[donutello]

In fact, it's a pain in the ass to use the Carbon APIs from within an Objective-C app. Turst me, I've had to do it.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[idlake]

Carbon applications are usually written in Objective C.

Carbon applications are usually written in languages other than Objective-C. Carbon is the old Macintosh APIs adapted to OS X.

Cocoa applications are usually written in Objective-C. Cocoa is derived from the NeXTStep libraries.

Re:How does it handle values outside the range?

[jZnat]

It'd be nice if there were some unifying toolkit available, but the current ones available such as wxWidgets, SWT, Swing (both are Java), etc., are all incomplete and usually don't support Qt which in itself is a unifying toolkit (cross-platform and whatnot). Until a unifying toolkit doesn't bias based on esoteric details like licensing, we won't be getting anything good for a while.

Is it really surprising?

[CyricZ]

So it seems they developed their algorithm to only deal with the values 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. Is it really a surprise that it doesn't take into account other values?

Re:Is it really surprising?

[TheSpoom]

Well, it's obviously a bug, but... Slashdot-worthy?

This just seems like something I'd quietly forward to their developers.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[Vellmont]

It's a slow news day. Apparently some guy wasting his time figuring out that iTunes uses integer math when doing song ratings is "news" today.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[JaxWeb]

It's quite interesting, as the following quote makes clear:

So, what does this tell us about iTunes and the way it handles ratings? As a hobbyist coder,21 there is one big surprise for me. I would have thought that the easiest way to code for the 'bias' toward higher rated songs would be to just use the numeric value that is stored as the rating. Clearly, this is not the case, as a 99-rated song plays about as many times as an 80-rated track. Therefore, the algorithm must convert the rating to a number of stars.

The simplest method to do this conversion would be something like: int(rating/20) in python.22 However, as int(19/20) gives 0, a special case coded in for rating==0 must have been used to result in the linear relationship observed between played_count and int(rating/20).

Re:Is it really surprising?

[Lally Singh]

Has no ill-effect to the user, looks like 1 part was overdesigned. Overall, looks like one person was in charge of the storage and UI for the rating, and another for the statistical interpretation (makes sense, a UI person and a math person).

Re:Is it really surprising?

[Vellmont]

That's interesting? Speculation based on statistical analysis of iTunes code has to be one of the most boring things I've heard in a long time. Sheesh, if he really wanted to know how it worked he should have just gotten out a decompiler and found the section that deals with ratings.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[CyricZ]

Yes, it's interesting. If you find such topics boring, then perhaps you shouldn't be reading Slashdot. I'm sure you'll find reading material more entertaining and suitable for lower intelligence level at Disney.com.

Many people who read this site care about issues like this. We find it interesting to experiment with software systems, especially those which we do not have direct access to the source code of. It's fun to see how a consumer-grade application reacts to unexpected data, for instance.

He could have decompiled the application. But doing so would likely have been in violation of the licensing agreement he agreed to before using said software. You may question the legality of such agreements, but he may not have wanted to take the risk of publishing his findings. Litigation is expensive, after all.

Not only that, but it's quite difficult to decompile a program written in C, C++ or Objective-C. That's especially true when you're dealing with an optimized program. It often isn't obvious what a particular chunk of assembly code is doing, and thus is basically useless for such analysis.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[Vellmont]

He could have decompiled the application. But doing so would likely have been in violation of the licensing agreement he agreed to before using said software. You may question the legality of such agreements, but he may not have wanted to take the risk of publishing his findings. Litigation is expensive, after all.

Give me a very large break. Even Apple, sue hungry nutjobs that they are, isn't going to sue someone for finding out a trivial part of iTunes. As for the "you don't find this interesting, but us slashdot people do" You can just shove it. Some things are just esoteric minutia, and this is one of them.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[larry bagina]

So it seems they developed their algorithm to only deal with the values 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. Is it really a surprise that it doesn't take into account other values?

That sounds like something Apple would do: write high-quality software that even resists unexpected tampering.

Re:Is it really surprising?

[weg]

I'm sure you'll find reading material more entertaining and suitable for lower intelligence level at Disney.com.

Which of the numbers challenges your intelligence, 20, 40, 60 or 100? (of course, all of them are higher than you have fingers on your hand, and 100 even has 3 (!) digits) ;-)

You shouldn't question the intelligence of somebody without knowing him..

OmniNerd once again...

[tom6a]

Here's the Slashdot post to OmniNerd's first iTunes article: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/28/ 0616225 Direct link to the first article: http://www.omninerd.com/2005/08/25/articles/34

How does the Windows version work?

[CyricZ]

Has anyone been able to replicate this behavior with the Windows version of iTunes? Is it built upon the same core as the Mac OS version, or does Apple have a separate implementation that may behave differently?

Re:How does the Windows version work?

[MoriaOrc]

I've looked at the iTunes Library xml file in Windows before (usually My Docs/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml) and it does store the rating values as 0-100 integers. I've never tried to modify them, though.

Re:How does the Windows version work?

[chmcarro]

You can edit the values here, but if you do an inbetween value, like 30, the GUI does not change, but rather stays at 1 star.

Re:How does the Windows version work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone been able to replicate this behavior with the Windows version of iTunes? Is it built upon the same core as the Mac OS version, or does Apple have a separate implementation that may behave differently?

Nope. Compiled from the same codebase.

How is it a "bug"?

[CyricZ]

I wouldn't necessarily consider it a bug outright. First of all, it doesn't appear to crash iTunes. But beyond that, it's an action that is outside of the normal usage scope. It requires one to use AppleScript, at least on Mac OS X, to use the non-standard values.

