Machine Learning and MP3s 228
dan moore writes "Students at Caltech and Harvard have developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns. It then channels its knowledge into generating streams of music that the people themselves would like to listen to. Intuitive, accurate, and finally someone has done it. Check out the website to get one of the available plugins. Another interesting approach to digital music."
Random playing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Random playing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Random playing (Score:1, Interesting)
A personalised 128kbps stream, you can skip the songs you dont like, it learns and your personalised stream gets better
Re:Random playing (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what this is, really. Personalized data mining. And all the prosecutor has to do is say, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, observe. He listens to Emminem. Consider that fact when you consider the verdict."
Re:Random playing (Score:2)
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, observe. He is black. Consider that fact when you consider the verdict."
Re:Random playing (Score:2, Interesting)
you are just randomly moving over songs that you like - even though you perhaps like some songs more than others - you are not likely to have many songs in there that you really dislike.
so it sees what you like and then recommends from there.
Others... (Score:5, Informative)
Yet none get the job done right.
Re:Others... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Others... (Score:3, Informative)
cool project... (Score:3, Funny)
"Who wants Synapse?
Listeners of the MP3. Students. Elevator operators. Makers of other media players. Programmers. Gangsters. Punks. Nerds. Really big nerds. Even ones from Yemen. Yeah, plenty of those. Competitors. Winners. People who exercise to Rocky music. Will Deringer. Audiophiles. Revolutionaries. Even Canadians. Quality people. Gastroenterologists. Bums. Lots of bums. Evil geniuses. Classics professors. Chinese people. Wine connoiseurs. Businessmen. Rabbis. Dew drinkers. Sherpas. Dictators. Professional servants. People with special powers. People who come through in the clutch. You. "
I like them!
Re:cool project... (Score:4, Funny)
At some point in every man's life, he's bound to find himself in bed with a Chinese girl. It may happen suddenly, and you may not remember how it happened, but it will happen -- I guarantee that. When the time comes he needs to be ready. He needs his full arsenal at hand. And by this I mean music. Too many times has the playlist run short on soft acoustic guitar songs, quieting the room to an awkward silence and giving the Chinese girl a chance to reconsider what she's about to do. I've seen it happen, and it's not pretty.
As a matter of fact, it's happened to me. And so we have spent the better part of the last six months of our lives making sure it doesn't happen to you. Because if it ever does, you won't be able to say "Why the hell doesn't my MP3 player just know what songs I want it to play?"
We've got you covered. Use the Brain.
Very "Dead Poet's society"-ish... "the ultimate purpose of all communication is... to seduce women!"
Daniel
Re:cool project... (Score:4, Funny)
Geek is about to score, music runs out,
girl reconsiders. Geek then starts programming
project to make him COOLER???
It's a sad sad world...
Re:cool project... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, if you're more a hardware guy like myself, and you're at a bar and that damn Internet Jukebox thing craps out (again...) and the moron who serviced it last forgot to lock it and you know the guts of the thing (it's a real PC in there - serial, USB, etc.) and you walk over and re-seat a couple cards and then reboot it and she gets all her music back...
Yes, I've had to do this a couple times now (and it really does work with some o
Re:cool project... (Score:2)
girl reconsiders. Geek then starts programming
project to make him COOLER???
Hey if the Matrix existed before AI, then the above is in the correct order of events. It would happen.
But people are lazy... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it could learn something from my mixes. But overall, this sounds like a much less useful technology than those previous "find out what other people who really like this song listen to" programs...firefly was one I think, way back in the day? Sort of like Amazon's "people who bought this CD also bought..." but on a per-song basis.
Re:But people are lazy... (Score:5, Informative)
Methinks you'd like audioscrobbler [audioscrobbler.com], which is somewhat like firefly
Re:But people are lazy... (Score:2)
But wouldn't the accuracy of something like that rely on other people not being lazy with their playlists? I know I am....so I'm not gonna be helping the stats either.
Re:But people are lazy... (Score:2)
It also helps to crank up the granularity. Albums and Artists might yield better hits than just tracks alone.
