[HN Gopher] The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
___________________________________________________________________
The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
Author : ingve
Score : 346 points
Date : 2026-03-15 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.charlespetzold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.charlespetzold.com)
| walthamstow wrote:
| I didn't get past the wanky declaration that he listens to
| classical, listing out dozens of composers.
|
| The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, that's where he lost me too. Strikes me as very
| pretentious.
|
| He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that
| moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".
| sambapa wrote:
| Because most of that list isn't classical music
| mrob wrote:
| Yes it is. "Classical" without further context means any
| part of the tradition of Western art music with written
| score. Classical-era classical music is a subset of
| classical as a whole.
| sambapa wrote:
| Well, Charles would just say that you are one of the ones
| that dgaf
| cheeze wrote:
| The entire thing is written in a curmudgeonly fashion, led by
| that massive list of musicians.
|
| We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor
| fit. That's... the article?
| aworks wrote:
| For my classical music use case, listening to new releases,
| Spotify works very well, particularly with the help of 3rd-
| party services.
|
| I follow several thousand composers and musicians. I then
| get daily playlist creation by crabhands.com of any new
| releases by those I follow. I then export the crabhand
| playlist into my own local database via exportify.net. I
| then create Spotify playlists of music I haven't heard that
| I may like as well as the released works I like best. Then
| I score the works I've listened to and feed that back into
| the system. So I get a deluge of new releases but play it
| in an organized fashion.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| It's not a long article, and is quite amusing to read.
| People have such high expectation of free articles on the
| internet.
| BrissyCoder wrote:
| "wanky"
|
| Austraian/New Zealander detected lol
| defrost wrote:
| Specifically one who disliked _The Hard Road: Restrung_ and
| Metal in general.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung
| apublicfrog wrote:
| It's a great album, but the term was around long before it.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I
| listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like
| that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird
| haha. I'd recommend just listening to the Classical New
| Releases playlist, which is excellent.
| barbs wrote:
| Glad I wasn't the only one. Love how he goes on to say how he's
| aware that people are unfamiliar with all those names he just
| dropped.
| moonbucket wrote:
| Or someone cueing up well-known pop/dance tunes at a
| wedding/disco. Last time I was at one they weren't generally
| firing up symphonies, string quartets then doing a deeper drop
| of a heavy hitting baroque banger to see the bodies hit the
| floor.
| SonnyTark wrote:
| Me three. I thought it was an attempt at humor, but I got to
| the end and didn't find a punchline?
|
| I learned Windows programming from his book, I'm sort of
| shocked he doesn't seem to have a base-level understanding of
| how transformer models work..
|
| That, and instrumental music. Seems to believe the set of all
| music = pop songs + western civilization tradition classical
| music
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Author comes off as what days is called "performative man".
| paradox460 wrote:
| It almost feels like he asked an AI to write out a list of
| composers
| xav0989 wrote:
| While I sympathize with the issue and have experienced similar
| problems with classical music, I found the listing of composers
| and the holier-than-thou attitude (because "pop is bad") grating
| and soured the rest of the post.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Ha, despite all that the author exposes themselves as a filthy
| casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify
| were looking up a score. Instead "of course" we are looking for
| a recording, principally keyed by, for example, conductor
| (orchestra), director of music (choral), and/or a soloist or
| key ensemble members. Searching by work is like typing in
| "Hallelujah" to find a version by someone other than Leonard
| Cohen.
|
| Snobbery sniping aside, I empathize with their sentiment, and
| their _work_ was worth reading. Spotify's whole UI is far too
| complicated and I wish they would go the Facebook route of
| breaking out the separate products into separate apps. Jumbling
| podcasts, pop music, and covers -- sorry, _classical music_ --
| is a bit weird.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I hate this AI slop commenting fad.
| bspammer wrote:
| The em dashes are the only thing making it look AI-written.
| I think it was human written by someone who likes em
| dashes.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| I am indeed a human. The variable quality of my
| contributions here ought to attest to that!
|
| My grandfather was a typesetter and print designer. My
| other grandfather was part of Gill's circle and his
| bookplate was inscribed by him. My first and only
| kickstarter in which I participated was _Linotype: The
| Movie_. I am currently reading Jury's _Type Designers of
| the Twentieth Century_. I also have Peace's catalogue of
| Gill's inscriptions on my desk. Justin Knopp from
| Typoretum set my personal card from his digitized
| collection of rare founts. I'm interested in type and
| page design and I do like em dashes.
|
| But I also just really like iOS's automatic replacement
| of 2x hyphens with a dash.
| mrob wrote:
| >the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by
| focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a
| score
|
| Isn't it the job of a DJ to pick a good recording? Petzold's
| test seems reasonable to me. As a classical listener, if I
| want a specific recording I'll just play that recording. The
| main function of the DJ is music discovery. Perhaps they know
| of good recordings I haven't already heard.
| xvector wrote:
| When was the last time you heard of a DJ doing classical?
| mrob wrote:
| I haven't listened to radio for over a decade, but back
| when I did I listened to BBC Radio 3, where the DJ played
| classical. "DJ" does not necessarily mean somebody
| beatmixing dance music in a club. Spotify's "AI DJ" is
| obviously meant to simulate a radio DJ.
| Closi wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Am I naive in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is
| my interpretation of the word "intelligence" too literal? And
| when an AI behaves stupidly, who's to blame? The programmers or
| the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction
| between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that
| the programmers need no longer take responsibility?
|
| IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in
| the general capability of 'AI'.
|
| We can prove that an AI _can_ understand this with a basic
| prompt:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c...
|
| This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same
| user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by
| default. Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model,
| or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe
| the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and
| then songs from similar artists after')
|
| > I've heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how
| can that be when it can't even grasp basic concepts in music?
|
| Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music
| based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to
| have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will be in
| the eating of the pudding. AI models have already been able to
| compose classical music to some extent, and can grasp music
| theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of
| quality/taste.
| arrrg wrote:
| Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try
| to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal
| clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical
| stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.
|
| Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not
| the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils
| this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing
| ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the
| world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.
| foltik wrote:
| Pretty sure they were saying it was a skill issue on the part
| of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt
| for their slop DJ.
| phony-account wrote:
| > it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers
| writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ
|
| Spotify are currently making a big deal about _not_ writing
| any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the
| slides proudly trumpeted this fact:
|
| " 0 lines of code
|
| Spotify's best engineers have not written a line of code
| since December."
| criddell wrote:
| December? I would have guessed it's been longer than
| that.
| foltik wrote:
| A full decade since spotify wrapped was released and we
| still have the grand unified ... menu with a seemingly
| randomized list of actions that takes hundreds of
| milliseconds to load depending on network conditions. And
| buggy jams that desync constantly. And it's way too easy
| to accidentally clear the entire queue. I could go on,
| wonder what the hundreds of PMs are doing?
|
| Bunch of clowns coasting on their moat instead of
| building an actually good product.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| > _Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you
| try to shift the blame to the user_
|
| Users are often to blame in many varied cases and there
| should be no taboo around discussing this. I think maybe some
| people hear that you should never blame rape victims for rape
| and then go running wild trying to apply that as a general
| principle of never blaming anybody who is in any way a victim
| of anything, even when the "victimhood" is simply some piece
| of trivial software not working well. But we're not talking
| about rape so your intense rejection ( _" disgusting"_) is
| completely off the mark.
| Closi wrote:
| > Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you
| try to shift the blame to the user.
|
| I'm shifting 'blame' to Spotify, rather than the user or the
| AI model - although blame is probably a pretty strong word
| anyway for what is probably just supposed to be a fun DJ
| feature.
|
| > All the prompts were crystal clear.
|
| We don't know what the prompt is, because the FULL prompt
| will be a combination of the base prompt plus the user
| prompt. It's trivial to show that a modern model with a
| minimal base prompt will return correctly (as per my original
| post), so IMO there is probably something in the base prompt
| which is encouraging the model to return differently.
|
| I wanted to clarify the first two points, but i'll not
| respond to the rest of your comment as it's a bit overly-
| emotive (calling what I say disgusting, rambling about the
| downfall of society as a whole etc).
| joegibbs wrote:
| "Disgusting" is a strong term to use regarding a poor quality
| music chooser
| xattt wrote:
| > maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the
| suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after'
|
| What are the chances there is or will be a prompt to direct
| listeners from artists with higher royalties to those with
| basic fees?
|
| If I was an MBA, this would absolutely a direction I would
| take.
| wzdd wrote:
| He doesn't really even dig into the quality of Spotify's AI DJ
| apart from pointing out, in a very roundabout way, that it was
| designed for popular music.
|
| Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's
| why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.
| leokennis wrote:
| I was about to comment this too.
|
| For someone that explicitly states:
|
| > I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year
| tradition (...)
|
| And who apparently wants to stream music, it is wild he's not
| subscribed to Apple Music Classical which exactly circumvents
| all complaints in this article...
| earthnail wrote:
| Ex spotifier here.
|
| Classical isn't harder. It's just so niche that leadership at
| spotify never bothered. It has a whole different taxonomy; it's
| composer, not performer based etc.
|
| Spotify isn't against new taxonomies outside of weatern pop
| music. The India launch, where ragas were super important,
| shows it. But the Indian market is vastly larger than the small
| (albeit loud) number of classical music enthusiasts.
|
| All that is to say, it's a business decision, not a tech or AI
| problem.
|
| (I really like classical music, too, btw., so please don't read
| this as me not respecting that user base.)
| Gigachad wrote:
| Does it even make sense to DJ classical music? It's done with
| electronic music to keep a continuous energy level for hours.
| defrost wrote:
| > to keep a continuous energy level for hours
|
| Like a full Michael Nyman concert? -
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3KgZlxTz8g
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHVU3UlLHRg
|
| Philip Glass's four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts
| (1971-1974)?
