Discussion

Charles Petzold

spiderfarmer: Now please try again with music that's actually played by DJ's.

jonathanlydall: I briefly tried it when they first launched it, but in less than an hour decided I hated it.Which I really should have anticipated since I generally dislike music radio "DJ"s too and Spotify's AI DJ is trying to be like one.In particular it would do things like start playing tracks with no bearing on anything I'd ever listened to, like local South African music which is very far from universally preferred here. I also got the feeling it was pushing "promoted" tracks with little regard to what I would likely like, just like real life radio stations.I also don't care to have some voice interrupting the music all the time.I was hoping it would kind of be like their other "radio"s, but it would be more explorative to finding more "similar" tracks to what I have listened to, without seeming to get stuck in a repeating play list.I suppose it's a cool gimmick for people who are prefer the broadcast radio experience.

walthamstow: I didn't get past the wanky declaration that he listens to classical, listing out dozens of composers.The term DJ is synonymous with modern, electronic music, anyway.

stavros: Yeah, that's where he lost me too. Strikes me as very pretentious.He didn't even say "classical", he was circumspect with "that moste illustriouse of musical traditionnes".

sambapa: Because most of that list isn't classical music

comrade1234: I've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to track your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring. I much prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set.I usually listen to dublab (los Angeles, cologne, and Barcelona) and nts1 (usually London) and nts2 (location rotates). They have 1 or 2 hour DJ sessions (live or recorded) and your hear some music that you normally wouldn't be exposed to and sometimes you hate it but usually not.

xav0989: While I sympathize with the issue and have experienced similar problems with classical music, I found the listing of composers and the holier-than-thou attitude (because “pop is bad”) grating and soured the rest of the post.

gorgoiler: Ha, despite all that the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a score. Instead “of course” we are looking for a recording, principally keyed by, for example, conductor (orchestra), director of music (choral), and/or a soloist or key ensemble members. Searching by work is like typing in “Hallelujah” to find a version by someone other than Leonard Cohen.Snobbery sniping aside, I empathize with their sentiment, and their work was worth reading. Spotify’s whole UI is far too complicated and I wish they would go the Facebook route of breaking out the separate products into separate apps. Jumbling podcasts, pop music, and covers — sorry, classical music — is a bit weird.

wzdd: He doesn't really even dig into the quality of Spotify's AI DJ apart from pointing out, in a very roundabout way, that it was designed for popular music.Classical is a harder (or at least different) problem and it's why specialist apps like Apple Music Classical exist.

BrissyCoder: "wanky"Austraian/New Zealander detected lol

Closi: I'm not sure we can infer the closing statements from this, i.e:> Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?IMO this is a programming/prompting failure - not a failure in the general capability of 'AI' - although the author seems to imply that it demonstrates some sort of fundamental limitation in AI as a whole, i.e.:> I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?We can show that an AI can understand this with a basic prompt:https://chatgpt.com/share/69b67906-0e18-8012-9123-718fc6422c...This is a minimal base prompt, with no fine-tuning, with the same user prompt, which shows that an AI will respond correctly by default.Presumably either the AI they are using is a weak model, or their prompt is encouraging the model against this (e.g. maybe the prompt says 'return one song based on the suggestion, and then songs from similar artists after')Trying to infer the underlying capability of AI to generate music based on a badly-prompted Spotify DJ feature is always going to have it's limits. The proof of 'can AI compose music' will of course be in the eating of the pudding. I mean of course AI models have already been able to compose classical music to some extent, and can already grasp music theory, so after this point it's just going to be a matter of taste.

arrrg: Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user. All the prompts were crystal clear. Trying to shift any blame on user error is non-sensical stupidity or dumb manipulation in this case.Also, might I recommend looking at the way the world is, not the way the world might be. This is one of the ugly AI tendrils this disgusting industry is putting into everything, bringing ruin to the world. This is the actual reality of it, making the world a dumber, less interesting more stupid place.

mikkupikku: I do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most people are fine with it.

ChrisMarshallNY: Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk.This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music.

Mistletoe: The Spotify AI DJ makes some pretty cool sets for me, but I listen to Hyperpop and Outrun type electronic music, stuff like that. A DJ spinning sets of classical music is pretty weird haha. I’d recommend just listening to the Classical New Releases playlist, which is excellent.