Yes, it's been done before (Score:1)
Smart Playlists? (Score:4, Informative)
Check it out: http://www.apple.com/itunes/smartplaylists.html
Synapse? (Score:2)
Re:Synapse? (Score:3, Funny)
yes, unfortunately.
Re:Synapse? (Score:2)
You know like,
1. have a hottie for a wife. Bang hottie nightly.
2. With only a handful of friends, write a piece of software that will revolutionize communications. And of course assume that somebody else will gladly provide the satellites to make it all work.
3. Smite Bill Gates in-person.
HEY, IT COULD HAPPEN!
I had a vaguely similar idea (Score:4, Funny)
I started working on a similar Winamp plugin to kind of give me a heads up, but then I figured I'd just see the used tampons in the trash...
Re:I had a vaguely similar idea (Score:2)
Re:I had a vaguely similar idea (Score:2)
Privacy Whore (Score:1)
People change (Score:5, Interesting)
This type of system of past trait analysis has failed before, hasn't it???
Re:People change (Score:3, Interesting)
Should be an easy change - maybe have mood as a sort of dock icon, and allow it to be queried by all of these applications that would then switch profile.
Re:People change (Score:2)
For example...I get in the mood to listen to all of a certain type of music, or a specific band...I dont get in the mood to listen to the songs i have listened to 30% of the time before. Although, this is a great idea, I think that it could become more advanced with groupings and selecting either an auto-grouping or a specific group. Maybe some simple folder manipulation or playlist manipulation could work to do this independantly of the program
Re:People change (Score:2)
For example...I get in the mood to listen to all of a certain type of music, or a specific band...I don't get in the mood to listen to the songs i have listened to 30% of the time before. Although, this is a great idea, I think that it could become more advanced with groupings and selecting either an auto-grouping or a specific group. Maybe some simple folder manipulation or playlist manipulation could work to do this independently of the program</I>
Actually you have a moment of gen
Already Exists! (Score:4, Informative)
Check out Last.FM [last.fm], they are very good. I've found a load of new artists from there. It is all stream based (128kbps) and they have a massive flash development section starting for open source goodness.
There's also the (all open source) Audioscrobbler project.. see my
RJ
Machine learning is a powerful tool (Score:5, Interesting)
Analysis indicates that I am 99.9% likely to want to see ZhAng Ziyi in a plastic raincoat going down on Jennifer Lopez in ripped SCUBA gear (or the reverse, I'm not picky.) Now, if "the Brain" can FIND such porn for me instead of just making playlists, I might get some use out of it! Teach the damn thing to know when the women are fat and skanky so it won't download lousy porn, and I'll be sold.
Seriously:
There is of course the question of our definition of self, and how it might evolve as computers become more sophisticated. The distinction between the self and the environment, when our nervous systems are physical processes influenced by and dependent on "external" factors, is fundamentally artificial.
When I use a hammer, a tool for doing physical work, it becomes like a part of me.
When I use a computer, a tool for doing intellectual work, should I regard it any differently?
The music I listen to has fundamental impact on my mood, on my posture, on my creativity and critical evaluation of ideas. If I am continuously communicating with my computer regarding my taste in music, and if my computer continuously responds by playing music, it becomes difficult to draw a meaningful distinction between my computer, which is a device, and my self, which does the thinking.
OH GOOD LORD I'M RUNNING WINDOWS XP! GET IT OUT OF MY BRAIN!
ka-blowie!
NO CARRIER
Re:Machine learning is a powerful tool (Score:3, Insightful)
A combination of NN based recognition [usc.edu] coupled with Eigen vectors [scheib.net] for a standardised dimension (for the pic) might just be able to do it
Its not rocketscience you know, just pr0n
@( * O * )@
Re:Machine learning is a powerful tool (Score:2, Funny)
Let's call it "The other, only slightly smaller Brain".
--
O<
Why isn't this a copyright violation? (Score:2)
High School Senior Project..... :) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:High School Senior Project..... :) (Score:2)
i assume thats what you want........
if they went to your school you should at least provide them the decency of reading their damned website!
Re:I don't care if its a winamp plug-in, I want XM (Score:2)
I am a simple man, with simple needs...and winamp does just fine there. Altho...winamp 3 sucks proc power like crazy...
