

How good is Google’s Instant Mix? - hillad
http://musicmachinery.com/2011/05/14/how-good-is-googles-instant-mix/

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chapel
He addresses this in his article, but you really can't evaluate competitors to
your own service in such a manner. Not only were the testing criteria highly
subjective, the fact that songs he considered 'WTF' in the lists were the
negative marks.

I know music is a very subjective subject, I really think he could have been
more objective about the whole thing. Maybe using other peoples music
collections and getting their own personal opinions on which songs work and
which songs don't. Add to that, have other people rate the playlists he
generated, so it wasn't just his opinion.

Also, wtf about Genius only getting 10 marks against it for not doing Beatles
playlists? I'm sorry, if you hold the criteria that any songs that are out of
place are considered negative, no songs in a playlist should be worth 24 'WTF'
points. Not that it matters in the comparison, and it was nowhere near close.

I don't have access to the beta, and at this point don't really care about it,
but this just screams as self promotion. I think it would have been a lot more
respectable if he had been more objective concerning the tests he used.

~~~
omaranto
Nitpick: an empty playlist has no songs out of place, so it should score 0
WTFs (I don't understand how you got length(empty)=24). Giving Apple some WTFs
instead of giving it 0 is clearly more in the spirit of the test than
following the criterion to the letter would have been.

~~~
kelnos
While that might make sense in using a logical definition of what a "WTF" is
in this context, assigning 0 WTFs for the inability to generate a playlist is
useless for the purposes of this comparison.

From my perspective, I'd say an empty playlist is worth 24 WTFs, in the sense
of "WTF, I expected 24 similar songs and got 0!"

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I disagree.

Would you rather be given no results or bad results? I agree that no results
isn't good but I'd rather an application that actually identified it couldn't
do a good job than one that just threw a load of junk at me.

I think a score of 50% or so is probably about fair. It shouldn't get a good
score certainly but I'd certainly rate it higher than one which just produced
nonsense.

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Tyrannosaurs
Anyone else curious about why the Beatles returned nothing on iTunes?

[Note: All this applies to Beatles tracks ripped from CD rather than purchased
via iTunes.]

I've just tried Genius (updated immediately before) on a selection of Beatles
tracks in iTunes - Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine, Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and not one of them produces a
playlist.

Even before they were selling Beatles tracks enough people will have ripped
them from CD to have the data to produce playlists so it seems unlikely (but
not impossible) that it's data related, which suggests that it's either an
odd, very specific error or intentional.

What's stranger is that for some (but not all) of the tracks it will make
Genius recommendations to buy...

Anyone any ideas? Some strange part of the Beatles licensing deal perhaps
though that would be very odd as really who gains anything by that?

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kefs
So, Google should purchase The Echo Nest.

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Androsynth
I have two thoughts on this: 1-As has been mentioned multiple times on HN
recently, many of the best minds of our generation are working on the
algorithms that go into products like genius. They are basically the same as
recomendations, online advertisements, etc. Its not surprising that theyre
really damn good at this point. 2-Google probably doesnt care about the
product itself, more likely it just wants to mine the data that gets put into
it. Like goog-411, the service is just a conduit to acquire data.

~~~
nl
_2-Google probably doesnt care about the product itself, more likely it just
wants to mine the data that gets put into it. Like goog-411, the service is
just a conduit to acquire data._

To what end? Unless Google is trying to make sure that when its software
becomes sentient and takes over the world it has good taste in music (heh) I
can't see much use for the data beyond building a recommender.

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MikeCapone
Could this be because this service is so new that they haven't yet had the
benefit of gathering lots of data and stats from users?

~~~
lordlarm
I too believe so.

Let Google build their product first, it is still a beta, for a reason. Music
recommendation is close to impossible without lots of data - and it becomes
unfair to compare Google Music with iTunes Genius, which has been on the
market in 3 years.

~~~
brianwhitman
(again, i'm the co-founder, grain of salt time, but check it out yourself) but
The Echo Nest makes amazing similarity judgments and playlists without any of
the data that you think Google needs to wait for. We crawl the web and analyze
the audio and figure out what people are saying about music and what it sounds
like. We don't need usage data at all to make recommendations. No usage data
went into the EN results in the OP.

~~~
MikeCapone
Fair enough, but if their technique is based on mining data from users of the
service, then let's wait a little while and do the comparison again.

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tintin
I think it would be more interesting to recommend music by mood instead of
genre.

Jazz doesn't mean a thing. When I'm happy I don't want to listen to down jazz
although it's jazz. Maybe I would like some happy funk and metal as well.

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andrewflnr
It would be interesting to run these songs through Pandora and compare the
results.