Gigachad: My observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it.Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets which are a million times better than Spotify’s AI dj. Some of this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a surprise change that makes the crowd scream.

mikkupikku: > Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the userUsers are often to blame in many varied cases and there should be no taboo around discussing this. I think maybe some people hear that you should never blame rape victims for rape and then go running wild trying to apply that as a general principle of never blaming anybody who is in any way a victim of anything, even when the "victimhood" is simply some piece of trivial software not working well. But we're not talking about rape so your intense rejection ("disgusting") is completely off the mark.

foltik: Pretty sure they were saying it was a skill issue on the part of the Spotify engineers writing the internal system prompt for their slop DJ.

defrost: Specifically one who disliked The Hard Road: Restrung and Metal in general.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hard_Road:_Restrung

spiderfarmer: I hate this AI slop commenting fad.

asah: Dunno about classical, but Pandora (still) works pretty well for mainstream music.

Closi: > Your reference to prompting is pretty disgusting since you try to shift the blame to the user.I'm shifting 'blame' to Spotify, rather than the user or the AI model - although blame is probably a pretty strong word anyway for what is probably just supposed to be a fun DJ feature.> All the prompts were crystal clear.We don't know what the prompt is, because the FULL prompt will be a combination of the base prompt plus the user prompt. It's trivial to show that a modern model with a minimal base prompt will return correctly (as per my original post), so IMO there is probably something in the base prompt which is encouraging the model to return differently.I wanted to clarify the first two points, but i'll not respond to the rest of your comment as it's a bit overly-emotive (calling what I say disgusting, rambling about the downfall of society as a whole etc).

mrob: Yes it is. "Classical" without further context means any part of the tradition of Western art music with written score. Classical-era classical music is a subset of classical as a whole.

metalman: tiny deskyou have to do your own search and play, but some of the stuff by unknowns and famous artists giving back is profound, they KNOW when they hit it, all live, mostly acoustic and all useing musicians, no tape, no sequencers. listen to one such performance, and maybe you dont need anything else for a week.

lordnacho: But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one?Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend.The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they have spent some time learning what is what in that world.But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the prevailing classification system only.

staticassertion: I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue. Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a great way to find other songs that I would like.I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.

igravious: "I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others."pompous prick

cheeze: The entire thing is written in a curmudgeonly fashion, led by that massive list of musicians.We get it, you like classical music and Spotify is a poor fit. That's... the article?

batiudrami: NTS is truly excellent yes.The streaming app algorithms are bland as hell, built for people who just want noise in the background.

oogabooga13: Youtube music hasn't failed me and their "beyond the beat" AI DJ/Music bits feature has been really solid.

shubhamjain: I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits.Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

Lucasoato: They should create a benchmark and compare AI against the best possible DJing state of the art: Mexican wedding DJs :)

sambapa: Well, Charles would just say that you are one of the ones that dgaf

mrob: >the author exposes themselves as a filthy casual anyway by focusing on the work itself, as if Spotify were looking up a scoreIsn't it the job of a DJ to pick a good recording? Petzold's test seems reasonable to me. As a classical listener, if I want a specific recording I'll just play that recording. The main function of the DJ is music discovery. Perhaps they know of good recordings I haven't already heard.

jonwinstanley: Classical is not good for Spotify because the format is different.Same as Spotify not working for DJ Mixes either.These are probably times you need a different app/service altogether.

defrost: The old stuff is the good stuff alright,(1930s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc(1950s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isIPytpk40(1960s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qssa6ec7faQ

sammy2255: Agreed. Besides, the "AI DJ" dude is an African American male with no way to change voice or personality. Virtue signalling at its finest.

sneak: Spotify is filled with payola, and their claims about it are intentionally extremely misleading while not explicitly fraudulent.It shows up in all Spotify-generated playlists, so I refuse to listen to them. I assume their shitty AI recommendations are similarly filled with cancer.

xvector: This writeup is insufferably pretentious.

