What is it about the need to put things in a particular way? What is it that drives us to achieve order? In this series, I probably won’t attempt to answer these questions but I’ll look at some examples and ask some more questions.
First up, how do you order your CD collection? If you look at a given set of CDs in someones house they have order. This has a very obvious purpose: lookup. If CDs aren’t in a fairly predictable order, finding something becomes tricky.
Originally, I had a single rack for my CDs. Alphabetically ordered by artist, sub-ordered by release. The standard method. Easy look-up, and can listen to an artist progressively. This was fine until multiple racks were necessary to accomodate my growing collection. At a rack change, should one start with a new letter or overflow? Also, adding new CDS got to be a problem. Everything after the position had to be moved down somewhat. If we assume an even spread of artists over letters, that’s half of your collection moving every time. Not fun.
The first and most naive solution is to place new CDS into a separate pile and then periodically insert them all. This takes less time over all, but is a royal pain in the arse and is the sort of thing that is procrastinated over endlessly.
Another solution is to introduce buffering space after each letter. This means that only CDs in the section in question need to be moved. This has two problems. Firstly, slack space. No-one likes having empty slots everywhere. Secondly, it still needs a periodic move around. Not perfect, but getting better.
For some reason, I then started separating by genre. One rack had CDs from a particular (and very broad genre) while a different rack would contain another. This did make finding CDs much quicker.
For a good while now, they’ve been arranged by association. The racks form an essentially 2D space (depth doesn’t really matter), and CDS are placed into the racking such that bands are grouped with bands that are somehow connected. These connections are loose. Some sound similar, others supported each other, some just seem right. This works remarkably well for me. Knowing where the single band used to form the origin are, I can place my hand onto the racks within 2 CDs of the one I was looking for (which itself is easily within eye range). It also makes mood based browsing exceptionally easy, just pick an area and move. CD insertion also seems to work fairly well as bands tend to release albums every 2 years and the local space around them changes fairly well.
Problems? Periodic changes are needed (less frequently I find, because finding new music tends to branch outward) and are a pain. Also, some people who approached particular bands from different routes from me find it difficult to pick anything out.
Obsessive? Perhaps. Just helps to have an order that works for me. Anyone got any better ideas?
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When I kept my CDs in some semblance of order, it was in the same manner as your original scheme. Now, I just pile them into boxes in any old order: shameful, I know, but when every track is loaded on my computer, I don’t need easy access to the original media. (What I want but don’t yet have is an elegant folksonomical tagging mechanism for the media library… any suggestions?)
I like the 2-D arrangement idea though. The algorithmicist (read: geek) in me would be intrigued to know if there could be some automatic way of determining an optimum layout, or if this is a completely intractable problem. (My thinking involves conditional probability: what is the probability that you’d listen to another artist, given that you had just listened to a particular artist. Where the probability is high, the two artists should maybe be close together. Of course, this assumes that you only listen to music of the same genre at one sitting. Still, a more proficient AI practitioner than me could probably come up with something.)
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Tagging mechanism? Why, you could add tags to the comment section of the MP3 and then let the WinAmp 5 media library and its querying functions deal with the rest.
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And I could also do that in iTunes, but it seems that neither gives me the wherewithal to perform non-search operations on the tags. So my dreams of an MP3 zeitgeist, for example, go unfulfilled. Or a playlist, generated based on tags, that takes me on a path from twee to, umm, hardcore. Or a million different graph-drawing possibilities.
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What specific non-search operations do you mean?
Winamp at least provides a healthy plugin architecture from which your wishes could be fulfilled.
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Heh, you know that my preference is for hand-waving abstractions over specific operations. (Many of these would be predicated on a more-complete listener history, which records every individual listen, and—perhaps—track-skip) Let’s see:
- Standard folksonomical zeitgeist display, parameterised by time period (e.g. “last 7 days” or “between 2100 and 0000″).
- Impressionistic playlist generation. Either graph-based, as suggested in my previous comment, or something more novel. My very vague idea for this would be a 2-d region (the dimensions being time and probability) on which it would be possible to “paint” tags using tools familiar to users of every paint package since MacPaint. Each tag that participates explicitly in the playlist would be represented by a colour (along with complete randomness, which would be transparent). The playlist could then be generated with the probability of a tag being chosen at any one time being equal to the proportion of pixels that are set to that tag’s colour at that point on the time axis. I could describe this more intuitively, but it would require images.
- Collaborative tagging. Services like AudioScrobbler appeal to me for the aggregation possibilities. Currently, it makes recommendations based on the similarity between your listening habits and those of others: the use of tags could aid this. Say, for example, that you were a fan of Blur in the mid-1990s. Then the listening habits of someone who listens to a lot of Blur that is tagged with
britpopwould carry more weight than those of someone who listens to 13 on repeat (tagged withinaccessible). The collaborative aspects of such a scheme interest me, with the possibility that they would save users from having to enter their own tags for bands or songs (though there would be some need for the ability to explicity delete a collaborative tag, if, for example, you didn’t believe that The Darkness areaces).
Just a few ideas, based on a couple of minutes’ thought. I dare say that more imaginative uses could come to the fore if it were possible.
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The first and last are certainly possible with Winamp 5 (the latter would have to be backed by some form of web service, I would imagine.) The second one I’m not sure I completely understand, but imagine it would be possible with a lot of work.
Also, no underhand knocking of 13, Blur’s best album to date.
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