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| iPod Obedience Training | | Date Created: Jan 07, 2006, 10:00 AM |
 Dr. Reptile can find music related stuff in the most unlikely places. This time it was in Discover magazine in the Emerging Technology section. There's an article by Steven Johnson called, "iPod Obedience Training -- Hey, Steve Jobs: How about a machine that knows some verbs?" It's not online but you can find the author's blog here.
The article was interesting to Dr. Reptile because he's still trying to figure out how to be a critic and communicate to listeners. (You recall there are three groups of people as regards music -- musicians, listeners, and critics). One of the ways you can tell you're a critic is if you can't deal with iPod Shuffle. Apparently Mr. Johnson doesn't like the plain old shuffle either and he's a technology critic.
The problem is in increasing the intelligence of computer chips as we move from CD's and playlists determined by record companies. The trend is (in some ways back) to singles. But how to tell your iPod which to play (or Amazon which things you're really interested in)? Johnson wants to have a way to tell the iPod not to play that song in the shuffle again and also to be able to play a song without increasing its use because you played it.
Thus he needs an iPod Shuffle and other such programs a command for "don't ever suggest this again" and for "pay no attention to what I'm doing". In other words, he needs a "remove" and an "ignore" button. He relates this to other sorts of technology such as TiVo and web browsers. He even mentions a couple of songs that got shuffled in and pushed him over the edge, Duran Duran's "Girls On Film" and Rush's "Tom Sawyer". I see his point.
Dr. Reptile doesn't like shuffle and doesn't use it. Random play is useful for such things as a large group of CD's of artist's greatest hits so you don't have to listen to the same sequence (and particularly when you're in the operating room and can't hit the skip button easily). But CD's have (or should have) a sequence built in, and shuffle as it's done on an iPod Shuffle makes no sense to a critic. There should be some sense to why one song is played after another. Random is too random. This is one of the problems with modern FM radio.
So Dr. Reptile programs in his own playlist. This is usually as a theme or by artist in a collection chosen by Dr. Reptile. Another option, perhaps, would be by musical genre or type. For this, check out Pandora. More on this later. In the meantime, Dr. Reptile agrees with Steven Johnson but not for the same reasons. If you like an iPod to shuffle all your songs for you, then you're a listener and not a critic. But that's okay...
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