worksonmine: > This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence?I would guess it's for the same reasons that you're ignoring all the fixes necessary to get to an actual "full blown native Mac app". It's rarely a single sentence unless your app does something trivial like printing Hello World.

onion2k: I've tried using Spotify and similar services that try to track your preferences but they're just, I don't know, boring. I much prefer the challenge of a human-picked DJ set.The significant problem that AI faces in automatically curating something is that the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on either similarity of the thing being curated which doesn't work because people don't want things to be too similar or to dissimilar, or it's randomness which doesn't work because it's too discordant, or it's based on patterns in the data (people who listened to X listened to Y, so recommend Y to people who listen to X) which works but only if the listener's taste aligns with the majority. If you introduce multiple sources of patterns in the data you quickly lose any variation and things stop being interesting.This is a hard problem. No one has ever really solved it, despite Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc investing hundreds of millions into the space. Humans are probably just too fickle to accept that an algorithm can choose for us. It lacks the social proof that a tastemaker like a DJ brings.

xattt: [delayed]

joegibbs: "Disgusting" is a strong term to use regarding a poor quality music chooser

kgwxd: Spotify should have twitch-style, human hosted, radio shows (intentionally no video) with live chat. with full access to the catalog, it would easily bring back communities built around good music.

secretsatan: Ugh, couldn’t read it, could the guy be less smug about liking classical music

qsera: >That should be good for at least a few things. Right?The example you described, no.It is not good because its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...

bspammer: [delayed]

bob1029: I asked this thing to play me some instrumental EDM tracks and it couldn't handle the task. I don't think classical music is even remotely viable. Spotify already really sucks at it. Pouring AI on top definitely won't help the main issue which is gaping holes in relevant content. It just doesn't exist on the platform in most cases.

Rodeoclash: Which weirdly enough has made Soundcloud one of my primary sources for finding music I enjoy, via DJ sets.

titanomachy: > I don't listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses [list of like 50 composers]... one of the sturdiest pillars of what we call "western civilization"> The use of the word “song” for instrumental music — that is, music that is not sung and hence is not a song — is borderline illiterate.This guy comes across as incredibly obnoxious. It's shit like this that gives classical music a bad rap as stuffy and unapproachable.But yes, Spotify and the like are terrible for classical music. Apple Music has a separate app for this, which does a pretty good job and addresses most of these complaints.

drdaeman: > its quality and adherence to the spec (the single sentence) is and will always be probabilistic...Isn’t the same true for a lot of individual programmers and even teams?Especially so if they were provided just a short one-sentence vision instead of proper documentation.

qsera: Oh, I was not comparing it with out-sourced development and was instead comparing it with developing it oneself.Sure, outsourcing is similar, but the difference is one uses a process that is inherently probabilistic, while other just depends on the probability of you getting a good team.

mrob: Radio DJ isn't the same as club DJ.

nottorp: Basically it's because what "AI" can do is extremely different from what "AI evangelists" claim it can do.I haven't seen a single "AI evangelist" address any concerns and limitations, other by than "throw more AI at it" or "it will get better in 5 years, just in time for cold fusion".

visarga: > the input data is usually pretty terrible. It's based on either similarityI found luck just using a LLM to chat about my tastes, what I like, what kinds of songs I want to discover ... it does a good job and is able to also give me background.

herrherrmann: Nice idea! Let’s hope that some other platform executes this (let’s be honest, Spotify doesn’t care about humans in any way).

tetris11: NTS and Radio6, genuinely enough to expose me to new things

amadeuspagel: > I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others.There are apps specifically dedicated to classical music and there are many youtube channels for classical music, with sheet music[1], with visualizations[2], with videos of concerts.Spotify and it's drop-in competitors were never good for classical music. This article is just another rant on this issue, by someone to whom classical music is so important, a pillar of western civilization, but not important enough to look for other ways to listen.[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin

Vespasian: That would be good experimnent and could actually work.I would love to try it however they would have to solve "global song availability" and "Sponsored songs only Stations".But if they did try there is the chance of some niche community.

mrob: The classical classification system is equivalent to the classification of cover versions in popular music. Of course, most audio software handles cover versions poorly too, but it's not like it's a completely unknown problem.

thaumasiotes: > I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.You do realize Pandora is still there, right?