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a massive fan of the six hour extended cut
| of Cage's 4'33
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to track
| your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring. I much
| prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set.
|
| I usually listen to dublab (los Angeles, cologne, and Barcelona)
| and nts1 (usually London) and nts2 (location rotates). They have
| 1 or 2 hour DJ sessions (live or recorded) and your hear some
| music that you normally wouldn't be exposed to and sometimes you
| hate it but usually not.
| metalman wrote:
| tiny desk
|
| you have to do your own search and play, but some of the stuff
| by unknowns and famous artists giving back is profound, they
| KNOW when they hit it, all live, mostly acoustic and all useing
| musicians, no tape, no sequencers. listen to one such
| performance, and maybe you dont need anything else for a week.
| batiudrami wrote:
| NTS is truly excellent yes.
|
| The streaming app algorithms are bland as hell, built for
| people who just want noise in the background.
| tetris11 wrote:
| NTS and Radio6, genuinely enough to expose me to new things
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Which weirdly enough has made Soundcloud one of my primary
| sources for finding music I enjoy, via DJ sets.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Spotify should have twitch-style, human hosted, radio shows
| (intentionally no video) with live chat. with full access to
| the catalog, it would easily bring back communities built
| around good music.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| Nice idea! Let's hope that some other platform executes this
| (let's be honest, Spotify doesn't care about humans in any
| way).
| Vespasian wrote:
| That would be good experimnent and could actually work.
|
| I would love to try it however they would have to solve
| "global song availability" and "Sponsored songs only
| Stations".
|
| But if they did try there is the chance of some niche
| communities forming.
|
| It wouldn't even need to be live to begin with. A narrated
| playlist with a DJ and basic control functionality such as
| fading into songs or a voice over.
|
| Not trivial but doable and I wonder why they never tried
| that.
| vintermann wrote:
| It has been tried. I don't remember its name, but I
| remember that they have changed names at least once. It's a
| pretty obvious "app" for Spotify's API which they opened up
| a few years ago.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Spotify is very anti music. They are just selling content the
| music part they are very indifferent on
| onion2k wrote:
| _I 've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to
| track your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring.
| I much prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set._
|
| The significant problem that AI faces in automatically curating
| something is that the input data is usually pretty terrible.
| It's based on either similarity of the thing being curated
| which doesn't work because people don't want things to be too
| similar or to dissimilar, or it's randomness which doesn't work
| because it's too discordant, or it's based on patterns in the
| data (people who listened to X listened to Y, so recommend Y to
| people who listen to X) which works but only if the listener's
| taste aligns with the majority. If you introduce multiple
| sources of patterns in the data you quickly lose any variation
| and things stop being interesting.
|
| This is a hard problem. No one has ever _really_ solved it,
| despite Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc investing hundreds of
| millions into the space. Humans are probably just too fickle to
| accept that an algorithm can choose for us. It lacks the social
| proof that a tastemaker like a DJ brings.
| visarga wrote:
| > the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on
| either similarity
|
| I found luck just using a LLM to chat about my tastes, what I
| like, what kinds of songs I want to discover ... it does a
| good job and is able to also give me background.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That only works because it's trained on reviews written by
| humans.
|
| So we are back to humans curating content, just with AI
| then doing the final search
| Etheryte wrote:
| These are great, thank you so much for sharing the
| recommendations. I tuned in to NTS and casually just kept on
| listening for a very long time. If anyone else has good
| recommendations, I'm all ears. Thank you.
| scott01 wrote:
| Check out mixes by Blackest Ever Black label (now defunct)
| from NTS and Berlin Community Radio, listening to them
| literally feels like a journey. Funny part, sometimes they
| use a contrasting tune to end a mix, which creates a feeling
| similar to movie credits roll in the end.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I rather do my own mix tapes, or mix MP3, taken from CDs that I
| still buy, occasionally directly from bands after concert.
|
| Otherwise a few European radios, even if with ads, as a second
| goal is to keep my foreign language skills up to date.
|
| Also a few lucky algorithm gems on YouTube, or the KEXP, Tiny
| Desk, ARTE Concerts, Colours channels.
|
| Never got into Spotify.
| lancebeet wrote:
| I think what you're describing is what people working with
| recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity,
| while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation
| success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to
| solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Thanks for these tips. I even find my Youtube gives me better
| recommendations than Spotify.
|
| https://www.nts.live/radio
|
| Right now NTS Guide to: Italian Library, Soundtracks and OSTS
|
| https://www.dublab.com/
|
| I avoid ghetto music but aslong as it has classical, OSTs, calm
| jazz, trance etc :)
|
| A bit turned off by a certain section but I can ignore it.
|
| aha okay, I can search for "NTS Guide to" on Spotify and people
| have just made playlists! Great! thanks
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I briefly tried it when they first launched it, but in less than
| an hour decided I hated it.
|
| Which I really should have anticipated since I generally dislike
| music radio "DJ"s too and Spotify's AI DJ is trying to be like
| one.
|
| In particular it would do things like start playing tracks with
| no bearing on anything I'd ever listened to, like local South
| African music which is very far from universally preferred here.
| I also got the feeling it was pushing "promoted" tracks with
| little regard to what I would likely like, just like real life
| radio stations.
|
| I also don't care to have some voice interrupting the music all
| the time.
|
| I was hoping it would kind of be like their other "radio"s, but
| it would be more explorative to finding more "similar" tracks to
| what I have listened to, without seeming to get stuck in a
| repeating play list.
|
| I suppose it's a cool gimmick for people who are prefer the
| broadcast radio experience.
| lozenge wrote:
| How could software engineers in London and Stockholm understand
| the effects of racial segregation on music preferences?
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| This not about race at all, for example just because you're
| white doesn't mean you'd care to listen to Afrikaans music.
|
| Even between people with the same cultural background, music
| tastes can vary wildly.
| driverdan wrote:
| These services shouldn't make assumptions based on
| demographics, like location. Some broader examples, it
| shouldn't recommend US pop music to me because I live in the
| US or country music because I live in the south.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Now please try again with music that's actually played by DJ's.
| mrob wrote:
| Radio DJ isn't the same as club DJ.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music
| playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when
| Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into
| either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and
| over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the
| record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like
| everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most
| people are fine with it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| My observations are that the average person is bothered by the
| slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don't care
| enough to do anything about it.
|
| Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets
| which are a million times better than Spotify's AI dj. Some of
| this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to
| unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more
| willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a
| surprise change that makes the crowd scream.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to
| something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I
| wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other
| selection service regularly fed me garbage.
|
| Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit
| (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it
| would still feed me junk.
|
| This guy is a classical music guy, though, and _all_ the
| pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly,
| forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated
| classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed
| mixing it in with my regular music.
|
| One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a
| "cover." Who _performs_ the piece is just as important as who
| wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand
| that.
|
| MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly
| limited, and I don't know why they have never been improved.
| kaelwd wrote:
| What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate
| fields for
| section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't
| the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It's the "pick any one" nature.
|
| You have to classify every title as _one_ type.
|
| How would we classify Zappa, or Secret Chiefs 3? Are they
| jazz, alternative (a worthless category), rock, pop, heavy
| metal, comedy? Depending on what you listen to, it could be
| any one of them. Also, each song could be in multiple
| categories. Boz Skaggs was known for disco-style pop, but
| he was an outstanding blues performer, and many of his
| songs reflect that mix.
|
| This is really a music industry problem, and software just
| reflects that. The bug is really in the Requirements phase.
| AlyssaRowan wrote:
| Well, it's less of a technology problem than it is an
| industry one. You can have multiple entries in the genre
| list and they're freeform, for example
| Ambient;Electronic, in both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. For
| Vorbis Comments, you have multiple GENRE= tags. Some
| players support this.
|
| In my interactions with distributors, it seems streaming
| services tend to support up to two genre classifications;
| though they're pretty outdated and general (even more
| general and dated than the Winamp genre list). I don't
| think they use the metadata presented much in the
| classification; in fact Spotify does its own estimation
| of 'energy' and other subjective emotions using various
| classifier algorithms.
| vintermann wrote:
| It's the record companies/publishers which don't use them.
| I don't think I know one record company which reports
| metadata well.
| paradox460 wrote:
| I've fallen back to keeping my classical collection on my
| Plex server. Many of the recordings are ones I've personally
| participated in the performance of, and others are just ones
| that I prefer. Elgar performed by London philharmonic with
| Daniel Barenboim is what I prefer, and when I hear a
| different recording, like the Berlin Symphony one that
| Spotify likes to trot out, it feels wrong. It drags where
| it's not supposed to and speeds at other times.
|
| It's not wrong, it's just not what I like
| staticassertion wrote:
| I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really
| have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue.
| Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to
| songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a
| lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a
| great way to find other songs that I would like.
|
| I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was
| awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best
| replacement so far.
| defrost wrote:
| The old stuff is the good stuff alright,
|
| (1930s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc
|
| (1950s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isIPytpk40
|
| (1960s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qssa6ec7faQ
| mikkupikku wrote:
| That New Order cover is tight, thank you for this.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Good stuff in any time, just harder to find:
|
| (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hPNPInXh0
|
| (2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-c-9G52jU
|
| (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1EDbkl2CU
|
| (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvcNvVZl9AA
|
| (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2sx-HHTBw
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >just harder to find
|
| But this is the problem. Before, people where naturally
| exposed to classical and jazz and OSTs etc.
|
| This is the problem with current society.
| nothercastle wrote:
| How do you find it in the modern era that's really the
| problem we're asking to solve
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora
| was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best
| replacement so far.
|
| You do realize Pandora is still there, right?
