Today,
I'm listening to my personal iTunes collection. When I do
this I usually I'll pick an artist and shuffle play through the
songs. This does get a little boring. However,
shuffling through an artist is much better than trying to shuffle play
my whole collection which tends to bring up my kid's music (high school
musical anyone?) more often than I'd like. Today, instead of using
shuffle play, I'm using The Filter to give me playlists. The Filter will generate playlists for you based upon a selection of seed songs. I commented
the other day how poorly The Filter seemed to do when recommending
music from the whole iTunes store, but so far today it has done a very
good job of giving me a decent playlist drawn from my own collection
based upon a seed song or two.
I like the idea of
providing tools to help people better explore their personal
collections. Without these tools are iPods are destined become
music graveyards - the place music goes to die. So far, with The
Filter, I'm listening to lots of music that is in my personal collection
that I have not listened to ever - and I haven't had to risk iPod
whiplash that comes with shuffle play.