Thursday, April 07, 2005

Running to Monte Carlo

So I just installed this Audioscrobbler plugin to my media player (WinAmp) on a couple of the machines I use. Basically, every time a song crosses 50%, it gets logged to my Audioscrobbler profile where there's lots of things that can be done. The simplest thing to do is to see what the last 10 songs I've listened to are and to see what are the artists I listen to the most.

Now, I usually put WinAmp on shuffle and just let it pick songs for me. However, if I don't like its choices, I skip them and move on to the next choice. After I run through a bunch of songs, I look at my profile and see what I've been listening to, and you know what? I usually learn something.

I don't know if you can tell anything about someone by the music they listen to, but let's assume for fun that you can. The combination of WinAmp's shuffle and Audioscrobbler is kinda like running Monte Carlo runs on me. (or, from a systems point of view, running white noise through a linear system to discover its transfer function)

So I think Audioscrobbler will have a better picture of my musical preferences than anything I could come up with myself.

HOWEVER, there are downsides. I mean, if I leave WinAmp on when I leave the room, it'll play music, even the music I don't want to hear at the time. However, because I have the music in the first place means that I'd be willing to listen to it SOMETIME. Additionally, because I know Audioscrobbler is "watching" then I tend to try to populate my Audioscrobbler profile... and I'm not sure I'm being honest with myself, ya' know?

So there's that.

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