| staticassertion wrote:
| Not really. I stopped using it at some point a very, very
| long time ago, and I don't recall why. I've moved to
| Youtube so it hasn't occurred to me to revisit.
| systoll wrote:
| For me, it's been 'gone' since 2017, when they shut down in
| Australia. They used to be available everywhere, but locked
| off international audiences when laws became inconvenient.
|
| (Obviously you could VPN in, but it's a meaningful hassle.)
| nothercastle wrote:
| It's never been good though
| apublicfrog wrote:
| It got shut down in my country about 10 years ago.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I've found a lot of great music through Pandora.
|
| It's very miss-or-miss; you need to be willing to thumb down
| 95% of what Pandora thinks you'll like. But with enough care,
| it's a good discovery channel.
| vulkoingim wrote:
| I've been working on and off on something [1] that tries to
| address this problem through somewhat manual curation. You
| choose what genres you're interested in, and get auto updated
| playlists created from your music library.
|
| I have a few other experimental features in the pipeline that
| will expand the music selection, but they are not there yet.
|
| [1] https://riffradar.org/
| vintermann wrote:
| Spotify's discover weekly was genuinely good when it first
| came. It was on another level from other recommendation
| services. Maybe 90% of the music I've bought on Bandcamp, I
| would never have known about if it wasn't for discover weekly
| (Bandcamp's own recommendation/discovery features are lousy).
|
| But somehow, probably from a combination of rights owners
| gaming it and Spotify gaming it, DW is a pale shadow of its
| former self.
| lordnacho wrote:
| But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If
| stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we
| expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one?
|
| Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to
| an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend.
|
| The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that
| they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they
| have spent some time learning what is what in that world.
|
| But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the
| prevailing classification system only.
| mrob wrote:
| The classical classification system is equivalent to the
| classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course,
| most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's
| not like it's a completely unknown problem.
| snakeboy wrote:
| The whole pitch of AI is that the model is going to be able to
| make exploit general knowledge outside of the local scope of
| the problem, just like a human would do. So I would also expect
| that it would be able to transfer his knowledge of classical
| music learned in language training, and apply that to the
| Spotify database.
| asah wrote:
| Dunno about classical, but Pandora (still) works pretty well for
| mainstream music.
| Lucasoato wrote:
| They should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best
| possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)
| shubhamjain wrote:
| I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it
| hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism
| lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the
| pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who
| complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at
| and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's
| going to have its limits.
|
| Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how
| AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This
| could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full
| blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good
| for at least a few things. Right?
| qsera wrote:
| >That should be good for at least a few things. Right?
|
| The example you described, no.
|
| It is not good because its quality and adherence to the spec
| (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...
| drdaeman wrote:
| > its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence)
| is and will always be probabilistic...
|
| Isn't the same true for a lot of individual programmers and
| even teams?
|
| _Especially so_ if they were provided just a short one-
| sentence vision instead of proper documentation.
| qsera wrote:
| Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and
| was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.
|
| Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one
| uses a process that is inherently probabilistic and will
| show up in every result, while other just depends on the
| probability of you getting a good team.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in
| context of people who - just like those who hire
| contractors - don't have the capacity to do it
| themselves.
|
| In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat
| some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality
| and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app
| and can't do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs
| are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more
| complex apps (still only simple ones before it produces
| junk, but progress is pretty appalling)
| qsera wrote:
| >beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both
| quality and spec adherence...
|
| I am not sure I want to keep paying for something that
| needs some amount of luck on my side, to be useful.
| Writing elaborate plans for LLMs also feels a bit
| pointless when there is no hard and fast rule about how
| much of it will be followed ..
|
| Apparently some people appear to be doing it, but I am
| afraid it is not something that will have a universal
| appeal..
| worksonmine wrote:
| > This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a
| full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?
|
| I would guess it's for the same reasons that you're ignoring
| all the fixes necessary to get to an actual "full blown native
| Mac app". It's rarely a single sentence unless your app does
| something trivial like printing Hello World.
| nottorp wrote:
| Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different
| from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
|
| I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns
| and limitations, other by than "throw more AI at it" or "it
| will get better in 5 years, just in time for cold fusion".
|
| > you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single
| sentence
|
| Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile
| linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?
|
| If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you when
| the wolf actually comes.
| n2d4 wrote:
| It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not
| using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks
| where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are
| plenty of tasks where they aren't.
|
| AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early
| on, many thought chess would be one of the last things
| mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense
| to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task
| compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a
| waste of time.
|
| In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical
| music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically
| mean the AI DJ is bad at everything. > Like
| they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile
| linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?
|
| You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are
| putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and
| instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them
| and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project
| that _someone else_ made, completely unrelated to this entire
| thread. That is not good faith discourse!
| nottorp wrote:
| > Who is "they"?
|
| Anthropic IIRC?
| rhdunn wrote:
| Here's the post:
| https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-
| compiler. It was written by a researcher at Anthropic.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| So you want to bring every conversation on the topic down to
| the level of the most idiotic fanboys making the most
| outlandish claims that are easiest to shoot down? If this was
| JUST directly in response to these "AI evangelists", a group
| which I'll ignore that you're unfairly treating as a
| monolith, that'd be fine.
|
| However, every post here that says the slightest thing
| positive about AI's abilities is always met with "yeah well
| it can't do my dishes for me so it's total garbage!" BS.
|
| You yourself are bringing up "making a compiler" out of
| nowhere. Nobody but you brought that up here. Yet you're
| using it as the be-all end-all yard stick, simultaneously
| completely ignoring and completely proving the argument that
| you're replying to.
|
| It's amazing how big a % of the developer community has
| started acting like intentionally unintelligent petulant
| children the moment they're faced with an iota of the sort of
| job security risk they've been inflicting on others for
| decades. Some of you need to grow up.
| scott01 wrote:
| This appears to be a troll account, that only ever engages
| in heated discussions. Please, do not engage with it, folks
| :) On a related note, has anyone noticed actual bots
| commenting on HN? I sometimes feel discussions are a bit
| weird here.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any
| concerns and limitations
|
| You see what you choose to focus on. I come across many
| people who are excited about the possibilities of AI-assisted
| coding, who are frustrated by its limitations, who share
| strategies for overcoming or avoiding those limitations, and
| s on. For a concrete and famous example, I would put Andrej
| Karpathy in this category. Where are you looking that you're
| not finding any of these people? linkedin?
| SyneRyder wrote:
| The user you're replying to has made many similar posts
| like this. I previously tried engaging in good faith. I try
| not to fall into the XKCD 386 trap now, my time is better
| spent with Claude Code. Hope I can help save you some time
| too!
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes, I try to avoid the evangelism topics but they're
| much worse than blockchain and are taking up most of HN
| now.
|
| Can't help but click sometimes, always see the same
| arguments, so why not post the same thing as well?
|
| By the way, I never check user names, I just reply to the
| post content.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| In my experience the people who are excited about ai
| assisted coding are people who aren't good at coding in the
| first place and don't care about quality, consistency, or
| understanding what they are having it write, and people who
| have a vested interest in ai coding tools being used
| (leadership who want to say "my team uses ai" and "ai
| experts" who have a personal brand dependent on ai being
| successful)
| rhdunn wrote:
| AI assisted coding is really good as an enhanced auto-
| complete, often better as it picks up patterns in the
| code and will complete whole lines or chunks of code.
| There, I'll assess the results like any other auto-
| completed suggestions.
|
| For other things like when asking questions I won't just
| blindly copy what the LLM is suggesting. I'll often
| rewrite it in a style that best fits the style of the
| codebase I'm working on, or to better fit it into what
| I'm trying to achieve. Also, if I've asked it for how to
| do a specific one-line query and it has rewritten a whole
| chunk of code, I'll only make use of that one line, or
| specific fix/change. -- This also helps me to understand
| the response from the LLM.
|
| I'll then do testing to make sure that the code is
| working correctly, with unit tests where relevant.
| Closi wrote:
| > Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely
| different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.
|
| You always have people at both sides of the aisle though -
| people who say it can do much more than it can, and people
| who say it can do much less.
|
| It's the same with all technologies - robotics, crypto, drug
| discovery, the internet, digital cameras, quantum computing,
| 3D Television, self-driving cars - it was probably the same
| with the steam engine. All of these will have had people who
| said that the technology would be useless and die (e.g.
| Napoleon and the steam engine), and others that would have
| said it was totally transformative.
|
| Pointing to people who hold extreme opinions 'for' a
| particular technology that are overly-bullish, and then
| dismissing the technology based on that, isn't a particularly
| good strategy in my opinion.
| raincole wrote:
| > Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could
| compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?
|
| Who's "they"?
|
| > If you constantly cry wolf, no one's going to believe you
| when the wolf actually comes.
|
| Who's "you"?
|
| You seem to believe all AI advocates are of the same hivemind
| and they somehow think and behave collectively. Have you
| considered that they might be different people with
| individual opinions and motivations?
| eithed wrote:
| What a strange take - you dismiss valid criticisms of Spotify
| product, just to venture off into the land of "well you can
| create a mac app with one sentence" as if that would matter
| here.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a
| full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?
|
| Isn't that a bit overblown? I just fired up Copilot in VSCode
| and typed in "make me a DAW plugin that will inject MIDI
| control changes into the track output" and it didn't even know
| where to start.
| rfw300 wrote:
| I don't necessarily endorse the author's broad conclusions
| about "AI", but I will say that the Spotify DJ specifically is
| an enragingly bad product. Nothing close to the utility of
| Claude Code.
| oogabooga13 wrote:
| Youtube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI
| DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.
| Zopieux wrote:
| As of a few months ago I get AI slop tracks in virtually all
| YTM automatic playlists, after a few normal tracks, so I
| abandoned the platform entirely.
