Music: Smart Shuffle

I have used WinAmp and iTunes for music playback for quite a while, but one thing that seems to be lacking in both is a sort of smart shuffle. As a Communications major, I took a class or two dealing with radio broadcasting, specifically how radio stations program content. The concept is simple, there are a minimum of three levels or categories of music, high, medium, and low rotation. The names are fairly self explanatory. High rotation songs are the popular songs that you hear hourly on a music radio station. Medium and low rotation songs are played with less frequency than the songs on high rotation, though they maybe songs by artists also in the high rotation category. Medium and low rotation are also where the songs that will become popular generally start out. Think of it as a rankings chart with the popular songs being played hourly and the songs near the bottom played perhaps every two or three hours.

Now, both WinAmp and iTunes us the ID3 tags for music, which includes a "rating" option from zero to five. People can rate their own music and then construct playlists that play their favorite songs. This is all well and good, but the problem with constructing a playlist of favorites is that it only plays the songs rated as favorites and ignores tracks that do not yet have a rating, such as new music. A person will never hear any of their other songs if they are only playing their favorite music, unless they manually switch to a different playlist or randomly shuffle their entire music library.

The problem that I have with shuffle is there is no way to control the songs that are played, because it is random. There are settings that can have shuffle choose songs randomly by artist, album, or group, as in iTunes, but it is still lacking.

I want a shuffle that plays my higher rated songs more often, while still playing songs randomly from my entire library. The reason is I like to listen to my favorite music, who doesn't? But I also want to listen to new music that I have added to my library or that I may not have rated or listened to yet. This kind of shuffle is why I think people enjoy listening to the radio, because there will be favorites mixed with new music that they may never have heard before but will enjoy.

With a smart shuffle, a song's rating would determine how often the song is played, or how likely the song would be chosen to be played. It would allow people to discover new favorites in their library that they might never have otherwise listened to, because any song could still be played from the library. This would also allow people to change musical moods gradually and naturally, by re-rating songs and thus altering how often those songs are played.

I would love to know if what I have described, or attempted to describe, actually exists, since I haven't tried too hard to locate the feature in iTunes or WinAmp. I was able to locate some WinAmp plugins that do almost what I describe, but they seem bloated and designed more for internet radio casts than casual listening.