Watterson

First, if the discussion on this has moved locations can anybody provide a link? There hasn't been much Ross interaction here for a while but he still seems very interested in the topic, so he must be discussing it somewhere, just maybe not on the forums? But second, upon watching the Great Berate interview, something clicked with this issue that might help potential solutions -- Sorting songs into categories seems to be less the issue at hand, and playback seems to be what he's after, largely. With this reframe my personal solutions differ and deepen. For instance, third: My new vision of what he's after is a program where you can manually sort sound files by mood/purpose, and tag them with tags like low/medium/high tempo, futuristic synth/retro synth/party synth, lyrics/no lyrics, etc. I'll explain further, but here's a sample video: So you click the umbrella mood/purpose, such as 'relaxing' and the program creates subgroups based on the tags (whose weight might need manual tuning, but likely you'd only need to manually tune a small number of important tags, like weighing tempo higher than the rest), by grouping things that are very close together, leaving files that aren't close enough to an established subgroup adrift between the subgroups, and creating a random shuffle mix, treating the subgroups as a single file in this shuffle, and then shuffling the order of the files in subgroups themselves. With a consistent enough tagging policy, and a large enough sample size, I'm certain there wouldn't need to be much upkeep, so the personal overhead is frontloaded on introduction of the song. Theoretically, at least. In an ideal situation it would also find a way to bridge the gap between these groups, but that would mitigate a lot of the shuffle capability of the sorter. In a case where we want a smoother gradient, it would determine the subgroups, find the best way of organizing the subgroups (as if they were each one whole unit) in a gradient, then put the stragglers (that were sort of close to 2 separate subgroups) in between the subgroups as a mortar, dump the stragglers that don't fit up to a certain standard in this gradient, and shuffle the place of a few of the files each subgroup, careful not to deviate their places too much from the internal gradient of the subgroup. This would require a lot of thought and/or mountains of trial & error though. The returns on investment could very likely not be worth it, and the whole gradient sorting concept might not even work very well, even if it somehow manages to pan out. Also, as mentioned, it would dump some songs, potentially a lot. I guess you could use these songs as interludes between subgroups, like dumping them to their own list and playing one in the middle of the mortar it's most suited to. It would need to be specifically one per bit of mortar though (otherwise it risks compromising the strength of the gradient more heavily) -- which means it could take a long time to get to a specific song if a lot of them belong closest in one specific mortar section. Could take 5 whole loops of the entire shuffle playlist, for instance, if you did it this way (which is the best way I could think of introducing them using this gradient system). My suggestion is to find a program that supports something close to what I outlined, or to seek programming help for putting a system into place like described here and portrayed in the video if it sounds good enough to you. Barring that, honestly, you may want to contact some sort of AI engineer.

I never doubted you

Showed it to a friend and he got the same crashing issue at 1:09, multiple times. I hope this isn't too stress-inducing honestly, I can only imagine how frustrating that could be for such a large, important project. He kept watching anyway without encouragement from me, so that's gotta count for something, man.

dope

FINALLY somebody takes down Life is Strange! As tiring as it is to see people rip into this game you definitely come at it with much more defensible and entertaining arguments. I'm so glad you didn't just stop at the first mention of hella, or comment endlessly on any of the unforgivably low-hanging fruit, instead opting to go for the actual structural instabilities you noticed. I'm sort of impressed actually, it began feeling as if critiquing this game in a meaningful way was almost inconceivable for a while, until you came along. In case it sounds like I'm defending the game, this isn't to say this game has no, or even few, issues, it's to say people critiquing it had seemingly no idea what the issues were. It felt like people laughing at a joke for the complete wrong reason, or like they were only pretending to laugh because there was an obvious spot for a punchline. Except in this example replace an obvious punchline with an obviously flawed game, and keep the inability to understand but desperation to interact.

CYBERSWINE https://www.giantbomb.com/cyberswine/3030-20171/ CYBERSWINE

There's genuinely a very noticeable input delay if you cap your framerate at 60 and you're playing on 60 hz. If instead your FPS was a consistent 300 that delay melts. It's not gonna eliminate your ability to play the game whatsoever, but it's going to bug you every time you (in your head) flick to the right spot or track perfectly but find you lag behind a little bit onscreen. It's easy and nearly automatic to compensate for this but if you can remove it the philosophy is 'why not?'

With this episode I'm getting closer and closer to hazily linking your videos together. The end, where you are faced with that left/right decision and choose right to find out you should have chosen left reminds me of an episode of Freeman's mind where Freeman faces the same conundrum and chooses right, finds out he should have chosen left and proceeds to, almost uncannily, discuss how that lost time might have amounted to him sidestepping an assassin's shot. This along with your admittance to owning a time machine in the Battleforge Game Dungeon and the time travel evidence in your Polaris Snocross Game Dungeon make the case against you in time court that much more solid. Expect to find out you've already been taken to trial soon.