|
| Call me when Spotify and YT collaborate with Deezer on
| labelling AI music as such. Yes, it's a nuanced concept, but
| the soup YT was serving me was extremely obvious, which was
| easily confirmed by checking the throughput of the "artists".
| igravious wrote:
| "I should mention that my perspective might be a little different
| from most people's because I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer
| music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly
| chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland,
| Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi,
| Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven,
| Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix),
| Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi,
| Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg,
| Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich,
| Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Part, Reich, Glass, Eastman, Leon,
| Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Ades,
| Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others."
|
| pompous prick
| titanomachy wrote:
| > I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year
| tradition that encompasses [list of like 50 composers]... one of
| the sturdiest pillars of what we call "western civilization"
|
| > The use of the word "song" for instrumental music -- that is,
| music that is not sung and hence is not a song -- is borderline
| illiterate.
|
| This guy comes across as incredibly obnoxious. It's shit like
| this that gives classical music a bad rap as stuffy and
| unapproachable.
|
| But yes, Spotify and the like are terrible for classical music.
| Apple Music has a separate app for this, which does a pretty good
| job and addresses most of these complaints.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I asked this thing to play me some instrumental EDM tracks and it
| couldn't handle the task. I don't think classical music is even
| remotely viable. Spotify already really sucks at it. Pouring AI
| on top definitely won't help the main issue which is gaping holes
| in relevant content. It just doesn't exist on the platform in
| most cases.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Ugh, couldn't read it, could the guy be less smug about liking
| classical music
| sneak wrote:
| > _I've heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how
| can that be when it can't even grasp basic concepts in music?_
|
| Why do people who hate AI think that every use of the term AI is
| referring to the exact same software program?
| xvector wrote:
| Author seriously needs to touch grass.
|
| > _[list of 20 classical artists] I'm aware that many people are
| unfamiliar with this musical tradition, but it forms one of the
| sturdiest pillars of what we casually refer to as "western
| civilization."_
|
| > _Unfortunately, this tradition is not much respected_
|
| > _The use of the word "song" for instrumental music -- that is,
| music that is not sung and hence is not a song -- is borderline
| illiterate._
|
| This writeup is insufferably pretentious. It almost reads like a
| caricature of someone that listens to classical.
|
| Prompted playlists is a beta feature designed to cater to most
| users. They are likely using a heavily quantized model, fine
| tuned on common use cases.
|
| Is it really surprising that it doesn't cater to the fringes of
| Spotify's user base from the get-go?
|
| Clearly the author believes that their taste in music is the
| superior one, and so Spotify not designing their product
| experience around their tastes is "appalling."
|
| Then you get absurd rants like this:
|
| > _I've heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how
| can that be when it can't even grasp basic concepts in music?_
|
| Almost like these are two completely separate models, in two
| completely separate products.
| projektfu wrote:
| More like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
| sneak wrote:
| Spotify is filled with payola, and their claims about it are
| intentionally extremely misleading while not explicitly
| fraudulent.
|
| It shows up in _all_ Spotify-generated playlists, so I refuse to
| listen to them. I assume their shitty AI recommendations are
| similarly filled with cancer.
| sammy2255 wrote:
| Agreed. Besides, the "AI DJ" dude is an African American male
| with no way to change voice or personality. Virtue signalling at
| its finest.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > I should mention that my perspective might be a little
| different from most people's because I don't listen to pop songs.
| I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in
| roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd,
| Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell,
| Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart,
| Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and
| Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner,
| Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach,
| Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland,
| Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Part, Reich, Glass,
| Eastman, Leon, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Ades,
| Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others.
|
| There are apps specifically dedicated to classical music and
| there are many youtube channels for classical music, with sheet
| music[1], with visualizations[2], with videos of concerts.
|
| Spotify and it's drop-in competitors were never good for
| classical music. This article is just another rant on this issue,
| by someone to whom classical music is so important, a pillar of
| western civilization, but not important enough to look for other
| ways to listen.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin
| grudgen wrote:
| This is really going to be a problem for the large overlap of
| people wanting to use Spotify AI features and people who like
| classical music...
|
| Perhaps file a ticket for the devs and go back to listening to
| the albums without AI
| worksonmine wrote:
| > go back to listening to the albums without AI
|
| The way things are going I'm not sure how much longer we will
| have that option.
| zokier wrote:
| Is hammer appallingly stupid for being bad at driving screws, or
| is the person trying to hammer screws stupid?
| program_whiz wrote:
| In this case, I see the author's point. The DJ isn't being
| advertised as "a narrow tool to select some random pop tunes".
| If an average person is told this is AI, has a full text
| interface and responds with "sure I'll do what you asked" and
| appears to understand, then they expect it to do what it is
| asked.
|
| We're told its better than people at selecting songs (e.g. has
| the combined wisdom of all music and music experts), basic
| requests like "play the first movement of Beethoven's 7th"
| don't sound hard for an average person with limited / no
| musical expertise. If I said "please play the entire 7th
| symphony", and the tool responds with "sure, I'll play the
| whole thing", then proceeds to play the Beatles, I'd say that's
| a fair thing to point out as a shortcoming.
|
| Its only obvious to tech people that understand that the
| technology has extreme limits and only works well on areas with
| abundant high quality data and labels, and can't be expected to
| reason like a person at all in many cases, that those limits
| seem as obvious as hammer / screw-driver. And that given how
| spotify developed these models, they probably didn't really
| intend classical or test that area -- so it fails despite
| sounding confident.
|
| But maybe we should stop advertising screwdrivers as universal
| intelligence? There's a lot of mott and bailey going on. When
| AI makes mistakes its "just tools, stop expecting
| intelligence." However, when people question the AI hype its
| "humans make mistakes too, LLMs are truly reasoning and better
| most humans already." And "the entire labor economy will be
| replaced, human DJs will cease to exist.".
| memcg wrote:
| I worked for a man who hammered wood screws most of the way in
| and then finished with a screw driver because "the threads made
| by that last few turns were enough."
| danmaz74 wrote:
| As a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in
| their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an
| example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a
| song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a
| feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also
| hindered by this kind of legal shackles.
| binarymax wrote:
| IIRC you can tell Spotify to never play a certain track, but I
| think only as part of a playlist...and it's buried in hidden
| options.
| sd9 wrote:
| What a strange article, from somebody who should understand the
| underlying technology (click on the "books" tab - the author is a
| technologist).
|
| This is not about AI, the author is mostly just pointing out that
| Spotify was not designed for classical music.
|
| This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially "shuffle with
| some voice interludes". There's probably some non-AI code in
| there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.
|
| Besides, AI is not one thing. It's weird to generalise "This beta
| spotify feature doesn't serve me, hence AI is useless". For
| example, when the author says "if it can't do this, how could it
| compose music?", that's a category error.
|
| Honestly the whole post and tone are just baffling. It's mixing
| up all sorts of opinions and trying to put them under one
| umbrella, and about 50% of the text is just name dropping
| specific classical pieces.
|
| I happen to agree that the Spotify DJ feature is terrible, but I
| think this is a very ineffective way of presenting the argument.
| vasco wrote:
| When "me" is most classical music and this is a music platform
| I think the critique is not unwarranted. They could adapt it
| with special system prompts for classical.
| sd9 wrote:
| Probably 50% of my listening is classical. If I want to
| listen to classical I just listen to albums. I've never had a
| problem with this. The concept of a DJ for classical music is
| just kind of weird.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| There's plenty of rest stations that specialise in
| classical music. So it's not that weird of an idea to have
| a "DJ" for classical.
|
| It's just a different kind of DJ. Like how HipHop DJ is
| different from a trance DJ. And a wedding DJ is different
| too.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| By "rest stations" I meant "radio stations".
|
| I missed that autocorrection early. Sorry
| johanvts wrote:
| Spotify is still bad for classical music because you can't
| ex. search by composer or label of find alternative
| recordings of the same piece etc. If you know what album
| you want already its ok, but if you like classical you
| should really consider IDAGIO.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Isn't fundamentally the issue that for any symphony by
| Beethoven or whoever that there are thousands of
| recordings of performances? So if I decide I want to
| listen to a certain one then I also need to pick a
| particular performance that a particular orchestra did a
| certain time?
| zukzuk wrote:
| Apple Music has a totally separate app for classical
| music. It was specifically designed to address exactly
| this.
|
| For each composer, it shows all their well known works,
| and then you can tap on each to see all the recordings of
| that particular piece.
|
| Smart move on Apple's part, if you ask me.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I always wondered why there were separate apps, and this
| makes total sense.
| allears wrote:
| As mentioned above, they bought Primephonic, which
| already had all those features. For myself, I used
| Primephonic until Apple bought it, then switched to
| Idagio, in order to minimize my connection with the Apple
| machine.
| mingus88 wrote:
| I love that app. They have Dolby atmos mixes which seem
| like overkill but I was completely floored putting on a
| double bass work and being completely immersed in the
| center of the sound. Obviously great for large ensembles
| but surprisingly awesome at solo works
|
| And the play history integrates with the main Music app
| systoll wrote:
| And if you want _one_ subscription for popular &
| classical music, Apple Music is miles ahead of Spotify.
|
| Music.app is already better than Spotify at handling the
| relevant metadata. But the dedicated Apple Music
| Classical app is roughly the same as IDAGIO.
|
| (They bought IDAGIO's former competitor Primephonic to do
| it)
| parpfish wrote:
| building recommendation systems for classical music has a
| simple data problem- most recommendation systems (for
| spotify and others) are based on simple user listening
| histories that look at "people that listened to X also
| listened to Y".
|
| this is a problem for classical (and jazz) for two
| reasons a) these genres are not particularly popular on
| the platform so there are few unique users and b) the
| songs are LONG so listening sessions contain fewer songs.