One might say that quality software should properly deal with unusual values, and that is quite true. Likewise, it appears to be the case in this particular situation. The rating system still works, even with the unexpected data. Indeed, could the Linux kernel really be considered buggy if somebody were to start entering random values into kernel memory via /dev/kmem? I wouldn't say so.

Re:How is it a "bug"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't necessarily consider it a bug outright. First of all, it doesn't appear to crash iTunes.
crash == bug. bug != crash, n00b.

Re:How is it a "bug"?

[TheSpoom]

You have to script in order to use it? Huh... If scripting is unsupported, then I obviously didn't read enough and am incorrect, and I apologize. If it is supported, then it's a bug, albeit a very small one. Either way, not really that interesting.

I hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itunes. But I'll tell you what I don't hate, The spicy italian sandwich from Subway. 2 layers of salami and Pepperoni topped off with 4 slices of american cheese. Put a little mayo on there, some lettuce, tomatoes, and black olives, and you've almost got yourself a sandwich. Next, have them cover the sandwich in salt and pepper, then spray some oil and vinegar over the top, wrap it up and there's dinner. I think we can all give thanks for a sandwich that good. mmmmm mmmmm

Re:I hate...

[Corbu Mulak]

No matter how many times I see this, I still laugh.

So it's basically fixed point math.

[voxel]

So, 32 of 100 is simply 1.6 stars.

Formula 32 / 20 = Number of stars.

Wow. I don't see why this article is on slashdot, what am I missing?

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[flyingsquid]

Wow. I don't see why this article is on slashdot, what am I missing?

Whatever it is the editors were smoking.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[CyricZ]

I doubt they're smoking anything. And if they are, it's likely a substance that enhances one's journalistic abilities.

This story has everything to do with what this site stands for. It directly involves Apple, mathematics, software design, software analysis, software realiability, and so forth.

Remember, one of the traits of the true, traditional hacker was to experiment with systems in order to better understand them. That holds especially true of proprietary software systems, where the source code cannot be easily or readily viewed.

Indeed, this is a very interesting story that should appeal perfectly to the general Slashdot audience.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[peteremcc]

the fact that you can choose figures inbetween the standard numbers, and that it reflects those changes in the program ----- Peter http://peteremcc.wordpress.com/

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[name773]

it's saying that only whole and half number values affect the program

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[Profane Motherfucker]

Yeah, everyone in this thread seems to be in love with it.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[nathanh]

This story has everything to do with what this site stands for. It directly involves Apple, mathematics, software design, software analysis, software realiability, and so forth.

Indeed, this is a very interesting story that should appeal perfectly to the general Slashdot audience.

The hacker audience who is interested in such things has been dwindling both in numbers and as a percentage. Now the "general Slashdot audience" prefers to fawn over the latest consumer product from Apple, to complain about Microsoft, or to inexpertly argue their "Rights Online".

Articles about technology, impressive hacks, homebrew projects, science and mathematics would be extremely welcome. Unfortunately the editors are infatuated with content-free articles that are little more than advertisements for products like the PS3 and Xbox and iPod.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's saying that only full-star ratings, with the single exception of one-half star (or thereabouts) affect the relative play count.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[Firehed]

If by "general" you mean "user of iTunes that makes use of the rating-star system", then yes. I don't think it's news to most slashdotters that a 30/100 is equivalent to 1.5 stars on a five-star system. I think maybe if it had more of an effect on the actual chance of playing (I'm assuming this is based off of the randomizer or party shuffle or something), people would care more. I dunno about anyone else, but every one of my tracks is rated at 0 stars, simply because I can't be bothered to rate thousands of songs. If I don't like what's playing, my keyboard has a very nifty "next track" key.

Re:So it's basically fixed point math.

[Bing Tsher E]

Unfortunately it also concerns an Apple Product. And traditional hackers have boycotted anything Apple since Jobs gave the boastful 'hacker proof' presentation about the original Macintosh: a closed-source sealed-box platform designed to be anti-hacker.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

"This shows the beauty of scripting systems like AppleScript. They allow you a level of interaction with a system that is hardly seen on Windows, and only vaguely available on UNIX."

This shows the level of brainwashing only possibly seen in apple zealots.

They created the perfect antiduplication system.

[technoextreme]

Slashdot can now link to past duplications. It's really quite funny because I scrolled down and they linked directly back to the same story. In related news the same story we will now provide the same story slightly edited..

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[slavemowgli]

Goodness, just how many top-level comments can you post in a single discussion in rapid succession? It *is* possible to write more than one sentence in a comment, y'know. :)

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, WTF? I can tell from your other drooling comments on this story that you're an Apple fanboy of the first order, but please at least try to show some basic understanding of the stuff you're blathering about.

This kind of thing is trivial on Windows and trivial on Linux. AppleScript has some nice features (wrapped up in the ugliest programming language known to man, with the possible exception of the COBOL it's apparently based on), but this particular case is nothing special.

Endnote #20

[TubeSteak]

Since there are only 11 tracks in this experiment, I can easily include the raw data. Unfortunately, I didn't record for how long the experiment using the data subset ran. Exercise for the reader: Calculate approximately for how long this experiment ran from the data contained within this article.

Anyone with some spare time wanna tell us the answer?