I doubt I can truly help here. I merely intuit everything I do with music organization, I don't have a mind that works with flowcharts in this regard. But if somebody could help, likely they'd need a simplified example of what you do in the form of a flowchart. Like, for example, if you use Genre, Purpose of the playlist and BPM to determine the contents of the plalist, an example would be: Or something to that effect. From there people of the right mindset might be able to logically add onto/modify the process you use to better suit what you're looking for. I could try myself, but again, I don't really have a mind for that kind of stuff. Sometimes a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters can produce results in a reasonable amount of time though, so who knows? EDIT: I also just now realized your most recent post was 2 months ago. I remember seeing it earlier and dwelling on a solution but I only got around to posting this now. This thread not being the most active thread in the world might be a note to temper any expected results with. EDIT2: Also, just a song I feel you might personally enjoy: -- It's a dark folk song by The Pine Box Boys, and the singer sounds a lot like Goofy. You might get a kick out of it if you imagine it's Goofy singing.

Ross, I truly and genuinely believe you should keep making more of these videos. This has potential to be interesting enough to stand out on it's own, with offhanded comments that imply a darker background that never gets directly addressed for instance, and it's only going to get better as you produce more and more episodes. I've seen this kind of thing all over the place. People kind of pick up on a groove and evolve their productions. It's sort of inevitable for somebody like you. I seriously think at the least you should just do test pilots and study them to learn how they can be improved. If you truly believe in this show idea then research why it isn't working with your audience and adjust. Like maybe try talking more, or even just cutting less but please don't just abandon this. It kind of symbolizes something I've wanted from you for a while, which is a faster stream of your content. You say there's no real way to improve "A LOT," but despite what some may believe that's not what's needed. Your fans' definition of "A LOT" and your definition must differ here. If you had high hopes for this then surely it wouldn't be hard to show us why you believed in it enough to work on it. Do that and I feel your fanbase would come to understand.

Well the 'structure' of my folders is very chaotic to an outsider without my brain. For example I have a folder named "GREAT MUSIC" which is just all southern plantation work songs. I know what this is and what it means because I remember the enthusiasm I had when I was creating the playlist. It doesn't exclude other songs from being great, and doesn't encompass the entire spectrum of songs I would consider great. Basically I just intuit all my needs, naming and categorizing things on impulse, because it's the most effective way of remembering the idea/mood the folder was conceptualized with. The process is just me finding I want to listen to something for a specific reason (Like concentrating on some memory game) but I don't have a playlist that tickles the part of my brain that helps me concentrate on a memory game, so I experiment and eventually come up with a folder I end up naming "Thought provoking." There's another folder called "Concentration," but its purpose is specifically for when I find myself a little too scatter-brained and mentally disorganized. These 2 folders share a couple songs and even a similar concept, but one can't quite substitute for the other. Making a program that does this virtually is practically a waste of time for my specific needs, since Windows Explorer launches on startup and Windows Media Player instantly loads the playlist when I hit ctrl-A and Enter. To program something that will skip this and automatically generate playlists to suit my very specific needs I'd need to have a deeper understanding of my own personal thought processes when editing/creating a playlist in order to predict what results I'd want most when I apply 3 abstract concepts to a desired playlist, and then figure out how to define these abstract concepts in 1s and 0s to fit my definition of them and my prediction of how they'd mesh together. So instead I just intuit everything by mashing songs that fit my need together in folders. That's why I hope Ross has a clearer envisioned end-goal in mind than I do for myself, because if it's more abstract or esoteric I'll struggle (As my track record has shown). If it isn't, then I may be of service. For instance, if he knows how to define his musical taste into a mathematical algorithm and just needs an application programmed to fit his specific needs then I'm in.

