Schinckel.net

I recently performed an experiment to examine how iTunes handles 0-100 ratings - the result was “Not very well.” Something made me repeat the experiment, but this time with just tracks rated 0,10,20,…,90,100. That is, no stars, half a star, one star, and so on. For those playing at home: I just used a Smart Playlist where name contains 0, and used the procedure in the previous linked post. Here is a graph showing the results. I’ve annotated it in a couple of places. The first thing to notice is that the yellow line shows the relative frequency of tracks played with whole star ratings, excepting no stars. As expected, this is a linear relationship. The interesting thing is that the zero-rated track does not lie on this line. Instead, the half-star track does. This becomes even more interesting, when considering this: one-half star is the only one where the frequency differs from the rounded down full star rating. The moral of this story: rate your songs as 0-5 stars, or ½-star only. Don’t bother about the other values…

From the comments to the hint about how to find out the serial number of the last connected iPod, I came across the following CLI/Terminal command. defaults read com.apple.iPod The program will then provide various information, such as this one: “Use Count” = 143; It also shows the date the iPod(s) was/were last connected. I’d forgotten about the 40Gb iPod I bought from OfficeWorks, before getting it home and finding out it was an older one, still full of music (and in a new box, meaning someone had bought a new one, and returned the old one…). I returned it the next day, but here are it’s details:

000A2700026661B2 = {
            Connected = 2004-10-09 10:42:14 +0930; 
            "Firmware Version" = 307; 
            ID = 000A2700026661B2; 
            "Serial Number" = JQ410859PNU; 
            "Software Version" = 35684352; 
            "Use Count" = 9; 
        };

I didn’t realise it was quite that long ago… September 10th 2004. By the way, a Google of that Serial Number returns no hits. Maybe I should report it stolen…

Split Screen Sadness • John Mayer • Heavier Things ★

Brandon: As if there weren’t already enough reasons to laugh at Nickelback I started downloading this, just for fun. And then listened to it when there was about 750k downloaded. I could not believe just how similar these two songs are. The drums play the same beat. The guitar riffs are pretty similar too. And then the heavy part starts. And it’s at exactly the same time. Does Nickelback have a formula for creating their songs? I have to finish downloading this, it’s just too good. (And I wonder if the person who originally mashed them up is a fan…?)

Love Generation [Club Mix] • Bob Sinclair • Chillout Sessions 8 ★★

The world’s largest restaurant chain said Thursday it had begun trialing a new scheme in Britain whereby two people from the same family who worked at the same branch could cover each other’s shifts without giving any prior notice.

All your family are belong to us. Hey, hang on one second:

McDonald’s said the first users of the new “Family Contract,” which it believes to be unique in Britain, were two sets of twins.

What’s wrong with them just lying as to which one they are? Who needs new contracts for that?

Boing Boing: Drunken gluttons order and eat 100-patty hamburger Man, Boing-Boing gets the best news.

I’m most of the way through the abridged version of the Da Vinci Code, as read by Jeff Harding. I think I’ve come across a Big Plot Flawâ„¢, but be aware that this post contains a plot spoiler.

Now, gazing up at the spires of Rosslyn… • Dan Brown • The Da Vinci Code

Apparently, Teabing is The Teacher. He seems to have been the driving force behind the murder of the Grand Master, and the Senechals. However, there are two issues here: how did he get out of the back of the car, and how come Remy did not recognise him at their meetings? Or maybe I’m missing something here? Time to Google this… • Yup. Wikipedia shows that Teabing is the Teacher. But no mention of how he got out of the back of the car, nor how Remy did not recognise him. In fact, it says they are in cahoots. Yet Remy was approached by the Teacher to spy on Teabing. I don’t get this…perhaps this is dealt with better in the full text.

Everybody Hurts • R.E.M. • Automatic For The People

Boing Boing: How actors remember their lines This is quite an interesting one:

According to the researchers, the secret of actors’ memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words’ meaning – the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them – as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.

I think this is important because I know when memorising song words, I do exactly the same thing. How do I know this? I often sing the wrong words, that have the same or a similar meaning. For instance, well I can’t think of anything right now, but I do it all of the time.

F e M a l e d i c t i o n s That’s whay I like. Anatomically correct heart-shaped soap. How romantic:

From OmniNerd: Playing Favourites, I decided to run my own version of the experiment that compares how often songs with different ratings get played by iTunes. The difference with my experiment is that it has 101 tracks, each with a different rating (0, 1, …, 99, 100). To start with, I created a new user, so I wouldn’t have to muck around with my own iTunes library. I recorded a short empty track with Sound Studio. That is, I started the application, pressed Record, then Stop, and saved this. Then, I imported this track into iTunes, and made it so it was only 0.01 seconds in length (use Info, Options, Stop Time). This will make the experiment much faster than the previous one, which had 1 second tracks. I’m not that concerned it’s an AIFF, as I made this script to create the 101 empty tracks, as AAC or MP3:

    tell application "iTunes"
    	set i to 0
    	set base to first item of selection
    	repeat 101 times
    		set trk to first item of (convert base)
    		set name of trk to i
    		set rating of trk to i
    		set i to i + 1
    	end repeat
    end tell

This will duplicate the selected track (or the first track of the selection, if you have more than one) 101 times. It will then give a name to each of these, 0-100, and assign the same rating as the name. Since doing this also seemed to play the tracks once, I used the following script to reset the play count. The bonus is that it can be used to reset the play counts and run the experiment again, with different parameters.

    tell application "iTunes"
    	repeat with trk in selection
    		set played count of trk to 0
    	end repeat
    end tell

It’s now time to run the experiment. I set the Party Shuffle to use the Library, and to play higher rated songs more often. Then I clicked play, and went away for about 12 hours. • When I came back, I could see what the data was starting to look like, but I grabbed the data using this script anyway:

    tell application "iTunes"
    	set theData to {}
    	repeat with trk in selection
    		set theRating to name of trk
    		set theCount to played count of trk
    		set thisData to {theRating, theCount}
    		copy thisData to the end of theData
    	end repeat
    end tell
    
    get theData
    
    tell application "TextEdit"
    	set theDoc to make new document
    	repeat with thisData in theData
    		set text of theDoc to text of theDoc & (first item of thisData) & "," & (second item of thisData) & return
    	end repeat
    end tell

Then, I saved this file as a CSV file, and imported it into Excel, which when plotted, gives the following graph: To me, the results look pretty clear. iTunes does not take into account the actual rating, only the star value. Even the new half-stars aren’t notably different. I’ll continue to run the experiment, and put up another post later. I may change some things, and rerun the original experiment, just to confirm it, although my results seem to do this already.

I love to browse bookshops. Back in the day, when I had money, I always bought at least one book. Now, I spend more time at libraries and second-hand bookshops. On Saturday, as we tried to avoid the heat, we went to the movies at Marion Shopping Centre. We saw Mrs. Henderson Presents…, but more on that later. We ate at Shenannigans, but more on that later. We had a coffee at Coffee Club, and I won’t elaborate on that.

However, after all of this, we still had a little time free, so we went into Dymocks. I tend to looks briefly at the specials, and then head over to the Popular Science and Non-Fiction sections. After browsing for a little while, I came across a collection of the Onion. I read a bit of it, and took it over to show Jaq, as there was something funny on the front cover. I think it was:

US Military clears A-Team of all charges

I used to love that show. Anyway, back onto the story. After flicking through it for a few minutes, I returned to the shelf I grabbed it from. And imagine my surprise in what section that was: Now seriously, Dymocks. It doesn’t take a very long read of the Onion to realise that it’s not Non-Fiction.