Re:Endnote #20

[Anonymous Coward]

15.4135 minutes

Re:Endnote #20

[tom6a]

Brandon answered the question in the article comments, "Assuming no time between tracks, the test ran for about 15.41 minutes (924.81 seconds)." (See http://www.omninerd.com/2006/02/11/news/530)

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[gowmc]

AppleScript really isn't a particularly great language. My understanding is that any OSA language can use AppleEvents, so all you need is something like this to talk to applications in something you are more used to:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/200 1-August/004064.html

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[m50d]

Erm, that's completely false. Just try using dcop with amarok, or basically anything KDE. The scripting facility is definitely there, and you can use it with any language you like.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[CyricZ]

Actually, the Windows equivalents nowhere near compare to what AppleScript offers. The WSH is, to put it kindly, a shitty tool. VBScript, well, we're all aware of how easily it allows applications like Microsoft Word to be exploited.

The open source solutions are far better. A program with Python, Tcl, or Scheme scripting, for instance, is often quite a useful application. Take GIMP, for instance. It's Scheme scripting capabilities are quite superb, and make for a swell application.

Still, AppleScript is by far the most integrated of all such systems. That's understandable, considering Apple's emphasis on providing a solid, coherent desktop system.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[MouseR]

Yeah, you just made two!

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Jozer99]

How can something be vaguely available? Isn't it available or not?

closed source..

[GrAfFiT]

Interesting to see that what would just involve reading a few lines of code on open source software takes a whole complicated statistical analysis on closed source software...

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[CyricZ]

I'm well aware of the DCOP capabilities of KDE. But not every Linux program is a KDE program. There are many users out there who choose to use GNOME, for whatever reason. Other significant applications, like Mozilla and OpenOffice, also do not necessarily have DCOP support.

Zero to 100?

[m0nstr42]

Any idea why they would pick 100? There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason to do this over 0 to 5. Memory considerations would peg it to 2^n-1 values wouldn't they?

Re:Zero to 100?

[-kertrats-]

As above poster, I would assume they put it that way for the option of future expansion to the ratings system without annoying problems.

Re:Zero to 100?

[jci]

I think the 0 - 100 is to have the ability to use a 0 - 100 percentage bar with a stars/no-stars image.

No scaling necessary for display.

Just my thoughts..

Re:Zero to 100?

[RoadkillBunny]

I suppose because it can be easly understood by a user in terms like percentage. For exaple a song marked 100 will recieve 100% (5) of stars.

Re:Zero to 100?

[wertarbyte]

Any idea why they would pick 100? There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason to do this over 0 to 5.

It's called "percent".

Re:Zero to 100?

[m0nstr42]

It's called "percent".

Which makes perfect sense IF the user has direct access to it. All you can do is set the number of stars, which, as far as the user knows, could be stored as 0,1,2,3,4,5 or 0,pi,2pi,3pi,4pi,5pi or whatever. If you were going to use one byte to do it why not make it 0, 1, 2, 4, 8? Or 0,1,2,3,4,5 and use the other bits to store other information.

Obligatory

[Errandboy of Doom]

iTunes? Is anyone still using that old thing? I now exclusively use Songbird, even though it's still alpha.

Tsk, and I thought this was Slashdot... bleeding edge, people!

Re:Obligatory

[dr.badass]

iTunes? Is anyone still using that old thing? I now exclusively use Songbird

I tried to install Songbird, but it just installed a buggy, broken and cluttered version of iTunes that didn't work with my iPod and had a farting bird for an icon. Does anyone know where the real installer is?

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's... an iTunes clone with a Firefox window stuck in. Woo?

Re:Obligatory

[Night Goat]

Why would I want to install a clone of iTunes, when I've got the real thing?

Re:Obligatory

[Queer Boy]

Yeah, you were modded funny because you're talking about Slashdot and bleeding edge when referring to a product that is currently Windows-only.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

a farting bird for an icon

Ok, so I'd never heard of this program, but after your comment I had to go check it out. I guess I'm a 4th grader when it comes to humor, because I laughed my ass off at this logo. It was hard not to chuckle while typing this.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, did you even go to that link? It runs on linux and OS X.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsk, and I thought this was Slashdot... bleeding edge, people!

No, no, it is slashdot, but you're confused. Bleeding anus. Bleeding anus.

Re:Obligatory

[jhoffoss]

...because the UI is black, so it matches your ipod nano and better represents your depressed state as a result of being a Windows user?

Re:Obligatory

[jhamm]

Have you actually taken the time to install Songbird? What a joke.

Re:Obligatory

[ckibbyrun]

I only use iTunes because i have an iPod....kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

Re:Obligatory

[pwhysall]

No, it doesn't.

Mac and Linux versions are "Coming soon".

Anyway, by the look of that UI, they're about to be sued into oblivion anyway.

Re:Obligatory

[Lars T.]

Hrrm, where are the song ratings?

Re:Obligatory

[zonker]

yeah, we are still using itunes. songbird, while nice in theory is as you stated betaware. early beta too. you'd know this is you tried it instead of read their webpage and jumped on the opensource troll bandwagon...

note: just because something is opensource doesn't make it a better solution. songbird may eventually become that, but at the moment it has a lot of work to do.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

It's open source, compile it for whatever platform you're into.

Re:Obligatory

[heinousjay]

Compile it? You don't do a lot of this programming thing, do you?

Re:Obligatory

[honkycat]

I installed it and it looked ok... one thing I wonder -- will it work better than iTunes on my laptop?

My laptop has a fairly small hard drive and I don't intend to keep my entire music collection on it. I rather think of it as an iPod -- my landlocked disk has my real library on it, and some subset lives on the laptop at any one time. When I'm on my home network, I want to have access to my whole library, but when I'm out and about, I would like to easily see what subset is local. I have found that iTunes, at least in the obvious mode of use, is horrible for this. It expects to index your library and have it available at all times. If it's in random play mode, it'll skip over the missing stuff, but when you browse through the library, you only find out that a song is not available after you try to play it -- then the little "missing" icon lights up.

