Playlist Assist for iTunes

Playlist Assist improves the Party Shuffle feature of Apple iTunes for Windows. Rather than selecting upcoming songs uniformly at random, Playlist Assist identifies and suggests songs in your library that are similar to those already in the playlist. Here's how it works:

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Playlist Assist makes it easy to build a playlist starting with just a few "seed" tracks. You can use it on both Party Shuffle and regular playlists. As you accept and decline songs, a simple machine learning algorithm identifies what the songs you've accepted have in common, and suggests similar tracks. The suggestion algorithm considers the metadata stored with each track and also information that iTunes records about your listening habits. It works best if you are a long-time iPod+iTunes user with some playlists already set up.

The program runs on your computer and transmits no information of any kind anywhere else, ever.

The current version of Playlist Assist is a sort of awkward, separate add-on program for iTunes. In the future, I'll integrate it more closely with the application; for now, I'm interested in getting feedback on how well the suggestion algorithm works. So please let me know how it works for you.

System Requirements: To use Playlist Assist, you must have a recent version of Apple iTunes for Windows (sorry, there is no Mac version yet). You also need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed; it is likely that you already have it, but if the installation fails for this reason, then it is available as an Optional Software Update from Microsoft Update.

Step-by-step

1. Open iTunes and add a few songs to Party Shuffle. Four or five is usually plenty to start with. Delete other songs that aren't part of what you're looking for, since these would throw the program off. Similarly, you should set it to show zero "upcoming songs".
2. Open Playlist Assist with Start > Programs > Playlist Assist for iTunes. The program will open your Party Shuffle and present suggestions for similar songs.
3. Mark the checkbox next to the suggested songs that you want to hear, if any.
4. Press the Add button to add these to the playlist. (The button says "More" if you didn't like any of the suggestions.)
5. The program adds the checked songs to the playlist and presents new suggestions; continue as long as you want.

You can also use Playlist Assist on any user-created playlist; just choose the one you want as the "Seed Playlist". When you select a different seed playlist and add songs, the songs are added to the seed playlist, not Party Shuffle.

If you add new songs or playlists to your library, you have to press "Reload iTunes Library" to see them, which takes a few moments. Sorry about this.

Copyright © 1999-2007 by Mike Lin. All Rights Reserved.