thaumasiotes: I've found a lot of great music through Pandora.It's very miss-or-miss; you need to be willing to thumb down 95% of what Pandora thinks you'll like. But with enough care, it's a good discovery channel.

drdaeman: I suspect the unspoken premise was that it was all in context of people who - just like those who hire contractors - don’t have the capacity to do it themselves.In this context I suspect a SotA LLM could sometimes beat some cost-comparable UpWork professionals in both quality and spec adherence. In other words, if you need an app and can’t do it yourself and have a tight budget, LLMs are quickly becoming a viable option for more and more complex apps.

barbs: Glad I wasn't the only one. Love how he goes on to say how he's aware that people are unfamiliar with all those names he just dropped.

zokier: Is hammer appallingly stupid for being bad at driving screws, or is the person trying to hammer screws stupid?

grudgen: This is really going to be a problem for the large overlap of people wanting to use Spotify AI features and people who like classical music...Perhaps file a ticket for the devs and go back to listening to the albums without AI

pjmlp: I rather do my own mix tapes, or mix MP3, taken from CDs that I still buy, occasionally directly from bands after concert.Otherwise a few European radios, even if with ads, as a second goal is to keep my foreign language skills up to date.Also a few lucky algorithm gems on YouTube, or the KEXP, Tiny Desk, ARTE Concerts, Colours channels.Never got into Spotify.

mikkupikku: That New Order cover is tight, thank you for this.

Etheryte: These are great, thank you so much for sharing the recommendations. I tuned in to NTS and casually just kept on listening for a very long time. If anyone else has good recommendations, I'm all ears. Thank you.

danmaz74: As a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice.I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.

ChadNauseam: [delayed]

kaelwd: What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r: So you want to bring every conversation on the topic down to the level of the most idiotic fanboys making the most outlandish claims that are easiest to shoot down? If this was JUST directly in response to these “AI evangelists”, a group which I’ll ignore that you’re unfairly treating as a monolith, that’d be fine.However, every post here that says the slightest thing positive about AI’s abilities is always met with “yeah well it can’t do my dishes for me so it’s total garbage!” BS.You yourself are bringing up “making a compiler” out of nowhere. Nobody but you brought that up here. Yet you’re using it as the be-all end-all yard stick, simultaneously completely ignoring and completely proving the argument that you’re replying to.It’s amazing how big a % of the developer community has started acting like intentionally unintelligent petulant children the moment they’re faced with an iota of the sort of job security risk they’ve been inflicting on others for decades. Some of you need to grow up.

lancebeet: I think what you're describing is what people working with recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity, while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.

phony-account: Spotify are currently making a big deal about not writing any code - I attended a webinar this week where one of the slides proudly trumpeted this fact:“ 0 lines of codeSpotify's best engineers have not written a line of code since December.”

xvector: When was the last time you heard of a DJ doing classical?

worksonmine: > go back to listening to the albums without AIThe way things are going I'm not sure how much longer we will have that option.

walthamstow: Englishman. Where do you think the antipodeans got it from.

Zopieux: As of a few months ago I get AI slop tracks in virtually all YTM automatic playlists, after a few normal tracks, so I abandoned the platform entirely.Call me when Spotify and YT collaborate with Deezer on labelling AI music as such. Yes, it's a nuanced concept, but the soup YT was serving me was extremely obvious, which was easily confirmed by checking the throughput of the "artists".

n2d4: It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early on, many thought chess would be one of the last things mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a waste of time.In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically mean the AI DJ is bad at everything. > Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests? You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!

iLoveOncall: This guy sounds like he has a canister of his own farts that he hooks up when writing his blog posts.

sd9: What a strange article, from somebody who should understand the underlying technology (click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist).This is a product issue. This feature was not designed for this use case.AI is not one thing. LLMs are different from preference engines are different from the models that generate musical compositions are different from image generators. They use some of the same concepts, but as of today, AI is not some all encompassing black box that can do everything. The model that produces the DJ audio is different from the model that selects the tracks to play.It’s weird to generalise “This beta spotify feature doesn’t serve me, hence AI is useless”.Honestly the whole post and tone are just baffling. It’s mixing up all sorts of opinions and trying to put them under one umbrella.We get it, you like classical music, you don’t like AI, you don’t like what Spotify represents, you don’t like corporations serving mainstream users for profit. All reasonable stances in isolation, but as it stands the text of the article just feels like a collection of category errors.