I haven't played with Songbird enough to see if it handles this any better. But, as this is thread is about to go off the front page, I thought I'd ask if anyone knows a media player that's better about this. Currently, winamp looks like the best bet (plus XMMS when I am in Linux), but it'd be nice to have something with better library management. Anyone know of anything? Can Songbird handle this kind of environment?

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

When I'm on my home network, I want to have access to my whole library, but when I'm out and about, I would like to easily see what subset is local.

I think the done thing here is to just use the built-in library sharing. Assuming you have some werid reason for not, I would just select the whole library while disconnected, Get Info, and change one of the disused tag fields (like BPM or Composer or Grouping or Comments). This will take a minute, but it should cause all of the missing files to get the missing icon.

To answer your question: Songbird won't help. At least in this "pre-beta proof-of-concept we-don't-really-have-a-product-but-we-sure-do-have -vc-money" phase it's library behaves just like iTunes, only worse.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you don't like Microsoft's COM? COM, it makes simple tasks ungodly complicated and five times slower! You mean you don't enjoy sitting around doing nothing while you wait for some shitty VBScript to slowly marshal and unmarshal thousands of COM calls in rapid succession just to allow you to read a bunch of values out of an Office document?

Of course, open source software isn't quite free from this either. The core of Mozilla is based on their own version of COM, and we all know how fast a browser Mozilla is... ("Hey, let's make the DOM tree COM objects! That way our browser will be five times slower than any other competeing browser! Even Microsoft is smart enough only to wrap internal DOM objects in a COM wrapper as they're requested, but who cares about speed and memory usage anyway?")

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

yup its a shame. everything should be based on kde so everything has dcop support.. would make life so much easier. :)

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

This shows the beauty of scripting systems like AppleScript. They allow you a level of interaction with a system that is hardly seen on Windows, and only vaguely available on UNIX.

Come on, mods! Show your sense of humour and mod that insightful.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[m50d]

Yes, not every program has it, but that's a far cry from "only vaguely available". It's your choice as a user, like everything in linux, but you can perfectly well use an environment where everything has a nice scripting interface - I know everything I use does.

Future considerations, perhaps?

[CyricZ]

They could have just been leaving their options open for future expansion of the software. Indeed, it would be better for compatibility to already use the 0 to 100 range.

Suppose in the future they added support for giving a song a percentage ranking. It's quite easy to do with the system they're using now. Data from the new software could be used with the old, as the old software is already expecting and can cope with a value in the 0 to 100 range, even if it does so slightly differently than the future versions.

Re:Future considerations, perhaps?

[m0nstr42]

That's pretty reasonable.

Another music-related comp crash

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of crashing music programs, my friend managed to crash an old DOS metronome program by setting the time signature to 4/0 time (normal time signatures look like 4/4 or 3/4 or 7/12 etc). It divided by zero and crashed. I found it pretty funny at the time.

Linear plot

[Anonymous Coward]

By the looks of things they need to use another program to do linear regression on data. That line of best fit would make my old physics prof cringe.

It's obviously not a bug.

[CyricZ]

It's quite obvious that it doesn't impact on a normal user's experience. I thought that went without saying, but apparently you completely missed that point.

So in the end it doesn't crash the program, nor does it lead to incorrect output or corrupted data, or anything of that sort. Thus it is not a bug.

why linear?

[kavehkh]

Why is the rating system linear instead of exponential. I would like a song that has one more star than another to play TWICE more often.

Re:why linear?

[hobbit]

Also: in the interface, a rating of zero means "no rating". Should songs with a rating of 1 really be played more often than unrated songs?

Re:why linear?

[darkitecture]

Why is the rating system linear instead of exponential. I would like a song that has one more star than another to play TWICE more often.

Man, do you really want your favorite song to play 32 times for every 0-star rated song you have on your iPod? I don't care how much you love a song, after listening to it that often, you're bound to want to stab your iPod in the face. Or the closest fan of The Cure. Come to think of it, that'd be a win-win situation.

Re:why linear?

[Zenmonkeycat]

I prefer complex functions for listening to today's hits. For instance, I would rather hear Britney's latest release 10i times as often as a Jessica Simpson song.

Re:why linear?

[porcupine8]

Yeah, this is the biggest problem. I am far more likely to run into a song I'm meh on, but don't quite want to delete, and give it a 1-star rating (which I have done) than to go through and rate EVERY song (which I haven't done). So it sucks that these 1-star songs will now be played more than much better songs that I just haven't gotten around to rating.

Re:why linear?

[zippthorne]

Actually you can set this up with a few smart playlists. They have suggestions at http://www.smartplaylists.com/ that you might be able to use.

Re:why linear?

[Anonymous Coward]

as another poster has pointed out, zero means no rating, so we're talking 16 times. Now: imagine the worst song you don't delete: it's fair that a dozen turds together should get less of your time than a gem. Or, in other words, if you have two 5-star gem cd's, and 24 CD's of more or less crap, then short of deleting them, you should certainly not have to hear much more (as you suggest) than one song from one of the crap CD's for each good song on one of the good CD's! Imagine if for every +5 mod'd post on slashdot, you had to read through many more posts at 0 until you could see the next one? If anything, the algorithm should give LESS than 1/2 as much weight for each fewer star (to the point that some people hard-hide posts at 0 and -1 -- they don't even know they're there!)

