I spent a couple days this week at Microsoft HQ in suburban Seattle. The company was showing off ideas devised and developed in its research labs around the world.
Most of the concepts I saw are years away from finding their way into commercial products — many may never hit the market — but I thought I’d share some of the more interesting tidbits via the blog.
One concept that I particularly brought intelligence to the shuffle feature on music players. Rather than a truly random shuffle, which might play gangster rap right after a Bach concerto, smart shuffle asks you to pick the first song and then it plays tunes that share similar musical traits.
The software chooses songs by analyzing all the tracks in your music library on more than a dozen criteria and assigning each one a number that indicates how similar it is to your initial choice. (The Internet radio service Pandora does this to create custom streams of music based upon one song or artist you select.)
Smart shuffle won’t work all that well if you have a small music collection, but it worked quite well in the demo I saw and it would be easy to see it included in some future update to Microsoft’s Zune software.
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