timthorn: > click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologistThat's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC.It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.

sd9: Apologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.

keiferski: AI DJs for music feel a bit like AIs writing restaurant reviews. Possible in theory, but fundamentally I don’t really care what a machine thinks, I care about what a human, preferably an expert human, thinks.I listen to a lot of DJ mixes on YouTube (Hör Berlin is great, for example) and part of the appeal is what this particular DJ picks: what kind of music are they listening to in the country they’re from, how are they interpreting it, what are they mixing it with, etc. For some DJs there’s also kind of a personal visual brand, like musicians themselves.The idea of an anonymous AI picking an optimized list of music kind of defeats the purpose.

ChrisMarshallNY: It's the "pick any one" nature.You have to classify every title as one type.How would we classify Zappa, or Secret Chiefs 3? Are they jazz, alternative (a worthless category), rock, pop, heavy metal, comedy? Depending on what you listen to, it could be any one of them. Also, each song could be in its own category. Boz Skaggs was known for disco-style pop, but he was an outstanding blues performer.This is really a music industry problem, and software just reflects that.

vasco: When "me" is most classical music and this is a music platform I think the critique is not unwarranted. They could adapt it with special system prompts for classical.

sd9: Probably 50% of my listening is classical. If I want to listen to classical I just listen to albums. I’ve never had a problem with this. The concept of a DJ for classical music is just kind of weird.

scott01: This appears to be a troll account, that only ever engages in heated discussions. Please, do not engage with it, folks :) On a related note, has anyone noticed actual bots commenting on HN? I sometimes feel discussions are a bit weird here.

WickyNilliams: Mr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw

BoredPositron: Sorry but at this point this beta product is over 2 years old. It should be better by now. Unlike your "baffling" comment at least he wrote the article himself.

sd9: The Spotify DJ feature is terrible, I agree. That doesn’t mean I find the linked article compelling.

earthnail: Ex spotifier here.Classical isn’t harder. It’s just so niche that leadership at spotify never bothered. It has a whole different taxonomy; it’s composer, not performer based etc.Spotify isn’t against new taconomies outside of weatern pop music. The India launch, where ragas were super important, shows it. But the Indian markey is vastly larger than the small (albeit loud) number of classical music enthusiasts.All that is to say, it’s a business decision, not a tech or AI problem.(I really like classical music, too, btw., so please don’t read this as me not respecting that user base.)

ahoka: The MF what?

snakeboy: The whole pitch of AI is that the model is going to be able to make exploit general knowledge outside of the local scope of the problem, just like a human would do. So I would also expect that it would be able to transfer his knowledge of classical music learned in language training, and apply that to the Spotify database.

ArtRichards: I like using the automatic lists in soundcloud to discover new music. Often its hit or miss but it can surface some great tracks... Its intentional though, gotta have your finger on the skip track and heart...

keiferski: Right but a good DJ introduces you to new music while fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery process, and oftentimes I’ll end up mostly preferring to listen to a song as a part of the set, not individually.To use the food analogy again: sure, if you just eat random things on the menu, you might find new foods that you enjoy. But it’ll be a much better experience if the chef / restaurant is introducing you to new foods in an intelligent way, not randomly or “We see you like chicken, so try this other chicken dish.”

amoss: As the DJ is an interface to shuffle, and the author specifically wants to listen to unshuffled music the lack of intelligence may not be entirely in the AI.