I believe that each star should be one standard deviation, and that the mean should be at 2, and that 0 should not be "no rating" but "total and worthless crap (like -1 on slashdot). Like: if I recorded myself shitting and looped it for the length of a song (remember The Turd Report troll ["News for Turds. Stuff that splatters"] on slashdot?), that's what 0 should be. It doesn't really need to be more fine-grained than that.

Then 1 should be one standard deviation below the average, two stars should be about average, three stars should be a standard deviation above average, and four stars should be two standard deviations above the average.

Five stars is if you'd gladly memorize the entire 72 minutes of the CD. (Although, in practice, I think it would have to be like Slashdot's +5 posts.)

I think it is fair to listen to more than 40 hours of mostly fantastic music and some good music before being subjected to three minutes of a song so awful you have to skip it: therefore, I think a 2-base logarithm decays too slowly. Under "Rules for normally distributed data" in the Standard Deviation Wikipedia article you can note that I propose lumping the low-end green and brown to 0-stars, the low blue to one star (*), the high-blue to two stars (**) the high brown to three stars (***) and the high green to ****.

This accounts for 99.73% of all music, half of the remainder of which is "better" than four-stars, meaning 0.135% of music in the whole of the iTunes music store should be at 5-stars (my definition is, I'd gladly memorize every second of the CD-length).

the iTunes music store says: "Featuring more than 2 million songs", so there is 2,700 songs or about 270 CD's worth memorizng. That is more selective than The Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, but then I don't think anyone would like to hear those 500 albums enough to memorize them. I would not consider it inappopriate to spend 75% of my time listening to the 2700 songs off of iTunes that are rock-solid five-star songs, since my definition is that they're pretty much good enough to memorize. Any one of those songs might very well be good enough to listen to more or less attentively for a few hours straight, under the right circumstances or with the right intention.

Re:why linear?

[cpeterso]

I would think an unrated song should have an implicit 3 star rating: it's not known to be good or bad, but it will still be played.

Re:why linear?

[NeMon'ess]

I agree that the fixed settings suck. As a user actually comfortable operating a computer, unlike much of the market, I want advanced options that let me adjust how much more and less often I hear songs. So Party Shuffle isn't worth using to me.

Instead I rate my tracks like I would a movie.
1-star is probably going to get deleted eventually.
2-stars play half as much as No-stars.
No-stars play twice as much as 2-stars.
3-stars play 3 times as much as 2-stars.
4-stars play 4 times as much as 2-stars.
5-stars play 6 times as much as 2-stars.

Then I make an enormous playlist containing 1 play of 2-star songs, 2 plays of No-star songs... and 6 plays of 5-star songs, shuffle them, and save the result in a new playlist. Takes between 3 and 5 months to go through the list.

Re:why linear?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's your lucky day, he provided some applescript that can fix this...

Re:why linear?

[eMartin]

"as another poster has pointed out, zero means no rating"

I'm fairly certain that is wrong.

I use Winamp, which allows me to make smart playlists that refer to ratings of zero OR unrated songs. Of course, you'll point out that that is not iTunes, but what's interesting is that when I put an unrated song on my iPod, it comes back into Winamp as unrated, but when I accidentally click through to the ratings screen on the iPod, and then click to dismiss it when there are no stars, the rating comes back into Winamp as 0 (not unrated). This also effects smart playlists on my iPod that are made in Winamp.

In a spirit of non-Disneyness...

[Expert Determination]

...I could announce that in the Palm ebook reader, eReader's PalmReader, you can uncover the markup used to format the text even though it isn't directly visible. You can do this by using the search facility to search for markup tokens from the "Peanut Markup Language" used. Curiously it skips the escape character ('\') and the first letter of each markup symbol, as if the original authors expected all markup symbols to be one character long. The markup also includes the filenames of included images which are stored in .png format. So you can search for images in an eReader ebook by searching for the string ".png". I discovered this by disassembling the executable - not by trial and error in the application. I think this was a much more interesting bit of sleuthing than this trivial iTunes one and wish it would get published on slashdot.

On the other hand, even I think this is too boring to tell other people.

I'm confused

[djroute66]

Can somone kindly tell me 'why'?

I'm just saying this...

[Jugalator]

This earth shattering revelation will truly shake religions and politics alike throughout the world.

I'm stunned.

Important stories like these is what make Slashdot so great.

Re:I'm just saying this...

[chris_eineke]

Important stories like these is what make Slashdot so great.

What's with the overly abundant amount of sarcasm? If you want to read "important stories", just go to bbc.co.uk. It even says below the green slashdot graphic to your front top left:

News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.

Were you not able to infere from the tagline that this is not your everyman's newssite about "important stories"?

Oh wait - you were trying to be funny. Don't quit your day job.

Re:I'm just saying this...

[Lisandro]

Why troll? He's damn right. Why how iTunes calculates ratings is considered a story? Why is it presented as "math", like it's advanced calculus? And why the hell is this on the science section?

Re:I'm just saying this...

[riker1384]

I agree. This story is about as important as a story about how some particular video game calculates some value for score or health. I'm suprised the story wasn't met with a flood of comments asking why it's a story. Guess everybody's snowed in with nothing better to do or discuss.

Re:I'm just saying this...

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU!!!!!

I am still in amazement at the number of posts I saw in which people are astounded by simple division. I've got REAL news for you people....it's happenening all around you!

It's called scaling. When you want to say $300k dollars instead of $300,000 dollars, you just scaled! When you buy movie tickets, in essence you just scaled your $15 down to 2 tickets. Instead of your car's RPM gauge telling you how many individual revolutions it made, it tells you in thousands of revolutions. It's nothing new, it's nothing amazing, and it certainly isn't a "science" in the 20th or 21st centuries

Using six discrete values (0-5) doesn't allow for very fine-grained control should they decide to expand later on. Therefore, they chose to use a larger range of values that can be easily scaled and displayed by....you guessed it.....DIVISION!