|
| track cooccurance based recs work well for popular
| genres, but these other genres need a different approach
| to recs and that's actually where AI could do really well
| by digging into the unstructured data associated with the
| tracks (sonic analysis of the song, biographical
| information about the composer, details about featured
| soloists, etc) rather than relying on piles of user
| behavior.
| moron4hire wrote:
| You never listen to NPR?
| sd9 wrote:
| I'm British so I guess the equivalent would be Radio 4.
| But no, not really tbh. I just find what I want and
| listen to it. I know some people really like Radio 4
| though.
| rhdunn wrote:
| I'm not in the US, but have listened to various of their
| tiny desk concerts that they put up on YouTube.
| timthorn wrote:
| > click on the "books" tab - the author is a technologist
|
| That's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the
| canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC.
|
| It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.
| sd9 wrote:
| Apologies, I wasn't familiar with his work.
| sutterd wrote:
| I was surprised to see a post by Petzold on this subject. I
| know who he is. But I don't think you owe an apology here.
| I think you made a thoughtful comment. A post like his
| should be critiqued for what it says, not for the author's
| previous work. And, fortunately, other people could give
| context on the significant work he has done.
| ahoka wrote:
| The MF what?
| eps wrote:
| Classes. MF classes.
| zeristor wrote:
| That stuff will never wash out of my mind.
|
| Pascal, C, or C++, it depends what mood they were in.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| For the curious:
|
| > Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows
| applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32.
| MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework
| for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming
| language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data
| structures provided by Microsoft for the development of
| Windows applications. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/difference-
| between-mf...
| okanat wrote:
| That's old info. Now there is also .NET Framework, .NET
| (Core), C++/WinRT and more. In the end all of them use
| either pure Win32 APIs or COM APIs including MFC.
| OJFord wrote:
| His 'Annotated Turing' (a reproduction of _On computable
| numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem_ ,
| with explanation and walk-through) got me into CS vs. prior
| interest mainly in EE.
| jrmg wrote:
| His book 'Code' is his masterpiece, IMO.
|
| It's a tour de force in technical communication. A
| fascinating book for both the Computer Science novice and
| expert.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| "Code" is one of the best books I've ever read. I don't
| usually read 500 page books but this one flew. Even if you
| know most of what's being discussed it's such a delightful
| ride.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Mr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw
| technothrasher wrote:
| > For example, when the author says "if it can't do this, how
| could it compose music?", that's a category error.
|
| That isn't really a category error. It's more begging the
| question. It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music
| is the same ability as being able to compose music, and uses
| that assumption to suggest the conclusion that a failure to DJ
| classical movement would necessarily result in the failure to
| compose same. A category error would be assigning a property to
| AI that it cannot have. It would look more like, "if AI can't
| DJ music, we have no way to know what color it is."
| navaed01 wrote:
| I'm fairly certain Spotify's core meta data adheres to the US
| music industry largely set / reinforby Nielsen. I'm curious
| why the author would want to happen with the feature if not
| move from 1 artist to another
| oasisbob wrote:
| For chart reporting? Am unfamiliar with the Nielsen
| standard, but given the state of musical metadata more
| broadly it's probably not very sophisticated.
|
| Would expect any provider like Spotify to just export the
| reports Nielsen requires, not design their core systems
| around it.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the
| same ability as being able to compose music
|
| And yet an awful lot of musicians are also DJs. It's almost
| like spending a lot of time playing music and watching how
| people react to it give you a good sense of how the
| underlying processes of creating it can work.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| GP was obviously talking about AI's abilities, not
| people's.
| smelendez wrote:
| Also, a DJ isn't typically tasked with playing an entire
| symphony (or pop album, for that matter) on request from
| start to finish. I'm sure there are a handful of DJs in niche
| situations who do this at listening bars and on the radio,
| but it seems pretty rare.
|
| Honestly a human DJ might well do what the Spotify DJ does --
| play a popular piece that matches the outlandish request and
| then transition to other music.
| hirsin wrote:
| To torture the metaphor further - it's also a personal dj,
| with an audience and customer of 1. Somewhat by definition
| there can be no outlandish requests, certainly not "play
| this entire piece".
|
| If I told the DJ at my wedding to play an album front to
| back, and they transitioned to Aerosmith, I'd be tapping a
| friend to run the music the rest of the night.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| There is a long history of using AI to analyze, compose, and
| perform music.
|
| Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: David Levitt shows Music Box
| on his Lisp Machine
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys
|
| Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Music box with Tom Trobaugh
| and drum machine with Jim Davis.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s
|
| Cynthia Solomon has shared a treasure trove of rare classic
| videos of Seymour Papert, Marvin and Margaret Minsky, kids
| programming Logo and playing with turtles, and many other
| amazing things at the MIT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Atari
| Cambridge Research:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604629
| raincole wrote:
| > For example, when the author says "if it can't do this, how
| could it compose music?", that's a category error.
|
| Given the author's background I believe it's intentional
| ragebait. It's as ridiculous as saying LLM can't count the
| number of Rs so it cannot generate grammatically correct
| sentences. No way he really thinks the logic is sound.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Spotify's DJ also isn't an LLM. It's just a shuffle with
| structured interludes and a TTS engine. IIRC it launched in
| early 2023 and has been the same since.
| snoman wrote:
| That explains why it is always/only wanting to play stuff
| that I listened to recently, or in 2023.
| hansmayer wrote:
| The 'author' is not some random social media influencer, he'd
| probably scoff at your silly comment. Ffs, educate yourself
| folks.
| raincole wrote:
| > Given the author's background
| alberto467 wrote:
| Who would even DJ on classical music?
|
| If you have the slightest knowledge of classical music you
| would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you
| would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think you could pick out a movement from this and then a
| movement from that. I can see somebody wanting to have
| classical music playing all day without having to pick out
| specific tracks, like listening to the radio.
| alberto467 wrote:
| I think the auto DJ feature is already well capable of
| that: having tracks playing the all day.
|
| But if you want to preserve the original composition of
| classical music, you have to play the track start to
| finish, preferably with a small pause between tracks as
| well.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have to admit that my rock and pop music listening is
| still album-oriented whether it is The Kinks or The Super
| Furry Animals or Charlie XCX.
| pimeys wrote:
| And then we have artists such as Gas who famously mixed
| classical with dub techno.
| alberto467 wrote:
| Interesting, i never heard of anything similar before, but
| i'm quite sure the classical music fans would also hate on
| him for ruining the original compositions.
| pimeys wrote:
| He is a very influential artist in the techno subculture.
| I don't think anybody hating him for making those
| masterpieces...
| wussboy wrote:
| The blend of classical and techno must come from the
| techno side. I remember many years ago listening to CBC
| Radio as they breathlessly talked about some avant garde
| classical piece that purported to blend classical and
| techno. It was a mid tier modern classical composition
| with occasional cheap synth sound effects. And this was
| ten years after Portishead released their entire first
| album, recorded with an orchestra, or all the work that
| Massive attack was doing.
| recursive wrote:
| William Orbit did an album of electronic arrangements of
| classical music 25 years ago. Not that it prevents anyone
| else from doing it. But it's not a completely novel idea.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, at least 50. Folks applied electronic instruments to
| classical music shortly after they moved out of the
| experimental phase.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach
|
| And there was this fun disco version as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fifth_of_Beethoven
| slfnflctd wrote:
| Remixing art has been done since the invention of art. It
| doesn't ruin anything if the original work is preserved.
|
| No one is required to like it. But the word 'hate' is a
| bit extreme, even in your example. Also, the group
| comprising "the classical music fans" is certain to
| include many who disagree with you.
| yareally wrote:
| I love electronic renditions of classical music. Trance
| does this often (Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, William Orbit,
| Ferry Corsten and others) and it's some of the best work
| they put out. To me, it's like a natural progression from
| classical minimalism, such as Phillip Glass or Max
| Richter.
|
| I've played the violin since I was a kid (only for fun
| now). I can find something I love about almost any
| musical genre and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
|
| BT is a trance dj that's classically trained:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_(musician) and Armin van
| Buuren has classically trained parents
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFanGv_ReU
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1YwlPH_o50
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fNloJAge0 (same chord
| progression as la folia
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7v8zxoEoA_Q)
|
| La folia itself has been "remixed" many times by both
| classical and modern composers
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folia
| pragmatic wrote:
| Why would you even have a classical music station? What is
| public radio even doing?
| dylan604 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRR_(FM)
| santoshalper wrote:
| I believe the person you are responding to was being
| facetious.
| drewbeck wrote:
| What the AI doing now is in fact what classical radio DJs
| do; the author wants a general purpose smart music playing
| robot, not a "DJ" per se.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Deodado?
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and
| you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.
|
| Yet the computer program happily tried to do it anyway. It
| would be much better to fail with a clear error message than
| to try to proceed and emit garbage.
| thayne wrote:
| I think it is totally reasonable to want something that plays
| all movements from one work, then finds similar works to play
| after that.
|
| Sure, that might not be what a DJ algorithm is optimized for,
| but a more generalized AI like an llm should be able to
| figure that out.
| spunky2342 wrote:
| You are very right, using a generalized LLM in combination
| with good music search and metadata tools works very well
| for this sort of thing. I know because I built a platform
| that does this. The big limiter isn't the tech, it's what
| the rights-holders will allow. They maintain tight control
| over their catalogs because renting that intellectual
| property is their entire business model. This makes them
| very cautious about letting any actually useful AI near
| their music and metadata.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It is not uncommon to have parts of a classical music
| movement in a DJ set, even if it lasts only a few seconds.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Perhaps not so strange in that from a practical standpoint many
| "AI problems" are actually "Data Problems" when you start
| peeling things back.
| leoc wrote:
| > There's probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly
| prevent it from playing an album end to end.
|
| Google's Nest speakers have or had similar issues: they'd start
| any requested piece of (at least multi-movement) classical
| music somewhere in the middle and simply defy any instructions
| to start at the beginning, bizarre behaviour for a smart
| speaker.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| Every modern streaming platform seems to be focused on the
| relationship between contemporary singles - who featured on
| what, what's trending, if you like this current pop artist
| you'll like this other one. Setting aside OP's interest in
| classical music this approach doesn't even work for popular
| music from the 60s to 90s when the primary format was the
| album. God help you if you try to use voice commands to play
| Help! (the album by the Beatles) and instead get Help! (the
| title track by the Beatles).
| jrm4 wrote:
| I think _quite the opposite_ for precisely the reason you 're
| saying?
|
| Which is to say, he's doing a very good job of reminding you/us
| nerds that "there should be no excuse for this, technical or
| otherwise." The technology exists to make this work very well
| and has for sometime; I GET why it's not working now, but that
| doesn't make it any less garbage.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The problem with this article is there are more than one way to
| be a DJ
|
| >This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially "shuffle
| with some voice interludes". There's probably some non-AI code
| in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to
| end.
|
| And I would argue that is one of the stupidest ways.
|
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3...
|
| The Complete Playlist argues for shuffling and serendipity for
| achieving accidental surprise and delight and clever
| juxtapositions, something that if you had an actually competent
| DJ could be guided and not left to chance.
|
| A competent DJ makes musical arguments in relation to an aural
| environment in the same way a competent Philosopher may make
| intellectual arguments in relation to an environment of ideas.
| gzread wrote:
| I can tell you're a philosopher, because I do not think of DJ
| music as an "argument"
| j45 wrote:
| Seems pretty harsh for somethign it may not have been designed
| to be good at.
|
| Maybe Spotify works more off lyrics, and classical music
| usually doesn't have lyrics.
|
| I'd love to have AI that could hear music.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Totally agree. And also, this limitation of Spotify probably
| affects 0.00000001% of their users. In other words, it just
| doesn't matter (except to those 3 people)
| pc86 wrote:
| > This is a product issue.
|
| The product organization at Spotify is a master class in
| dysfunctional product organizations. Compare the feature parity
| of the desktop and mobile applications and you'll find random
| features available in one but not the other. Try to do
| basically anything in CarPlay other than select a different
| recently-played playlist and you'll be able to do it 10x faster
| by picking up your phone and doing it there.
| hansmayer wrote:
| > from somebody who should understand the underlying technology
|
| I am really looking forward to the day when the software
| industry implodes and VC capital withdraws, so all of you
| coding-bootcamp-types finally drop out of it and leave it to
| people who always did it primarily out of intrinsic interest
| and not for the money. Some random mmoron on the Internet
| calling out none less than the legendary Charles Petzold has to
| be peak of the absurdity that the current tech industry
| represents!
| sd9 wrote:
| Chill out, you don't know anything about me
| hansmayer wrote:
| Indeed I don't, but your comment was very revealing.
| apublicfrog wrote:
| I have an intrinsinc interest and have been tinkering,
| fiddling, hacking and learning for 30 years. I've done it for
| money before, I've I've always done it for fun every spare
| moment I have.
|
| I've never heard of your man here. Does that make me a lesser
| from your perspective?
|
| I'm sick of this arrogent gatekeeping. Why does someone have
| to memorise names, dates and achievements to qualify as
| someone who loves what they do?
| spunky2342 wrote:
| Spotify is definitely not trying very hard, the author is
| justified in complaining. I had a very similar experience. They
| are in a perfect position to be able to make something amazing,
| but they (and other streaming companies) are somewhat limited
| in what they can do because of their music licensing
| relationships. I was able to build something 100x better than
| their DJ using an off-the-shelf LLM and some well-crafted
| search/metadata tools. It has no problem doing what Petzold
| wanted. It's a much better way to interact with music than what
| the general public has access to now, and I would love to
| commercialize it, but the rights-holders (UMG, WMG, Sony, etc)
| are very protective of what they own. If you want to know more
| reply here or reach out to me at info@tunistry.com.
| Razengan wrote:
| It's amazing: How AI can now generate accurate images from a
| textual description but storefronts and music platforms can't
| recommend suggestions actually matching what I like.
|
| Instead they're just thin veils around paid-promotion.
| keiferski wrote:
| AI DJs for music feel a bit like AIs writing restaurant reviews.
| Possible in theory, but fundamentally I don't really care what a
| machine thinks, I care about what a human, preferably an expert
| human, thinks.
|
| I listen to a lot of DJ mixes on YouTube (Hor Berlin is great,
| for example) and part of the appeal is what this particular DJ
| picks: what kind of music are they listening to in the country
| they're from, how are they interpreting it, what are they mixing
| it with, etc. For some DJs there's also kind of a personal visual
| brand, like musicians themselves.
|
| The idea of an anonymous AI picking an optimized list of music
| kind of defeats the purpose.
| ArtRichards wrote:
| I like using the automatic lists in soundcloud to discover new
| music. Often its hit or miss but it can surface some great
| tracks... Its intentional though, gotta have your finger on the
| skip track and heart...
| keiferski wrote:
| Right but a good DJ introduces you to new music while fitting
| the track into the set as a whole. It's not a random music
| discovery process, and oftentimes I'll end up mostly
| preferring to listen to a song as a part of the set, not
| individually.
|
| To use the food analogy again: sure, if you just eat random
| things on the menu, you might find new foods that you enjoy.
| But it'll be a much better experience if the chef /
| restaurant is introducing you to new foods in an intelligent
| way, not randomly or "We see you like chicken, so try this
| other chicken dish."
| twelve40 wrote:
| no idea how spotify ai specifically works (i don't use that
| service) but:
|
| > fitting the track into the set as a whole. It's not a
| random music discovery process
|
| there have been plenty of attempts to analyze music and to
| automate track matching like the music genome (going back
| to '99) and while human DJ's definitely have their place (i
| actually listen to lots of those) it's not inconceivable
| that a lot of modern music could also be mixed and matched
| automatically with at least half-decent (to a human)
| results.
|
| P.S. found the article itself pretty funny - like a nerdy,
| methodical complaint, just funny to read
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Check out Paul Lamere's talk about playlisting that he
| presented at ISMIR 2010 (The International Society for
| Music Information Retrieval has conferences about all
| this stuff, and Paul founded The Echo Nest, which Spotify
| later bought):
|
| ISMIR: The International Society for Music Information
| Retrieval
|
| https://ismir.net/
|
| Finding a path through the Jukebox: The Playlist
| Tutorial:
|
| https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-
| through...
|
| >Tutorial 4: Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The
| Playlist Tutorial. The simple playlist, in its many forms
| -- from the radio show, to the album, to the mixtape has
| long been a part of how people discover, listen to and
| share music. As the world of online music grows, the
| playlist is once again becoming a central tool to help
| listeners successfully experience music. Further, the
| playlist is increasingly a vehicle for recommendation and
| discovery of new or unknown music. More and more,
| commercial music services such as Pandora, Last.fm,
| iTunes and Spotify rely on the playlist to improve the
| listening experience. In this tutorial we look at the
| state of the art in playlisting. We present a brief
| history of the playlist, provide an overview of the
| different types of playlists and take an in-depth look at
| the state-of-the-art in automatic playlist generation
| including commercial and academic systems. We explore
| methods of evaluating playlists and ways that MIR
| techniques can be used to improve playlists. Our tutorial
| concludes with a discussion of what the future may hold
| for playlists and playlist generation/construction.
|
| The Echo Nest:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest
|
| Paul's blog:
|
| https://musicmachinery.com/
|
| And github repo:
|
| https://github.com/plamere
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think it's impossible or anything, I just don't
| think it would really result in anything particularly
| interesting. The best DJs often add such an obscure
| reference or song, dialogue from a movie, etc. that comes
| from their own individuality. Music recommendation
| systems seem to mostly operate on a tagging/descriptive
| basis, because obviously they don't have real lives to
| draw these references from.
|
| If an AI would make interesting DJ mixes that aren't
| merely collections of similar music, I think they'd need
| to be constructed in a totally different way.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Using recommendation engines feels like wading through the
| sewers. Eventually you find some gems but you have to pass a
| lot of shit on the way. Listening to actual DJ sets is gem
| after gem. Only problem is if you are looking for stuff to dj
| with yourself, most of what they are playing is yet
| unreleased or private edits that never come out.
| nothercastle wrote:
| But how do you find a good dj and then fight Spotify to
| listen to their set list?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I much prefer the human curated 'casts or mix shows from DJs
| with early releases from labels that do a mix while telling
| you the track/artist/release date. These are clearly aimed at
| human DJs rather than the larger public. But as far as new
| recommendations, they are far superior to "automatic" lists
| from any platform.
| bbor wrote:
| Sure, it's not the same as a human suggesting music. But
| sometimes people consume art for the art, not for the curator!
| Both are worthwhile.
| Elidrake24 wrote:
| Sure, and a simple random number generator will use
| significantly fewer resources for the same desired result.
| bbor wrote:
| Surely you'd agree on second thought that Spotify's
| recommendation algorithms are more reliable than pure
| chance?
| dominotw wrote:
| not so sure actually
| SubmarineClub wrote:
| I've always found Spotify's recommendations to be
| _aggressively_ bad, to the point that complete randomness
| would probably be preferable.
| apublicfrog wrote:
| Spotify has spent 5 years pushing podcasts and audio
| booms at me, despite me never clicking one and showing
| interest. Spotify has very little idea what I want, it
| seems.
