When I heard about The Filter I thought it sounded fantastic. An application that integrates with your iTunes and iPod to creates your playlists for you.
Sounds like the answer to all my dreams. Particularly seeing as I’m on my third iPod in 18 months and I can’t bothered to spend hours creating playlists if they give up the ghost halfway through the year. And for the record, I’m yet to meet a genius or be given an alcoholic drink to numb the pain at Apple’s so called ‘genius bar’.
Essentially The Filter allows you to pick a broad criteria to be analysed, such as by track or by genre. You then click on a track on your iTunes or you iPod, click on ‘create playlist’ and hey presto, it generates a play list of similar tracks directly into your library. The problem is they aren’t that similar.
I’m off on my hols soon so I thought I would create a nice lazy, summery playlist. So I selected Jack Johnson and let it create a list of 30 similar songs from my 5,000 strong library.
It’s a bloody good job I checked because there I would have been, chilling out, lying on my sunbed, dozing off, listening to a bit of JJ. When I would have been awoken by the dulcet tones of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones singing London’s Calling.
To be honest I think it’s because of the inaccurate tags iTunes puts on the tracks. Jose Gonzalez is alternative punk apparently. So until I can be arsed to go through and change the genres it won’t get used I’m afraid. It’s almost there though.
Hi there,
Thanks for posting about The Filter – sorry you’ve had a bit of a lame playlist. The Filter actually doesn’t use just your own genre tags, the software uses AMG genre tags as well as our own collaborative filtering and baysian analysis. There are a couple of reasons why you may have got a lame playlists.
Firstly, when you start up The FIlter for the first time the software does a quick scan of your music library and then does a longer background check. Until this background check is complete you won’t get 100% great playlists – although the playlists should still be good.
The other thing is that you might want to experiment with picking more than one ‘seed’ artists. I find that particularly with popular artists it is best to pick three songs and then ask it to create a playlist.
Anyway – hope you persevere with The Filter,
Bernie
TheFilter.com
I’m impressed with the response Bernie. I’ll be sure to give it another go and let you know how I get on.
dude – try last.fm….
tho’ nice response from The Filter
although on re-reading it’s clearly slightly different
)
lol. Yep It’s a bit different. Last FM rocks.
Bernie – i’ve tried your tips and it is a bit better.