I talked before about liking the iTunes genius playlist generator. It's a step in the right direction, but it is still kind of unwieldy when it comes to making music lists. Sometimes, the exact same group of music is always played together all the time and that doesn't add much musical variety to the playlists generated. I would like playlists automatically generated for whatever the occasion that I am feeling like. Something fast? Acoustic? Folk? Whatever?
The interesting thing is that music selection can be sort of dealt with using a markov chain kind of analysis. The computations might be really intensive since the transition matrix does tend to get really big, but it is a really simple "dumb" way of figuring out what kind of music that should be played together without directly analyzing the content of the music itself.
The point about the Genius playlist generator is that you send all your music data to apple, where it sorts through the ID tags of the music you have and then generates some kind of connection tree back for your iPod and then playlists are automatically generated based on that data. There are several problems with this since not all music might be listed in their database, thus certain songs will be forever left out of your automatically generated music mix. The other problem is since that I am on a linux based machine, I can't use iTunes and I don't want to use iTunes through a virtual machine because it is slow.
The open source music playlist generators right now are OK, but I still find them lacking a little still. I've started using a plug in for Banshee that does the playlist generation. I just use an initial song for the things to start. Sometimes it is tricky to pick something and I don't really like that. If I could pick from a mood or a genre, that would be nice.
There is room for improvement here and it might be an interesting problem to work on.
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