program_whiz: In this case, I see the author's point. The DJ isn't being advertised as "a narrow tool to select some random pop tunes". If an average person is told this is AI, has a full text interface and responds with "sure I'll do what you asked" and appears to understand, then they expect it to do what it is asked.We're told its better than people at selecting songs (e.g. has the combined wisdom of all music and music experts), basic requests like "play the first movement of Beethoven's 7th" don't sound hard for an average person with limited / no musical expertise. If I said "please play the entire 7th symphony", and the tool responds with "sure, I'll play the whole thing", then proceeds to play the Beatles, I'd say that's a fair thing to point out as a shortcoming.Its only obvious to tech people that understand that the technology has extreme limits and only works well on areas with abundant high quality data and labels, and can't be expected to reason like a person at all in many cases, that those limits seem as obvious as hammer / screw-driver. And that given how spotify developed these models, they probably didn't really intend classical or test that area -- so it fails despite sounding confident.But maybe we should stop advertising screwdrivers as universal intelligence? There's a lot of mott and bailey going on. When AI makes mistakes its "just tools, stop expecting intelligence." However, when people question the AI hype its "humans make mistakes too, LLMs are truly reasoning and better most humans already." And "the entire labor economy will be replaced, human DJs will cease to exist.".

vulkoingim: I've been working on and off on something [1] that tries to address this problem through somewhat manual curation. You choose what genres you're interested in, and get auto updated playlists created from your music library.I have a few other experimental features in the pipeline that will expand the music selection, but they are not there yet.[1] https://riffradar.org/

majkinetor: Good stuff in any time, just harder to find:(2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hPNPInXh0(2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-c-9G52jU(2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1EDbkl2CU(2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvcNvVZl9AA(2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2sx-HHTBw

heraldgeezer: >just harder to findBut this is the problem. Before, people where naturally exposed to classical and jazz and OSTs etc.This is the problem with current society.

noodletheworld: What a baffling take.There is no confusion as to which “AI” the OP is referring to.The author wrote:> Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that the programmers need no longer take responsibility?They are pondering, in general, if the non deterministic nature of AI is an excuse for bad products.The Spotify DJ is a recommendation engine.Its bad.Its a lazy, bad implementation that relies on AI, instead of deterministic algorithms; eg. identify requested music and play it.Instead it wants to “try something different”.If you press play on the music player on your phone, do you expect it to “try something different?”…or, is AI making developers and product managers lazy?It is not a complicated take, and the example is, to me, pretty compelling.

heraldgeezer: Thanks for these tips. I even find my Youtube gives me better recommendations than Spotify.https://www.nts.live/radioRight now NTS Guide to: Italian Library, Soundtracks and OSTShttps://www.dublab.com/I avoid ghetto music but aslong as it has classical, OSTs, calm jazz, trance etc :)A bit turned off by a certain section but I can ignore it.

scott01: Check out mixes by Blackest Ever Black label (now defunct) from NTS and Berlin Community Radio, listening to them literally feels like a journey. Funny part, sometimes they use a contrasting tune to end a mix, which creates a feeling similar to movie credits roll in the end.

