Let me explain. There’s this online music player called Pandora, which is supposed to “read your mind” and play music that you would like. You start off by giving it the name of an artist or song that you like, and it will play things that it deems “similar.” The people behind Pandora analyzed a whole bunch of songs and assigned traits to them using a lot of pretentious musical terms, like “subtle syncopation” and “minor key harmonic tonalities”. (They call this the “Music Genome Project.”) The player uses these traits and builds a playlist of other songs or artists that share the same properties.

I’m sure that the system works well, but for some reason, I just don’t like most of the stuff it plays. I give it some of my favourites like Radiohead and Björk, and it just starts playing absolute crap. The common traits are definitely there, but I end up not really enjoying the playlist it generates.

It could be that I’m just picky, but I think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. It’s very difficult to quantify the elements that make you like or dislike music. For example, you might like a particular song for its repetitive beat, but another song with a repetitive beat might drive you nuts. Pandora is a noble effort, and I’m sure many people will like it, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work for me.

I was catching up on some Ebert & Roeper shows via their podcast… A couple weeks ago, they reviewed Into the Blue. Richard Roeper gave it a thumbs down for all the expected reasons: ridiculous plot, mindless action scenes, etc. Ebert, on the other hand, gave it a thumbs up, to Roeper’s astonishment. He began his justification of his recommendation thusly (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Jessica Alba is a pretty girl. She’s pretty in this movie. So that’s a thumbs up.”

Can’t argue with that, Roger Ebert. Of course, he tried to give other reasons for liking the movie, but it was altogether unconvincing. I propose that Ebert & Roeper introduce a “thumb down, penis up” rating for just this purpose.

I have never been a big fan of Apple. Their philosophy of computer-as-appliance has always struck me as a bit repulsive. It’s easy to dislike Microsoft (and I do) for keeping everything closed and proprietary, but in some ways Apple is even worse. At least with a Windows PC, you can open the thing up and add and remove parts yourself.

Just look at the iPod, for example. The fact that it uses a non-standard connector to interface with the PC means that there are a whole bunch of products (e.g. USB cables) that you can’t use with the iPod, and also that there are a whole bunch of iPod-specific products that don’t work with anything else.

Yeah, but that means the good Apple engineers can optimize for the hardware and make it work really fast…

Uh… but it’s harmful to consumers when these incompatibilities arise… it takes away their choices…

That’s okay, if everybody uses an iPod, then there won’t be any incompatibilities… and it’ll be really easy to find iPod-compatible products because all the manufacturers will be on the iPod bandwagon…

But… but… Apple is an evil corporation… they’re trying to take over the world!

Just look at this iPod… it’s so shiny and pretty… and cute..

NOOOOO!!!!!

Apple rulzzzzz!!!

As promised, I did a bit of research to find out what it would take to get LongPlayer to work together with amaroK. It turns out that amaroK supports a DCOP interface. DCOP is a protocol shared by KDE applications that allows you to control them via the command line. For example, you can add songs to the amaroK playlist by executing the following shell command:

dcop amarok playlist addMedia  

It’s definitely possible to modify LongPlayer to use these DCOP commands to control amaroK, instead of performing the equivalent operations with XMMS. And it’s probably not even difficult.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), while I was looking into this, I realized that everything I liked about amaroK were just gimmicks (e.g. lyrics lookup, album cover images). After initially being impressed with all these bells and whistles, I came to see that there’s ultimately no real usefulness to any of it. On the other hand, LongPlayer really does perform a useful function, and changes the user’s experience.

Therefore, I declare the LongPlayer/XMMS combination to be the winner of this little competition. Somewhat anti-climactic, but I’m glad it turned out this way… saves me the trouble of actually going through with modifying LongPlayer code.

(Aside: I think I learned a bit about myself through this little “ordeal.” I may at first be impressed by superficial things, but I eventually tend to gravitate towards a more practical ideal. In general, this probably does describe my general outlook on things. So, there you go: self-discovery through software.)

I’ve arrived at a bit of a crossroads concerning audio player software, and which one to use. I have a moderately large collection of music on my computer, and dumping everything onto a playlist and shuffling isn’t quite good enough for me.

I’ve narrowed it down to two candidates:

XMMS + LongPlayer

XMMS is pretty much the standard audio player on Linux (it’s basically a clone of Winamp). However, its shuffle functionality (as with most audio players) is pretty rudimentary. In particular, it is susceptible to the so-called birthday paradox. I have no desire to start explaining probability theory here, but essentially, this means that it does not take long for the same song to be played twice, which quickly becomes annoying.