I kind of cut down what I was saying, since as I was re-reading my post I noticed I had gone a little too mad sciencey with things, but I guess in doing that I cut out some much needed context. I also appear to have made mistakes when bitesizing myself, as "fast-tempo" and "slow-tempo" were meant to say 'upbeat' and 'gentle' respectively. I actually only just now caught that when re-reading my previous post to make sure I wasn't about to correct you with incorrect information. This likely happened because of me chopping bits and moving them around haphazardly as I'm want to do sometimes. I have a serious issue with digressions, in case it wasn't already apparent. Believe it or not, you're currently reading something that actually has a lot of other digressions cut out. The fun part about this is any sentence that isn't a digression that doesn't have a digression immediately leading it or immediately following it is an easy-to-spot signifier of where these incisions occurred. Anyway for 'upbeat but happy' an example would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_R5puXs6E. An example for 'gentle but happy' would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSif77IVQdY. These are both songs that make me feel happiness but anybody can see how they're also entirely different. This is where my perplexity came, as I never found a great way to weigh the 'nature' vs the 'general mood' of a song. Then I decided to make it easier on myself by removing the arbitrary 2-tone mood limit and have an infinite amount of tags that are weighed in their accuracy by myself through the application. But that raised the fidelity so high that it became a worse option than manually hand-picking playlists and evolving them over a very long period of time naturally, since it wasn't much faster and wasn't much simpler. In fact the only thing it did better was incorporate new songs into new playlists faster, but with much less satisfying results. See I had this exclusion system. The idea at first was to ensure that certain types of songs (Like incredibly melancholic songs) would be excluded from a playlist labeled as "incredibly happy." But that just added so much more time required to tag a new song and each generated playlist then required even more maintenance. And even then that ended up more or less just turning the application into a high school with heavy stereotypical cliques. Pro Era would never be caught dead sitting at Ana Gasteyer's lunch table. Not unless you gagged them with a spoon first. So that meant whenever a particularly somber STEEZ track like was put in the same playlist as because the principal wanted to promote camaraderie, it left this real uncomfortable tension in the air. Like a fight was about to happen, but since it's a highly organized high school it means a fight wasn't going to happen, but it would certainly make the two groups feel much more awkwardly hostile in future interactions with eachother. So this is why I just stick to organizing playlists in folders, copy/pasting to my heart's content. It's also why I'd like to know exactly what Ross does, and exactly what he's looking for. Not because I'm some super niche creep, though there's no guarantee I'm not. But if the problem he's having is simply a convenient place to store his songs and randomize a playlist without having to drop duplicates into random subfolders of random subfolders of random subfolders then that's a pretty simple fix. If the issue is more esoteric, then it's much more complex, but it could be very fun to discuss, though I don't see a solution springing from the discussion. From what I gather he already has something that's suiting him well enough not to swear off music altogether, but is just looking for more practicality. It could prove a neat exercise to pool the community's brainpower to wax philosophic about this issue, to see if we can come up with a better philosophy behind defining and generating playlists, but I'm sure there are people at Apple that have much more resources and that know much more about the subject yet, to my knowledge, nothing earth-shattering has come out of them in this department. That's why I don't see discussion doing much. But hey, hi by the way, don't know if I've introduced myself, call me Watterson, if Ross already has a clearly reasoned out end-goal that he'll be able to easily tell when he's reached, then I'm willing to enlist myself to help. At least with the logistics end of it.

Hmm, this is where things get tricky, and it's also why there aren't very many large-scale programs that attempt this. Every variable that goes into this is so specific to each individual user. It's hard for a program to be able to account for fluctuations in personal genre definitions. The best shot for that would be creating a program that allows you to tag any song with any number of user generated tags, and have the user go by each song and each tag manually rating each tag's accuracy to each song it's attached to. This would take a long time to calibrate by the user, especially because I've tried this before and I found myself endlessly calibrating each tag's accuracy and found that I change my mind too frequently. If you have more solid thought processes than me though, then the idea would be for the program to generate a list based off of the tags you searched and order them by most appropriate to least appropriate. The way I did it is I used tags for mood and how the music itself plays, but that came with some problems. A song that's both happy and fast-tempo wouldn't give the exact same feeling as something that's happy and slow-tempo, but it shares the same number of tags as something that's sad and fast-tempo, even when it's closer in mood to the one that's happy and slow-tempo, at least in my experience. As I'm writing this I'm beginning to realize that maybe I was more focused on creating the perfect algorithm to suit my needs than I was with creating something that works well enough. I don't have infinite free time, but I'd be willing to work on a design with you, or anybody else who has any ideas, and eventually make a program to that design. Let me know if you have any way to enhance this or if I shouldn't even bother. If you're having difficulty understanding what I described I'll make a small demonstration, if you think it might interest you.

Hey, I think I might be able to offer some help if you further detail the system you currently use and the major flaws you encounter using it. I could aid in increasing its efficacy, at least as an attempt to pacify you until you find a more complex tool that suits you. If you already have a detailed idea of what kind of software you would use, however, I could try to drum something up using your design. Just the logistics behind it should suffice (Like having a search bar you could enter tags into to search your library for songs that you manually attached the searched tags to).

I'm Nick. My username is Watterson in reference to Bill Watterson, famously the creator of Calvin & Hobbes. I agree with his view on how light conversations and heavy debates should be held. I don't like to talk much.