Re:High School Senior Project..... :) (Score:2)
Anyone heard of Last.FM (Score:1, Informative)
Check 'em out for some great new music from independants and small/medium label stuff
Changing moods?? (Score:2)
I'd rather listen to random music on the radio.. I don't like the idea of someone out there, sitting and monitoring me.... like MS does.
Re:Changing moods?? (Score:2)
I was thinking the same thing. I can go from Slayer to Yanni to Pink Floyd to Iron Maiden to Brian Eno to David Bowie in the span of about 15 minutes. I'd almost LOVE to see what kinda play list it suggests for THAT kind of listening.
Re:Changing moods?? (Score:3, Funny)
I have a WinAmp plugin installed that detects if my mood ever moves to "Yanni". If it does, my computer then kicks me square in the nuts.
Re:Changing moods?? (Score:2)
Also why play a Burger King commercial just before a song that vaguely reminds people of the McDonald's theme unless McDonald's is kicking in a little money.
If they are not doing this now they probably will be after reading this post!
Time Travel!! (Score:1)
I guess the softwave I've been using for the past few years came through a time portal!! Music Match has had this feature for a long time.
Listeng tastes (Score:4, Interesting)
*That* would be imposibile to substitute with a learning machine.
I also think for a lot of people, they like a song because it's already familiar (they've subconsiously heard it in a store or a few dozen TV ads), and suddenly hit that point where they like that song and actively persue it. Unless the machine learning system were somehow able to track everything the person heard, It couldn't substite this either.
Re:Listeng tastes (Score:2, Informative)
That's one of the reasons that I use AudioScrobbler [audioscrobbler.com].
My brother lives about 500 miles away from me and we can see what each other is listening to. I'm pretty comfortable listening to just about anything in his playlist.
He's a freshman in college and I'm an old fart. This allows me to learn about a lot of new music.
Re:Listeng tastes (Score:2)
Actually rating the stuff after you've heard it is up to you.
Sounds cool, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
My tastes in music are varied wildly, and I often will select a small set of my MP3s based on mood; will this system be able to determine that when I code I like to listen to classical but when playing games, alternative music is the thing? Or will it just play it all at once, unaware of the correlative patterns that would link the timing of music selection -- just mashing everything together into one massive playlist? (Given that nothing, not even time of day, can help determine what I want to hear, I have some serious doubts their system can handle my preferences as well as I do.)
Truly "smart" programs often aren't really; the defining line I draw is how well they handle pathological cases. For example, have your dictation software transcribe the following sentence: "The village yeoman, Hugh, hewed two yews to use in the upcoming archery contest". I'm not guaranteeing it will choke, but it sure won't be pleased with you, despite the grammatical perfection of the sentence. However, any human hearing that will immediately make sense of it. Unsurprisingly, it is the simple algorythms (like naieve Bayesian statistics for spam filtering) that seem to best manage the complexity of real life while still failing gracefully.
Re:Sounds cool, but ... (Score:2)
Sounds nice to me. I've been playing with it today and it looks like it's already starting to get me. Kinda cool.
Re:Humans are not as superior as you think... (Score:2)
Likewise, have you ever tried punning to
Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:5, Interesting)
This intelligent mp3 playback stuff seems like a really good idea to me; learning algorithms can be astonishingly effective, and even if it only when I hit "next track" halfway through a song it would help. However, I'm still looking for an mp3 player I like. I really like iTunes, but it's not perfect because I only have OSX on my laptop (Linux my desktops, where I want mp3 playback most).
Stuff I like about iTunes:
Other features I want my mp3 player to have, but which I've never seen done:
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:3, Interesting)
For a start, I do understand that Brain is supposed to be snagging stuff from the net according to my tastes; my central but utterly obscured point is that I'd rather get a player that can handly my own mp3s to my total satisfaction before getting fancy with one that can seek out new mp3s for me. Let's walk before we try to run.
However, I think this sort of learning algorithm can be sensibly applied to my personal collection; for e
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:2, Interesting)
You might like Rhythmbox [rhythmbox.org] a bit better than GQmpeg or xmms but it depends how you weight your different needs. It doesn't look like ass and it has neat metadata but 1. no viz, 2. no ID3 editing, and 3, no moon on a stick.