LongPlayer is a program that runs alongside XMMS (it also works with Winamp on Windows, and iTunes on MacOS), which basically continually populates your playlist queue with “random” songs. It is not completely random, because that would lead to the birthday paradox; instead, it tries to play the songs in such a way as to maximize the average time between playing the same song twice. Also, it supports a rating system which causes the higher-rated songs to be played more often.

The combination of XMMS and LongPlayer does a very good job of randomizing my playlist. On average, it takes about 4 weeks for a song to be played again (according to LongPlayer’s statistics).

amaroK

amaroK takes a completely different approach. This is the most full-featured music player I’ve seen. It places a strong emphasis on organizing a collection of music, and can group your tracks based on genre, artist, year, etc. It also uses this information to make suggestions as you’re playing something; for example, it gives you a list of albums by the same artist, and other artists of a similar genre.

I also like the fact that amaroK downloads album covers from Amazon.com and displays them as you’re playing tracks. It even displays lyrics for the currently playing song. (How this works, I don’t know—I should take a look at the source code.) Yes, I know that these are kind of frivolous features, but it gives the app a professional, polished feel.

So, here’s the dilemma. I really like the full-featuredness of amaroK, but its shuffling mechanism is pretty basic. There is a rating mechanism, but it doesn’t seem to obviously affect the selection of tracks. Now, amaroK is a larger project than LongPlayer, so it is likely that future updates will have an improved shuffling function. In fact, many people have requested a smarter shuffle on the amaroK forums.

The “best-of-both-worlds” solution would be if LongPlayer could interface with amaroK and feed songs into the amaroK playlist. I believe that this should be possible, because both apps are open-source. If I have time, I’ll try to find out more about this… (to be continued…)

This is one of my favourite passages from George Carlin’s newest book, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?:

If someone says, “Have a nice weekend,” I never say, “You too.” Because I never know if, perhaps, by the time the weekend rolls around, I will have other plans for that person. Come Friday, I may wish to have them slain.

A lot of Carlin’s humour has to do with language, and in particular, the stuff that people say so much that it becomes automatic and loses meaning. I know I’ve had the “Have a nice weekend”/“You too” exchange many times, and every time it happens, I kick myself for being so conformist. The next time someone says to me, “Have a nice weekend,” I will reply, “Fuck that, I plan to wallow in misery and self-loathing all weekend.” Thank you, George Carlin.

So there’s this new “flavour” of Tylenol called Tylenol “Cool Burst”. You know what it is? It’s minty Tylenol. Minty! Tylenol!!

Why is this even necessary? The ideas of pills is that you swallow them. Do they really want people to pop in a couple of Tylenols and start sucking on them like candy? “Mmm… minty… refreshing… maybe I’ll have 10 more.”

I’m getting pretty tired of this notion that everything has to be minty. The only things that should be minty are mouthwash, breath drops, toothpaste and other oral hygiene products. I don’t want to eat it, I don’t want to drink it, I don’t want to wash my hair with it. Just take your mint and keep it to yourself, thank you.

(This is a sequel to another post)

It’s crap.

Yesterday I washed my hair with this newfangled Head & Shoulders shampoo called “Refresh”. It’s basically shampoo with mint, and it supposedly creates a refreshing, “wake-me-up” feeling. To me, it felt like washing my hair with Vicks VapoRub while eating a Halls and brushing my teeth at the same time. I was coughing and sputtering and my eyes were stinging… a generally unpleasant experience.

I can just picture the marketing people who came up with this..

Marketing Executive #1: “I’ve got an idea… minty shampoo.”

Marketing Executive #2: “Excellent idea!”

Marketing Executive #1: “Yes… because everything minty is good!”

Marketing Executive #2: “Wait… didn’t you also invent Sprite Ice?”

What’s next, Bacon Double McMinty with Cheese?

The first is Google Suggest, which is basically a server-side AutoComplete feature. As you type a search query, it pops up a list of commonly searched keywords which match what you’ve already typed. Amazingly, when you type “por”, the first thing in the list is “porsche”, instead of… well, you know.

Another recently added Google feature is the ability to use POP to access GMail. I’m not sure exactly when they started doing this, but I noticed it a few days ago. Basically, this allows you to read GMail with an e-mail client (like Thunderbird or—God forbid—Outlook Express), instead of logging on to the webpage.

I’m surprised that Google actually decided to do this, because I assumed that most of the revenue generated from GMail is from the ads that they display on the webpage. By using POP to access your account, you effectively circumvent the need to use the web interface, thus avoiding the ads altogether. You have to wonder what Google has to gain from this, but I’m glad that they’re willing to make sacrifices to provide innovative services.