| wanderingpixel wrote:
| Curation is the future, and those with the depth and breadth of
| knowledge required to do it well will be in high demand. The
| human touch will become a selling point and attract those in
| the know.
|
| While there has always been room for middle-of-the-road
| "content", there have also always been those that seek a higher
| value. I expect that segment to only grow.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I can't really tell the difference between the mixes Spotify
| has been generating for more than a decade, except that the DJ
| picks _which_ mix and then an LLM writes some DJ patter to wrap
| around it. I 've gotten a lot of value over the years out of
| Spotify picking what song comes next when my queue is empty,
| I've been introduced (or re-introduced) to a lot of good music
| this way but there is no magic to it, its just a ML
| recommendation/engagement model like many others.
| dominotw wrote:
| i like going through chatgpt to generate spotify mixes. much
| more personalized.
| wildzzz wrote:
| There's a big difference between a real human DJ, especially
| one at a live event that can read the audience, versus what is
| essentially Spotify shuffle with some LLM voice in-between
| songs. It knows the song coming up next so it can spout off
| some random words it's pulled from various review sites. It's
| not really that impressive once you've used it, the Spotify
| shuffle and the generated song blurbs are the real tech running
| the show.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This guy sounds like he has a canister of his own farts that he
| hooks up when writing his blog posts.
| amoss wrote:
| As the DJ is an interface to shuffle, and the author specifically
| wants to listen to unshuffled music the lack of intelligence may
| not be entirely in the AI.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| A lot of this discussion makes more sense if you know the history
| of The Echo Nest and their acquisition by Spotify.
|
| The Echo Nest was one of the most interesting music-tech
| companies ever built: a music intelligence platform spun out of
| MIT that analyzed audio, metadata, web text, artist similarity,
| genre structure, and playlist construction. Spotify bought them
| in 2014 specifically to strengthen music discovery and
| recommendation. At the time, Spotify said the deal would let it
| use The Echo Nest's "in depth musical understanding and tools for
| curation", and even said the Echo Nest API would remain "free and
| open" for developers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest
|
| https://news.cision.com/spotify/r/spotify-acquires-the-echo-...
|
| If you ever used the old Echo Nest APIs, Remix SDK, demos, Music
| Hack Day projects, or Paul Lamere's experiments, that was a
| golden era. Echo Nest had open APIs for artist similarity, track
| analysis, playlisting, "taste profiles", ID mapping across
| services, and beat/segment-level music analysis. Paul Lamere's
| whole ecosystem of demos came out of that world: Boil the Frog,
| Sort Your Music, Organize Your Music, playlistminer, and later
| Smarter Playlists. His GitHub still points to a lot of that
| lineage, and his blog is still active. In fact, he posted just
| this month about rebuilding Smarter Playlists after ten years of
| use.
|
| https://github.com/plamere
|
| https://musicmachinery.com/
|
| The sad part is that the open developer platform mostly did not
| survive the acquisition. By 2016, developers were being told that
| the Echo Nest API would stop issuing new keys and then stop
| serving requests, with migration to Spotify's API instead.
| Community discussions at the time also noted that some Echo Nest
| capabilities, especially things like Rosetta-style cross-service
| mapping, were not really carried over.
|
| https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/1920
|
| That's also why Spotify's current AI DJ is so frustrating. The
| problem is that "AI DJ" is not the same thing as a system that
| deeply understands musical structure, discography semantics,
| performance history, or classical work/movement hierarchy. It's a
| recommendation + narration layer, not a true MIR-native musical
| intelligence system.
|
| If you're interested in the research side of this field, the
| conference is ISMIR: the International Society for Music
| Information Retrieval, which is literally dedicated to
| computational tools for processing, searching, organizing, and
| accessing music-related data. That community is still very
| active. The ISMIR site describes MIR exactly in those terms, and
| the 2010 Utrecht conference included Paul Lamere's tutorial,
| "Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial."
|
| https://ismir.net/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36482468
|
| >gffrd on June 26, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show
| HN: Mofi - Content-aware fill for audio to ch...
|
| >Yes! It was "Infinite Jukebox," created by Paul Lamere ... it
| was awesome because it would analyse a track, then visualize its
| "components" and you could watch as the new "infinite" track
| looped back on itself and jumped from point-to-point in the
| original track to create an everlasting one. He created some
| excellent products from the Rdio API, and later Spotify ... and I
| believe his analysis engine ended up being the foundation upon
| which Spotify's _play more tracks like these_ capability is
| based.
|
| >Looks like he's moved over to publish on Substack -- there's a
| recent(ish) post reflecting on 10 years of Infinite Jukebox:
|
| https://musicmachinery.substack.com/p/the-infinite-jukebox-1...
|
| >rahimnathwani on June 26, 2023 | next [-]
|
| >However, that wasn't the end of the Infinite Jukebox. An
| enterprising developer: Izzy Dahanela made her own hack on top of
| mine. To make it work without using uploaded content, she matches
| up the Echo Nest / Spotify music analysis with the corresponding
| song on YouTube. She hosts this at eternalbox.dev. It runs just
| as well as it ever did, 10 years later.
|
| >DonHopkins on June 28, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Show HN: Mofi - Content-aware fill for audio to ch...
|
| >I was working on some music retrieval stuff in 2010, so I joined
| the EchoNest developer program and played around with their web
| apis that let you upload music and download an analysis that you
| could use in all kinds of cool ways. They had an SDK with some
| great demos and example code. I discussed it with Eric Swenson
| and Paul Lamere, and had the chance to hang out with Paul Lamere
| and Ben Fields at ISMIR 2010 (the International Society for Music
| Information Retrieval conference) in Utrecht, where they gave a
| tutorial about playlisting:
|
| https://ismir2010.ismir.net/program/tutorials/index.html#tut...
|
| Finding a path through the Jukebox: The Playlist Tutorial:
|
| https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-through...
|
| >Tutorial 4: Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist
| Tutorial. The simple playlist, in its many forms -- from the
| radio show, to the album, to the mixtape has long been a part of
| how people discover, listen to and share music. As the world of
| online music grows, the playlist is once again becoming a central
| tool to help listeners successfully experience music. Further,
| the playlist is increasingly a vehicle for recommendation and
| discovery of new or unknown music. More and more, commercial
| music services such as Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes and Spotify rely
| on the playlist to improve the listening experience. In this
| tutorial we look at the state of the art in playlisting. We
| present a brief history of the playlist, provide an overview of
| the different types of playlists and take an in-depth look at the
| state-of-the-art in automatic playlist generation including
| commercial and academic systems. We explore methods of evaluating
| playlists and ways that MIR techniques can be used to improve
| playlists. Our tutorial concludes with a discussion of what the
| future may hold for playlists and playlist
| generation/construction.
|
| >[...]
|
| Some of the most interesting Echo Nest descendants are still
| around in one form or another. Paul Lamere's current/public
| projects include Smarter Playlists, and his GitHub still
| highlights SortYourMusic, OrganizeYourMusic, playlistminer, and
| BoilTheFrog. Glenn McDonald's Every Noise at Once is another
| major descendant of that tradition: an enormous map of music
| genre space. Glenn's own site still describes it as an
| "inexorably expanding universe of music-processing experiments",
| and the public genre pages now explicitly say they're a long-
| running snapshot based on Spotify data through 2023-11-19. After
| Spotify's layoffs in 2023, TechCrunch reported that Glenn lost
| access to the internal data needed to keep Every Noise fully
| updated, which is why it now feels more archival than alive.
|
| Back in 1998 when I was working on The Sims 1, I proposed in my
| review of the design document something I called "Moody Music":
| essentially a soundtrack plus a synchronized semantic/emotional
| control track that could affect gameplay over time. The idea was
| that music wouldn't just decorate the simulation; it would change
| it: influencing mood, motives, relationships, skills, timing, and
| even triggering events at specific musical moments. I wrote that
| up in my review of the 1998-08-07 Sims design document, along
| with the broader idea of letting the game recognize a player's
| own CDs and fetch associated "moody tracks" from the network.
|
| Don's review of The Sims Design Document, Draft 3 - 8/7/98:
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
|
| >I have some ideas about how the music could effect the game,
| that I will write up more completely later. In a nutshell, the
| people in the house could have a cd or record collection to
| choose from, each record an object that has the sound (audio wave
| and/or midi) and a "moody" track synchronized with the music.
| Playing the music also plays the moods into the environment that
| the people pick up on. Music can subtly effect how people react
| to the environment, objects, and each other. It can effect their
| motives and even their skills temporarily. For example, you might
| be able to clean the house better and faster if you put on some
| up tempo bouncy music. The player should be able to assume the
| role of disc jockey on the radio, and play from another larger
| library of music and commercials, that effect the peoples moods
| and buying habits. The TV of course is another source of mood
| altering temporal media, with commercials and shows that should
| effect different people differently. But the most important part
| of this idea is instead of the game effecting the music that's
| played, the music effects how the game plays! The ultimate way
| for the user to effect the game via music, is to insert one of
| their own CD's into their real computer's CDROM drive, and the
| game would recognize it, and start playing it (maybe with a
| simple cd player interface to select the song). There could be a
| database associating the unique ID number of the CD with a table
| of contents and "moody" tracks that tell how the song effects the
| peoples emotions over time, with "percussion" events at dramatic
| moments of the music that can trigger arbitrary events in the
| game (like provoking a fight that was brewing, or triggering an
| orgasm at just the right place in the song). We hire monkeys to
| listen to well known CD's, and enter time synchronized tracks
| with semantic meanings in Max (like note tracks, and user defined
| numeric tracks) or some other timeline editing tool). Put the
| database up on the web for instant retrieval, so when somebody
| sticks in a new CD, it downloads our "moody" tracks that go with
| it, and it starts playing and effecting their game! Streaming
| emotions over the net! Eventually there should be an end-user
| tool so people can record their own responses to music as moody
| tracks they can use in our games. This mechanism could be used in
| all kinds of games, to varying degrees of effect. I'm not saying
| that music should be the only way to control the game - it's more
| like a subtle background effect, but there certainly could be a
| scenario where you try to accomplish some task (like taming a
| wild beast) by using only your musical taste and timing. The real
| bottom line benefit is that you get to listen to your OWN cd
| collection of music you want to hear, instead of being driven
| crazy by the repetitive music bundled with the game.