This is assuming a gtk2 app is acceptable, you can get it running-without-crashing for enough time to build up useful playlists and use it enough to make the metadata actually have an effect.
If you can't, there was a fork/branch [verbum.org] a while back that add's streaming management and is relativ
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:2)
Well, having apt-getted i
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:2)
You haven't seen Synergy [wincent.org] yet, have you?
Your right linux mp3 players mostly suck ass (Score:2)
For now I use Zinf since its the only one which seems to makes an effort to let you organzie your music library in an easy manner. See a screenshot here http
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:2)
Actually its been working for me for over a year now, but it doesn't have a GUI so it doesn't yet fit your description of not looking like ass.
Its Java (so it should work perfectly well on Linux) and it does have request mode (so that you can request a song, or ten, or a whole playlist) and when it runs out of requests it picks the next song based on the current songs meta-data... which right now you still have to enter yourself.
But its been playing music at my house, 24 hours a day, 7
Re:Still searching for my perfect mp3 player (Score:2)
This really annoyed me, too, until someone told me that iTunes can do it already. Turn crossfading on, set the time to 0, and hey presto! It occasionally seems to get confused and crossfade over a second or two, but most of the time it's seamless. (Best to turn off the automatic level setting, Sound Check, as that works on a tra
I don't WANT to hear the same crap over and over (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly, I listen to Radio 1190, [radio1190.org] the CU Boulder station. I'd say that I enjoy about 1 song in 4. I keep listening because I find out about local bands that I'd never hear, I hear indie bands (not just bands running on the "indie" branch of a major label) and I get DJs who love what they do. (here's where I give mad props to Milkman Dan)
What's your spiffy MP3-scanning-neural-network-plugin going to do with me, eh?
--
Re:I don't WANT to hear the same crap over and ove (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't WANT to hear the same crap over and ove (Score:2)
What I want is to be able to find the stuff I haven't heard recently in my music collection.
this guy is one to watch... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:this guy is one to watch... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, he has a Slashdot account: SkyIce [slashdot.org]
Re:this guy is one to watch... (Score:2, Informative)
Machine Learning parts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Machine Learning parts (Score:2, Informative)
I haven't used their system - but if it generally sucks if not many people have used it, and then gets much "smarter" over time and as more users (and usage) increases - then I would suspect that is what they are using as well.
Essentially you have song A, and then that points to a list of songs (after listening to song A, people then tended to listen to song Z, Y, and
Nothing but an advertisement for their mp3 player. (Score:2)
I dont see a use for this software.
Damn (Score:2)
You know... (Score:3, Funny)
Fantastic! (Score:2, Funny)
Any projects along the same lines... (Score:5, Interesting)
That is, say I have all my music appropriate tagged for artist, year, and music type (say through MusicBrainz or something similar). Maybe each track has it's own classification for those CDs that have 'various artists' or that the artist goes into a number of different styles, or whatever. You also have tracks from some CDs that are meant to be played without a break between them ("Dark Side of the Moon" for example has a couple of tracks like this).
Now, what I'd LIKE to do is to have my mp3 player look at the current song, then using a combination of random factors and some expert knowledge to select the next song to play as to have a nice subtle shift in music tone. Right now, the random feature in most music players could easily put up a grunge track right after a classic track, then into some 60s rock. This is not necessarily wrong, but it's a bit drastic.
I've considered a way to build up a finite state machine of the various musical types as typically defined by the MP3 ID tags, such that each type is a state, and you can only effectively move to very related types in the FSM. (A random factor with possibly some weighting would be used to determine which state to go to: if you are currently at "80s Synthpop", you have a good chance to go to "70s Pop" or "90s Pop" and a slight chance to move to "Electronica", for example). Such a FSM would need a lot of community suggestions, and maybe the end result would require some net-lookup table as to get the current FSM status.
So the program as I see it would look at this FSM, the artist, and other details (again, if there's a song that should follow it, it gets higher weighing), the program generates a weighted list of tracks to go to next, hits the RNG, and pulls out the next track. At which point it repeats itself. Various aspects, such as the weighting on the genre, artist, or play order, could be included. Additionally, the FSM should allow for a "completely unrelated" jump to a different genre that's not necessarily related to the current one, but with some chance as set by the user. Thus, with this program in play, if you have a good select of CD tracks, you can have the playlist progress slowly through genres, thus not having massive mood changes during the playlist, unless you have set it up as such.
I know there are programs that can generated weighted playlists from your input , such as LongPlayer, but this only looks at your ratings, and doesn't try to do anything tricky on the list otherwise.
Mind you, the way current MP3 players work, this would most likely be done by generating a playlist from your current song selection, which you then feed to winamp or whatever. A plugin that does this dynamically would be best, but I don't think a lot of these mp3 players have that type of ability builtin, and instead, you have programs like LongPlayer that call out to WinAmp to only play the song, LPlayer doing the playlist selection.
Does anyone know if such projects exist yet, or is this even something the community would be interested in?
Hmmmmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you spend most of your time playing Unreal Tournament 2003 with winamp in the background, and so this software learns that you like ripping violent music about 90% of the time.
Then you bring home the aforementioned Chinese girl and you put on some soft guitar music and just and things are becoming interesting, the song ends, and the idiot "Brain" decides a little Rob Zombie is just what you need, based off past experience.
Half the time I don't know myself what I want to listen to...It's too closely linked to my mood to be modeled in a purely statistical manner unless my mood levels out because of some wierdness (i.e. I smoke a lot of pot so I listen to a lot of Grateful Dead, or my significant other dumps me and I listen to really depressing breakup music for a month.) Otherwise, I'm going to be oscillating all day between different types of music, so something which may please me in the morning may get skipped bigtime by the afternoon.
But even THAT isn't reliable; I could be mellow, listening to mellow stuff on Friday morning, then WHAM! Major programming meltdown at a big client! I have to mobilize my tired brain cells with brain crushing rock/metal! A reversal of my otherwise "normal" progression from violent to mellow during the course of the day, which itself is often severly affected by how much I have to deal with my boss.
I don't see how such a thing could be truly accurate unless it has the facility to somehow read my mood. I can think of several ways to do this, but I doubt blush reflex scanners, heart rate/ekg monitors, voice stress monitors, or neural feedback chips are included with the software.
I'm not sure I'd want it to be accurate anyway. Seems like it would be too easy to get lulled into a pattern, with no new input. Kind of stale. Unless it can read a new song and figure out, statistically whether or not I would like it, which sounds more like a Turing test than anything else. Maybe worse; my S.O. can't figure out what the hell I like, so if a computer COULD, well, I'd probably finally be able to write off the opposite sex.
I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Hmmmmmm. (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmmmm. (Score:2)
It'd be cool to put them together, somehow.
Client/Server mode? (Score:2, Interesting)
ummm.. (Score:2, Funny)
I think i'll pass on this ;)
embrace randomness (Score:2)
This sounds like a tool for control freaks to find patterns and reinforce those patterns in themselves over and over. Patterns breed stagnation. This is the whole problem with commercial radio.
I say embrace randomness. That's why I prefer to listen to streams instead of local mp3s anyway. In fact I would like to see a tool which mixed hundreds of streams into a single stream. When a song ended on one stream, it would find another stream where a song was just beginning and switch to it.
Besides, con [cam.ac.uk]
Some clarification (from one of the programmers) (Score:2, Informative)
I want to offer the following information about the project. The majority of development effort went into building the Brain. The Synapse player is just something we threw together to get the most from the Brain's functionality. We will probably never port Synapse to other systems since more than enough players already exist. Synapse does work under Wine though. We do have plans to bring the Brain to other systems, and we've
Re:Some clarification (from one of the programmers (Score:2)
But anyway, thanks for trying.
So far I'm not impressed... (Score:3, Informative)
What's worse, the app stayed on top of all my other apps, smack in the middle of my primary monitor, with no way to move it. So, I had to work on my secondary while it chugged away.
Ok, fine. Told it where the MP3s were, and it imported all the song info. I believe I was allowed to move this window, although I can't totally remember.
Fired it up. Black on dark blue background. Um, tough to read to say the least. Switched to the 'playlist' screen and tried dragging n dropping an m3u playlist into the screen, a la winamp. No dice, wouldn't load.
Ok, can't find any place to manually add files without exploring the little music database it built. Open the database tree and, holy crap, what a piece of shit. I wanted to listen to Linkin Park's Meteora CD, so I scroll waay down to linkin park, and expand the tree. Ugh. Flat file listings, by song name. Crap. Can't find Meteora.
Now, I know that this is kind of a different MP3 player, and I had every intention of RTFMing before really using it, but come on. It should at least be intuitive enough for me to be able to load some songs without having to read the instructions.
I closed Synamps and fired Winamp 3 up. Maybe I'll go back and try it out again, but I'm not as interested as I was when I started.
You All Are Wrong About What This Does (Score:2)
Brain opens up port 8541 !! (Score:2, Interesting)
The uninstall did NOT work. I had to find the
I felt SO stupid for spending time on this. "Brain" is either some very bad engineering or it's a latent trojan.
Programmers? (Score:2)
Click on P, click on R, click on I, click on N, click on T, click on F, shift-click on 9...
Am I the only one thinking that the mouse to a programmer is the same as a tricycle to a fish?
Re:No source, no XMMS plugin... (Score:1)
Thiere media player using the technology looks interesting too. I like thier names too
No - he's focused (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody has obviously already taken then/than (which is a known high runner) as their special calling.
So, if you always wanted to be a spelling/grammer nazi, but didn't have time to police ALL of Slashdot, get involved in the new paradigm: focused spelling/grammer nazi activism!
Act fast before the cool ones are taken:
* there/their
* to/too/two
* you/your/you're
and the ever popular:
* it/its/it's
Hurry! Some other spelling/grammer nazi may take your choice!
Re:No - he's focused (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No source, no XMMS plugin... (Score:2)
Of course I'd be much happier with a native Noatun plugin ('cause XMMS is a memory pig), but whatever.
Re:No source, no XMMS plugin... (Score:2)
<flame type="obligatory">
Now, is that comparison counting the 150MB of KDE libs that have to be loaded just to start Noatun, or not?
</flame>
Re:No source, no XMMS plugin... (Score:2)
Yeah, I know this is flamebait
Since I like to work in KDE (after all, the apps I use most are Quanta, KATE, Konqueror and Kmail and Korganizer), no I'm not counting the KDE libs.
If I'm not working in KDE, I use XMMS...on the odd occasion I need the extra memory to compile big stuff or something, I use Blackbox as it is small and fast and XMMS does use less memory compared to loading all
Re:No source, no XMMS plugin... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't run Windows, then you're not going to be able to run 100% of Windows software- there's just no way around it with things as they are.
Either suck it up and wait, or don't complain that you have to install Winamp to use a plugin specifically made for Winamp.
I like (and run) Linux as much as the next guy, but making comments like that as soon as software is released causes people to appear incredibly ungrateful. Cut the kids some slack, i'm sure your XMMS plugin will be d
I wish I knew why it was insightful... (Score:2)
scratch that (Score:1)
Apocalyptica... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.spitfirerecords.com/Apocalyptica.htm
They rock, classically.
WWJD? JWRTFM!
Re:Apocalyptica... (Score:2)
Re:how is this any different... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mind you, i haven't been able to get Synapse running on my machine since first hearing about it near the start of the year (under XP, despite emailing the Synapse site for help, and after two reinstalls for non-connected problems) so i'll just stick with Foobar and Winamp 2...
Re:how is this any different... (Score:2)
I think the aim is to introduce new music to people by seeing what people with similar tastes to you are listening.
You may well be right about the result though, as many people have pointed out the technology needs a lot of work and even then may never be able to
Re:Finally (Score:2, Interesting)
and then no matter what they listen to, it just always recommends Kenny Loggins songs.
If I had more free time and didn't already have a backlog of projects that I want to work on, I'd totally do that.
Re:Weighted Randomness (Score:2)
So show it in your comment. Practically every other sentence on the Synapse site is "we don't use a central databse" or "this only relies on the songs you choose to play" yet you started spouting off about it judging "collective tastes" having it judge from what you download. How else are people supposed to take that?
As to the question of providers, I'm amused that you assume the only way to obtain music is through commercial channels. Unless you mean to claim that all music is b