I'm almost feel sorry that I have been so cynical in this post. But I'm even more sorry that so many people consider this any more interesting than tying your shoelaces which is far more complex. For my sake and Slashdot's, I surely hope all the semi-intelligent people passed this article over completely and the posts I read were from the remaining bunch

Phish

iTunes violating Norwegian law..

[techefnet]

Maybe not on topic, but in Norway iTunes is getting investigated by the goverment for violating various consumer and marketing laws. Will be interesting to see what the outcome will be.

Re:iTunes violating Norwegian law..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's not nearly enough information...

Overkill?

[TheGSRGuy]

Why did Apple choose multiples of 20? Isn't 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 a lot easier to work with? It certainly makes the most sense.

Re:Overkill?

[Skater]

So they could expand to a 100-star rating system in the future!

Seriously, it's a good question. Statisticians generally use scales of 5 values in surveys for a reason - it provides enough options for people to choose something near what they really want without the hassle of too many options that would have to be collapsed anyway. A 0-100 scale really seems like overkill.

Re:Overkill?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. It isn't just 0,1,2,3,4 and 5 stars. iTunes does take into account 1/2 of a star. It's using 0,10,20,40,60,80,and 100.

Re:Overkill?

[Helios1182]

In case they ever want to expand the system? Instead of rewriting everything they could add features to the existing base. Percentile, more refined stars, some other thing? The space to store a vale of 1-5 compared to 1-100 is negligable, so you might as well plan for the future.

Re:Overkill?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Seriously, it's a good question. Statisticians generally use scales of 5 values in surveys for a reason - it >provides enough options for people to choose something near what they really want without the hassle of too many >options that would have to be collapsed anyway. A 0-100 scale really seems like overkill.

On school reports (in NZ), they have 4 options to stop teachers from marking most of the students as 3's, because they can't be bothered putting thought into it.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[realbadjuju]

He's obviously written an aapple sctipt to comment for him.
PS: I kid, I kid. And I love my mac.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

considering Apple's emphasis on providing a solid, coherent desktop system.

It's a shame they forgot about making keyboard shortcuts consistent. Is copy CTRL+C or Apple+C in this application? It's like Shrodinger's keyboard shortcuts - the value only resolves once you try it and observe.

Same goes for the "make my window a little bigger / occasionally maximize it" button in the top-right corner of the window - you never know what it's going to do for a particular application! Sometimes it'll even make the window smaller! Really. The maximize button is a system control with application-defined functionality and no clear guidelines as to what that functionality should be).

Fantastic consistency there, Apple - super job you've done at messing up one of the basic principals of user interface design: predictability.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Dorceon]

You can do all of this through the iTunes COM interface, which is accessible to VBS, and also any compiled application.

var iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
var numTracks = tracks.Count;
var time_secs = 0;

for (i = 1; i <= numTracks; i++)
{
var currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
var track_end = currTrack.Finish;
var track_start = currTrack.Start;
var track_dur = track_end - track_start;
var track_time = currTrack.PlayedCount * track_dur;
time_secs += track_time;
}

WScript.Echo("You've spent " + Math.floor(time_secs / (3600*24)) + " days " + Math.floor((time_secs / 3600) % 24) + " hours " + Math.floor((time_secs / 60) % 60) + " minutes " + Math.floor(time_secs % 60) + " seconds listening to iTunes. (" + time_secs + " seconds total.)");

According to this, iTunes has been playing for ~29.5 days since my hard drive crash about a year ago. This is what I get for having a Scheduled Task (think cron job) run a VBS that uses COM to start iTunes as my alarm clock. (Item is 1-indexed, which is probably simpler for non-coders; subtracting the start time from the end time instead of using Length makes sure it doesn't count space that isn't part of the song, such as most of The Wonderful Future by Our Lady Peace, which has abour 13 minutes of empty space between the end of the song and Ray Kurzweil reading a long excerpt from his "The Age of Spiritual Machines".)

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[MrNonchalant]

And you'll note all of those posts contain something like "Apple really understands how to do integrated systems right" or "iTunes is realy what we should be looking at as a shining example of desktop consumer software." I would buy an Apple if only I didn't have to become one of them.

more math ..

[thc4k]

here is some more advanced math for you: iTunes = Teh Suck.

Smart Shuffle might have something to do with it

[theurge14]

In the current Windows version of iTunes (6.0.2.23), in Preferences there is a tab for Playback. And in there is a section for Smart Shuffle.

The first control is a 3-setting slider for "more likely, random, less likely". The description below says "Smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album."

Below that are three radio boxes, labled Shuffle: ( ) Songs ( ) Albums ( ) Groupings.

Is it possible that this 100 scale rating system might be more fine grained to take these Smart Shuffle user settings into account? Perhaps that might be why it isn't simply the integers 0-5. /didnt rtfa

Time

[ataahdc]

Somebody has too much time on their hands...eh?

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, Ctrl-C belongs as the STOP command for Shell programs. The fact the Windows uses it for Copy is just plain wrong.

Not just 'news'

[weierstrass]

But 'science'??

Must only be interesting if

[Anonymous Coward]

introductory algebra is new to you. Sorry, it's not people who think this is boring that should be looking at Disney.com. It's people who think this is interesting that should be posting somewhere that's the Disney equivalent of Slashdot.

