Training iTunes

iTunes Remote Learning Edition

Here’s a quick proof of concept Yahoo widget player for iTunes, that learns what songs you do and don’t like based on what you skip and replay.

All it does is increment the rating of a song when you use the back button to replay, and decrement it’s rating when you skip it. The inc/dec amount is configurable in the preferences. Works best with a Party Shuffle (to play higher ratings more often) and perhaps with a smart playlist to limit songs to 1 or more stars. If you don’t have many song ratings I’d suggest setting all the songs in the playlist to 2 or 3 stars, to give you a baseline.

It’s of dubious value atm, and I have no idea if I’ll ever do anything else with it, but I’ll already have an idea feature #2 - Automatically setting your iTunes ratings based on a song’s relative play count.

It’s a hack of the standard iTunes Remote.

And a screenshot, not that it shows anything: