So, Apple has a new OS version coming out for the iFeely products, and i see that there's a number of improvements being offered. i'm sure they're all very nice and potentially something that will make even more people paint themselves black and dance to Indie music.
Sadly, they won't include my personal wish, something that was supposed to be in the first round, nay the very first MP3 player created, yet still, somehow, manages to elude the capabilities current players.
According to my GPS, this past weekend when i drove down to San Diego, i spent 21 hours in the car. That's a mighty long time, but since my player allegedly has 3.6 days worth of music on it, something that shouldn't be a major concern.
In addition, said music player has this feature called "smart playlists" which allegedly allow me to do clever things like say "Don't play a song that's been played in the past 4 months" (which you'll note is far beyond the number of songs available). Considering said music displays to the minute the last time a track was played, and has the horsepower to drive 3D games, one would believe that crafting a list of songs that meet that simple criteria would be child's play.
Apparently, it's akin to finding the Higgs Boson particle because i can attest to hearing a goodly number of the same f'ing songs during those 21 hours.
Am i angry at evil Uncle Steve for lying to me about the capabilities of his device? Only a bit, since this, or a subset has been true for every damn device i've owned. None, and i do mean None, of these devices have managed to master the concept of "Play each track available once, in a random order" even though each of these devices reportedly possessed that ability. The iPod merely adds the additional pain point of being able to craft a carefully constructed, deep rule that is completely ignored by the device, but then, this is Apple and i've learned that they truly understand the concept of electronic sadism.
Still, here i sit looking at the contents of my player and i see play counts of certain tracks in the double digits while there are others that remain "unplayed". Yeppers, there's some fine iPod developer that really grasps the concept of randomized set reduction. Perhaps someone ought to port sqlite to the iphone just so that i can run a simple query like
select track,random() as r from music_database where last_played > (now - month*4) order by r
My bet is that AppStore rejects it because there's already a playlist manager that's horribly broken and because they're right bastards.
Still, there's the dream that the next OS version actually fixes this problem that's existed pretty much the last decade.
Chances are, though, it'll probably just get worse.
The iPod is indeed capable of this, provided you don't do a few things. One being that it appears to only consider a song "played" if it reaches the end (otherwise it's considered "skipped"). The other is that if you sync on multiple computers or if you use itunes to change elements about the song (e.g. ratings or some such) it also may decide to reset the last played time of the song.
urgh, but a reasonably livable urgh.
