Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] automatic rating and weighted random

[Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin mail utexas edu>]

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Colin Walters wrote:
| Hi,
|
| One thing that popped into my head last night while explaining to a
| friend about Rhythmbox's weighted-random playback is the potential
| negative interaction between it and the autorating bits.
|
| Let's say you start up Rhythmbox in weighted-random, viewing your whole
| music collection (or just a large subset).  You let it play for a
| while.  Those songs that were played increase in rating.  Now, you close
| Rhythmbox and go home for the day.  The next morning, you start again in
| the same way.  Now however, the songs that were played before are *more*
| likely to be played again.  And when they are, this will increase their
| rating, making them even more likely to be played again...  There's a
| feedback cycle here.  I'm not sure how bad it is, or whether we should
| even worry about it.

You don't need to quit and restart rb for this to happen; if autorating
works the way I expect, you get feedback even between one song and the next.

| But maybe it would make sense to disable autorating when we're in
| weighted-random playback?  Or maybe just disable the positive weighting
| parts, and keep the negative rating when you skip, etc.

The point of autorating is that songs you like more get played more. It
would be counterproductive to turn off autorating at the only time you
can see its effects. It's possible that the rating or weighting
algorithms need to be tweaked. If anything, it's probably the weighting
one since imms (where rating came from) would have had exactly the same
problem. Also, keep in mind that the weighting we're using penalizes a
song for being played recently. (Sidenote: If you skip a song, the
last-played time doesn't get updated, so the song isn't penalized.)
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