I don't use itunes, and while I realize many people do, this seems pretty mundane. It might be interesting to those who care - obviously there's some of you out there - but this hardly seems worthy of Slashdot. I'd expect something more hackerish along the lines of "NSA backdoor found in Windows". Math wise I'd expect something about a newer, better way to find prime numbers, or a new encryption algorithm. Not how cool it is that instead of 0-5, they use 0-100!!! And you can specify half a star. BAD ASS!

Just my useless, anonymous two cents.

Re:Must only be interesting if

[dsanfte]

How does it so inconvenience you to simply skip the boring stories? Do you refuse to read the newspaper because it has a Sports section?

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[jb.hl.com]

Done right? Pah.

Using iTunes to manage a decent sized music collection is like shooting yourself in the head with a gun that looks like a candy cane. Sure it looks nice, and it's really glossy on the surface, but at the end of the day you're still blowing your brains out.

The slowness of iTunes notwithstanding, the utter lack of any decent playlisting features, the ability to sync to 1 (one) music player, the pisspoor MP3 encoder included, the terrible UI which doesn't fit in with Windows and won't even let you change the UI font to something different, did I mention the slowness?

It's really, really awful. I always find it funny to hear people screaming about Windows Media Player being the devil, because it's a fucking paragon of virtue compared to iTunes (at least WMP's DRM scheme works with more than one audio player).

Basically the same...

[Otto]

You can do half star ratings in iTunes for Windows as well. Works exactly the same way.

Scripts to do it can be found here: http://ottodestruct.com/blog/category/geekery/prog rammery/

Negative towards iTunes?

[rodm13]

"that not only do non-whole, non-half values (e.g., 47) not increase the amount a song will play, but neither do the half-star ratings (with the exception of .5 star)."


I know this article is about DRM-filled software, but do we really have to be this negative towards it?

Re:Negative towards iTunes?

[StikyPad]

Without the negatives: Whole star and the initial 1/2 star ratings are the only values which affect play time.

In other words: Duh! Sekret variable settings have no effect.

Big woop

[vlad119]

How in the heck does a stupid story like this make it onto slashdot, let alone the science section, what crap!

47 IS the weirdest number...REALLY...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

that not only do non-whole, non-half values (e.g., 47)

47 really really IS the WEIRDEST number... Really. There's even a group dedicated to it:

The 47 Society

So TFA comes as no surprise...

RS

42 is the exception

[slashbob22]

If your song gets a rating of 42, you can expect to hear only that song while you ponder the meaning of life.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cyric, buddy, give it a rest. You've posted more tonight than most sane people do for a whole month. It's still Saturday night at a few places around the world, so go get your old wrinkled ass a whore or booze or something, this is very pathetic!

first discovered MP3 files back in the early 1990s

[iamhassi]

//RANT!
{
FTFA:
"I remember when I first discovered MP3 files back in the early 1990s..."

I call BS. From wikipedia:
--"July 7, 1994 the Fraunhofer Society released the first software MP3 encoder called l3enc."
--"In the first half of 1995 through the late 1990s, MP3 files began flourishing on the Internet.

so basically before mid-1994 there were no mp3s. There were other things (like mp2?) but mp3s really didnt exist since, duh, u kinda needed a encoder in order for mp3s to be created.

ok so this is minor and really has nothing to do with the article but i just hate it when you show someone some cool neat thing you found and they're all like "ya i discovered that back in forever ago" especially when it didnt even exist yet .

} //END RANT

mod me up or down i dont care i bleed karma

Re:first discovered MP3 files back in the early 19

[DA-MAN]

so basically before mid-1994 there were no mp3s. There were other things (like mp2?) but mp3s really didnt exist since, duh, u kinda needed a encoder in order for mp3s to be created.

Dude, he said "...MP3 files back in the early 1990s...". In case you didn't notice, 1994 is part of the early 90's, in that it's before 1995.

Not sure why you're bitching about this, it doesn't seem to be contradictory at all . . .

5 Stars Rating Systems are Poor Design

[ChristopherA]

If you read my article on the Rating Systems you'll see that 5 point rating systems are a poor way to do ratings. In our analysis, only 10% of raters use the bottom two star in a 5-point scale, and only 2% use the lowest rating of 1 star. The median of the 5-point scale is actually the fourth star, with a neat bell curve arranged around it. In my own personal use of iTunes, I've forced myself to be much more consistent and lower with my ratings. 1 star means that it has been rated, but in general I don't like it and don't play it. 2 stars means average, which means play it some of the time. 3 stars is above average, and play it more often, but I can get bored with these. 4 is good, and can basically listen to these regularly without getting tired. 5 stars are exemplars -- I try to find more songs like these.

Re:5 Stars Rating Systems are Poor Design

[ibennetch]

I think this is because people tend to think of a 5-point rating system as being 5 stars for love it and 0 for hate it -- where as if they hate a song, they probably don't even own it. Even "strongly dislike" which is what most people would figure as 1 or 2 stars, doesn't make the cut to be purchased for my music collection. I like your system, where 5 is exceptionally good and 2 is average; it's much more useful for this type of thing because the music that would typically get rated 0, 1, or 2 isn't even in one's music collection, so the whole rating system needs to compensate for that.

Re:5 Stars Rating Systems are Poor Design

[danigiri]

That's why I use the 5-star rating system in a different way.

In iTunes there is a boolean (checked/unchecked) that you can use as an extra binary digit.

Horrible or bad song: I thrash them
Not that good, but still a keeper (it's in a full album or something): unchecked
Regular: not rated but checked
From 1 to 5: from nice to exceptional

Actually, if a song is nice enough for me to take the seconds to perform the rating means it is worthy.

There goes your gaussian... yeah, I know my values would probably be classified as outliers, but the system works for me, so to Hell with statistics

Re:first discovered MP3 files back in the early 19

[daddyrief]

Didn't you hear? You can't claim wikipedia as a source!


...jk, i <3 wikipedia.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[itior]

So integrated is good if it comes from Apple, but horrible if it comes from Microsoft?

Re:first discovered MP3 files back in the early 19

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO 1994 counts as the mid 90s. I would hardly think discovering MP3s less than 6 months before the end of the first half of the 90s counts as early 90s.

Re:first discovered MP3 files back in the early 19

[Bing Tsher E]

He's bitching because he had to reach into wikipedia to back up his assertion, instead of citing anything from personal experience. In other words, he was likely listening to Barney sing back in the early 90's.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Bing Tsher E]

Is it an 'AppleEvent' when you stick a music CD into your Mac and have to bring it to a repair shop to get the CD to eject?

I ask, because:

1. I am not up on the latest Apple-Lingo.
2. For some reason this article isn't in apple.slashdot.org where it belongs.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Lars T.]

No, that's a Sony event.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Lars T.]

Twice as many sentences, certainly not more content. 1/2 Star for you.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[Lars T.]

Well, you can buy a Mac and stay the same (f)lamer you are.

To all its detractors...

[Errandboy of Doom]

1) iTunes doesn't play half my collection, because there's no ogg support. Winamp plays ogg, but it's got nothing for library management. Somehow, Songbird managed to pull off ogg support before they were even released, and its shooting for the basic skeleton of features iTunes provides as well.
2) Songbird helps you buy music from a variety of stores, rather than just one. I think eMusic is better than the iTunes Store, but even if it isn't, I don't want my car telling me where to buy gas; I don't want my music player telling me where to buy music.
3) If you're going on the web to look at media, going on the web with a media player makes some sense. Reading music blogs with Songbird feels a lot more sensible, you can stream recommended mp3s through a different pane, without leaving the page. It feels a lot more natural. Granted, this is one miniscule fraction of the things we do online, it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to use Songbird to check your Gmail account... except whatever advantages are achieved from not having to open a separate program if you're listening to music and just want to jump online to check something really fast.
4) It's still just a proof of concept. It's not finished, and there are no extensions for it yet. So the fact it doesn't stack up to iTunes yet is a non-starter. You want less bugs? Wait until it's even in beta. You want ratings? Maybe they'll be incorporated, maybe they'll be an extension. You want a smarter shuffle, one that shuffles by artist rather than by track, or one that "sticks" to a genre or tempo? Extensions. You want it to automatically download the mp3s off your favorite music blogs every day? Extensions. You want anything new in iTunes? Go whine about it to your preacher, because I've sent in my complaints to Apple, and Apple's not listening.

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[e4g4]

Yep, as an apple fanboy myself, I'm not big in to applescript. I've used it a couple of times with AppleScript Studio to write, in the space of about 15 minutes, gui apps that do things like randomize a list of names an email addresses to assign secret santas and send out emails with those assignments. It's real use is easy to write, easy to read, easy to edit scripts that someone whose never written a perl script can use and tweak. It is neither efficient nor elegant, but it's not supposed to be - it's just supposed to be easy.

Re:first discovered MP3 files back in the early 19

[blargbigfoot]

I hate it when someone finds something cool neat thing and then someone else attacks them on something totally irrelevant. You feel big now? Hope it helped your self esteem to reveal the dark fact that he in fact DIDN'T listen to mp3's in the early 1990's. I think you will successfully convince the jury with that one. Lets break out the torches and pitchforks and lay siege to his house. Or we could just be impressed with a pretty cool analysis of a software program and over look his poor estimation of when he started listening to MP3s.

Interesting data, but wrong analysis.

[toaster83]

I have to say that while the aim of the article is quite admirable, the author does a horrible job of analyzing the data he collects, and he completely misses an anomaly of interest.

His conclusion that "only for tracks rated 1-19" do ratings of finer granularity matter is bogus. Ignore figure 5 and look at every other figure in the article. It's not linear from 1-19 either. It shows the same step behavior as the rest of the graph. He mistook an anomalous edge case for some sort of liner relationship. The *actual* interesting piece of information that can be taken from the data collected is that, whether intentionally or not, the algorithm Apple uses has an odd (again, I don't say erroneous since it's possible that it's intentional) edge case. The play count difference between two songs where one has a rating one star higher is around 2000-2500. However, between no stars and one star, the rating difference is 3700. Without more information (and a Mac of my own to investigate myself), it's not clear what's going on. The author states that the 0-100 rating gets integer-divided by 20, which makes sense except that that's not what the data in the graph reflects since a rating of 0 yields a significantly different playcount from a rating of 1. In fact, neither a strict ceiling or floor explains the data generated, especially since the rating is discretized to a five-star rating.

Here's my point in summary. If iTunes integrally divides or floors the rating, then where does the extra step when the rating is between 1 and 19 incluseive come from?

I hate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Itunes. But I'll tell you what I don't hate, The spicy italian sandwich from Subway. 2 layers of salami and Pepperoni topped off with 4 slices of american cheese. Put a little mayo on there, some lettuce, tomatoes, and black olives, and you've almost got yourself a sandwich. Next, have them cover the sandwich in salt and pepper, then spray some oil and vinegar over the top, wrap it up and there's dinner. I think we can all give thanks for a sandwich that good. mmmmm mmmmm

Re:The beauty of AppleScript.

[dasdrewid]

You don't. Seriously. We're not all that bad. Black sheep and all that, you know...