|
| In hindsight it was quite adjacent to MIR, affective computing,
| adaptive soundtrack systems, and some of the ambitions that Echo
| Nest represented. That's why I was so excited about The Echo Nest
| in 2010 when I was working with Will Wright at the Stupid Fun
| Club on a music spatial organization and navigation system called
| MediaGraph.
|
| MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed
| for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
|
| >This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I
| developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie
| menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and
| cellular automata.
|
| >It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and
| edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.
| givinguflac wrote:
| 1. Duh.
|
| 2. This author is truly insufferable and arrogant.
|
| 3. Apple Music Classical exists.
| dmix wrote:
| I've had good results from Spotify's DJ, it's basically just a
| memories feature on Facebook
| navaed01 wrote:
| What's interesting is this feature (Spotify DJ) really excels
| when you give it qualitative input "workout music that pairs well
| with a sunrise" - and can deliver stronger results that hunting
| for a playlists
| dsr_ wrote:
| In this article we see proof that the words people use to
| describe a phenomenon influence how they think about that
| phenomenon: what they expect, what they assume, how they reason
| about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
|
| Every time someone calls an LLM "AI", their brain faults a little
| more.
|
| This is the profession of marketing's greatest success:
| inflicting so much damage on the rest of the world.
| lilytweed wrote:
| This isn't really related to the core argument, but I think the
| author would be better served on just about every count by
| switching to Apple Music (Classical). The discovery and
| organization mechanisms are built for classical music first and
| make the whole project of finding, saving, and enjoying the
| material way better. They include PDFs of the booklets, for
| goodness sake! (And let you cross-shop recordings of the same
| piece by different performers so, so easily.)
| satya71 wrote:
| Indeed Apple Music Classical or Idagio. Spotify has never cared
| for classical, because the market is too small for them to
| bother.
| royal__ wrote:
| The real problem with Spotify's DJ is that, if you use it a lot,
| it gets into a feedback loop where it keeps playing the same
| songs that it serves you up because it thinks you like them. It's
| pretty bad at finding new music which is ironic because I find
| Spotify's Discover Weekly algorithm to be quite good (sometimes)
| hnipps wrote:
| I'm not surprised. I used the AI DJ twice, on separate occasions,
| and it played me the same songs, in the same order... Suffice to
| say I have not used it since.
| simonw wrote:
| > Am I naive in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is
| my interpretation of the word "intelligence" too literal?
|
| I wish more people would ask themselves those questions.
|
| Sadly Charles himself didn't appear to conclude that yes, it's
| naive to expect AI to be "smart" (whatever that means) and yes,
| he and many other people get hung up on the word "intelligence"
| in AI, a field that's been called that since the 1950s.
| rafram wrote:
| > I'm aware that many people are unfamiliar with this musical
| tradition, but it forms one of the sturdiest pillars of what we
| casually refer to as "western civilization." Plus, it's a whole
| lot of really enthralling music.
|
| I really had to push to keep reading past this part.
|
| But this piece doesn't really say anything surprising anyway.
| Spotify isn't for classical music. There are other services that
| are.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Spotify DJ is terrible - just like their Apple TV app (which is
| perpetually buggy). However, their radio mix feature is so good
| that it's become the #1 reason I can't switch.
| bronlund wrote:
| This article is definitely not written by AI. No AI I know of,
| will be caught dead sounding like a total asshat.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Does anyone have suggestions for good recommendation engines for
| new music discovery?
|
| Since I've switched from Spotify to Apple Music, Apple's
| recommendations are lousy and I miss discovering new artists and
| songs. Several of my cult favorites were Spotify suggestions I
| never would have found otherwise.
|
| Are there any good recommendation engines, or people mostly just
| use Spotify for that?
|
| I'd be sad if I had to switch back to Spotify but it is what it
| is.
| esafak wrote:
| Basically it's a case of Spotify catering to a young, pop-loving
| audience, at the expense of alternative genres.
| struct wrote:
| I do think the Spotify DJ has been dumbed down a lot since its
| launch ("a'ight, I got you. Here's some songs for your washing up
| session." [proceeds to play the same 10 songs it always does]).
|
| But for classical music: Apple Music Classical is where it's at,
| it understands the relationship between composer, work and
| recording.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Just wanted to second Apple Music Classical. It's cool.
| Plasmoid2000ad wrote:
| Absolutely agree on the dumbing down. I'm guessing it's getting
| heavy use, for many it's probably the default thing to go to -
| so an easy target for cost optimization.
|
| Mine will randomly go "Here's some driving tunes" while I'm
| sitting still, or introduce to me to "The Kings of Leon" when I
| have some of their songs liked and in my playlists. It's pretty
| clear there's not a lot of my data in the the input context, or
| it's not been improved over time.
| cedws wrote:
| I think advertising it as a DJ is a stretch, last time I tried
| it, it was basically just Siri for music. DJing is much more than
| just playing random tracks.
|
| I've been wondering if AI could be used to compose a set that
| rivals real DJs, but it seems like a difficult problem. First it
| needs to select tracks that fit well together, and stitch them
| together to ramp up and ramp down energy over time. Then it needs
| to layer the tracks, which requires an intuition for what sounds
| good and I'm not sure can be done algorithmically. It also needs
| to do engaging transitions which are appropriate for the moment -
| also difficult.
| sanex wrote:
| I think calling it AI is also a stretch.
| zdc1 wrote:
| I do miss What.CD and its catalogue of classical music where it
| was easy to find the different renditions of any given symphony.
| It was the best I've seen (not that I've searched very hard since
| then). Spotify leaves a lot to be desired in that respect.
|
| That being said, Spotify is probably not the best product if you
| listen to classical. If classical were all I listened to, I would
| probably still have an offline collection in a Media Monkey
| library as my main source of listening.
| frankdenbow wrote:
| My gripe with the AI DJ is that it just talks way too much,
| emulating the worst djs.
|
| Songza was able to do this properly years ago which customized
| playlist based on your mood but Spotify just doesnt get it.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Why would anyone use an AI DJ for classical music? The data model
| for modern music and classical music do have some major
| differences, which the author notes. which is why there are
| separate apps, sometimes connected to the same subscription, for
| classical and general music streaming
| lartin_muther wrote:
| I love this. Reminds me of https://playedgar.netlify.app/
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Spotify has to be one of the worst run companies on the planet.
| Despite all the money wasted on a big engineering organization
| that believes it's great, the product only ever gets worse. The
| interface is awful when you actually use it and find how painful
| the little things are. At this point I don't think it's worth
| staying with them above a giant like Apple Music.
| fuy wrote:
| almost all Spotify playlists/radio features are extremely stupid.
| Radios all repeat the same 2-3 songs per artist, doesn't matter
| where you start. Classical pieces in radios are always 1-2
| minutes long etc etc. It was like before AI though.
| 13zebras wrote:
| Excellent. The DJ is a random number generator. No matter how
| good the prompt, the randomness is gonna be there.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Author is right about Spotify: it was designed for pop music, and
| was also designed to de-emphasize albums in favor of individual
| tracks. The end goal is to remove the artist entirely, and just
| play AI pop music that they don't have to pay any royalties on.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Royalty reduction is where I think Spotify is putting in all
| their R&D dollars
| felix9527 wrote:
| The article treats this as AI being stupid, but it's a design
| category error. Spotify is applying rules ("don't repeat
| artists," "mix genres") to a system whose behavior space is
| unbounded. Rules are a blacklist -- there's always a gap.
|
| Real DJs don't follow playlists. They work within constraints --
| energy, tempo, crowd -- and let the set emerge. Better
| boundaries, not more rules.
| radley wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it comes down to radio vs interactive music
| licensing. A general radio license doesn't allow users to pick
| the track they want to hear. They only get a shuffled playback
| and face other limitations like "can't play an album all the way
| through". Interactive licensing allows users to pick exactly what
| they want, including playing full albums, but it's much more
| expensive per track.
|
| It appears that Spotify's engines use a mix of these licenses to
| reduce costs. Since AI isn't explicitly user-made selections,
| it's quite possible that the AI playlist generator is limited to
| a radio license model for playback, simply to save money
| (considering the additional cost of providing AI).
| hluska wrote:
| I'm not sure this article is about the right thing. Rather over
| the last few years of cultivating a Bach obsession, I've
| discovered that streaming services in general are really bad at
| classical music. Without any hyperbole, Apple Music and Spotify
| combined don't have nearly the selection that I have access to
| with an afternoon of digging through a used record store. When
| you get into records (especially European pressings) from the
| 1960s, you get into the heyday of liner notes when they were part
| education and part advertisement.
|
| Some things just aren't meant for shuffle and genres that haven't
| been properly digitized are definitely one.
| IceDane wrote:
| I can scarcely imagine a way to formulate an argument that is
| better at convincing the reader that the author is a grumpy dude
| on the spectrum.
| gos9 wrote:
| The DJ I heard in Portland last night was horrible - I do not
| think humans are capable of creating music!
|
| Doesn't that sound ridiculous?
| ottah wrote:
| Who pays for a Spotify subscription, to listen to out of
| copyright compositions, and recordings that probably can be found
| easily in the public domain? Might as well complain that TikTok
| has no feature length documentary films in IMAX.
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