DonHopkins: A lot of this discussion makes more sense if you know the history of The Echo Nest and their acquisition by Spotify.The Echo Nest was one of the most interesting music-tech companies ever built: a music intelligence platform spun out of MIT that analyzed audio, metadata, web text, artist similarity, genre structure, and playlist construction. Spotify bought them in 2014 specifically to strengthen music discovery and recommendation. At the time, Spotify said the deal would let it use The Echo Nest's "in depth musical understanding and tools for curation", and even said the Echo Nest API would remain "free and open" for developers.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nesthttps://news.cision.com/spotify/r/spotify-acquires-the-echo-...If you ever used the old Echo Nest APIs, Remix SDK, demos, Music Hack Day projects, or Paul Lamere's experiments, that was a golden era. Echo Nest had open APIs for artist similarity, track analysis, playlisting, "taste profiles", ID mapping across services, and beat/segment-level music analysis. Paul Lamere's whole ecosystem of demos came out of that world: Boil the Frog, Sort Your Music, Organize Your Music, playlistminer, and later Smarter Playlists. His GitHub still points to a lot of that lineage, and his blog is still active. In fact, he posted just this month about rebuilding Smarter Playlists after ten years of use.https://github.com/plamerehttps://musicmachinery.com/The sad part is that the open developer platform mostly did not survive the acquisition. By 2016, developers were being told that the Echo Nest API would stop issuing new keys and then stop serving requests, with migration to Spotify’s API instead. Community discussions at the time also noted that some Echo Nest capabilities, especially things like Rosetta-style cross-service mapping, were not really carried over.https://github.com/beetbox/beets/issues/1920That's also why Spotify's current AI DJ is so frustrating. The problem is that "AI DJ" is not the same thing as a system that deeply understands musical structure, discography semantics, performance history, or classical work/movement hierarchy. It's a recommendation + narration layer, not a true MIR-native musical intelligence system.If you're interested in the research side of this field, the conference is ISMIR: the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, which is literally dedicated to computational tools for processing, searching, organizing, and accessing music-related data. That community is still very active. The ISMIR site describes MIR exactly in those terms, and the 2010 Utrecht conference included Paul Lamere's tutorial, "Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial."https://ismir.net/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36482468>gffrd on June 26, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to ch...>Yes! It was "Infinite Jukebox," created by Paul Lamere … it was awesome because it would analyse a track, then visualize its "components" and you could watch as the new "infinite" track looped back on itself and jumped from point-to-point in the original track to create an everlasting one. He created some excellent products from the Rdio API, and later Spotify … and I believe his analysis engine ended up being the foundation upon which Spotify's _play more tracks like these_ capability is based.Looks like he's moved over to publish on Substack -- there's a recent(ish) post reflecting on 10 years of Infinite Jukebox:https://musicmachinery.substack.com/p/the-infinite-jukebox-1...>rahimnathwani on June 26, 2023 | next [–]>However, that wasn't the end of the Infinite Jukebox. An enterprising developer: Izzy Dahanela made her own hack on top of mine. To make it work without using uploaded content, she matches up the Echo Nest / Spotify music analysis with the corresponding song on YouTube. She hosts this at eternalbox.dev. It runs just as well as it ever did, 10 years later.>DonHopkins on June 28, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Show HN: Mofi – Content-aware fill for audio to ch...>I was working on some music retrieval stuff in 2010, so I joined the EchoNest developer program and played around with their web apis that let you upload music and download an analysis that you could use in all kinds of cool ways. They had an SDK with some great demos and example code. I discussed it with Eric Swenson and Paul Lamere, and had the chance to hang out with Paul Lamere and Ben Fields at ISMIR 2010 (the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference) in Utrecht, where they gave a tutorial about playlisting:https://ismir2010.ismir.net/program/tutorials/index.html#tut...https://musicmachinery.com/2010/08/06/finding-a-path-through...>>Tutorial 4: Finding A Path Through The Jukebox -- The Playlist Tutorial The simple playlist, in its many forms -- from the radio show, to the album, to the mixtape has long been a part of how people discover, listen to and share music. As the world of online music grows, the playlist is once again becoming a central tool to help listeners successfully experience music. Further, the playlist is increasingly a vehicle for recommendation and discovery of new or unknown music. More and more, commercial music services such as Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes and Spotify rely on the playlist to improve the listening experience. In this tutorial we look at the state of the art in playlisting. We present a brief history of the playlist, provide an overview of the different types of playlists and take an in-depth look at the state-of-the-art in automatic playlist generation including commercial and academic systems. We explore methods of evaluating playlists and ways that MIR techniques can be used to improve playlists. Our tutorial concludes with a discussion of what the future may hold for playlists and playlist generation/construction.>[...]Some of the most interesting Echo Nest descendants are still around in one form or another. Paul Lamere's current/public projects include Smarter Playlists, and his GitHub still highlights SortYourMusic, OrganizeYourMusic, playlistminer, and BoilTheFrog. Glenn McDonald’s Every Noise at Once is another major descendant of that tradition: an enormous map of music genre space. Glenn's own site still describes it as an "inexorably expanding universe of music-processing experiments", and the public genre pages now explicitly say they're a long-running snapshot based on Spotify data through 2023-11-19. After Spotify's layoffs in 2023, TechCrunch reported that Glenn lost access to the internal data needed to keep Every Noise fully updated, which is why it now feels more archival than alive.Back before 2000 when I was working on The Sims 1 era, I proposed something I called "Moody Music": essentially a soundtrack plus a synchronized semantic/emotional control track that could affect gameplay over time. The idea was that music wouldn't just decorate the simulation; it would change it: influencing mood, motives, relationships, skills, timing, and even triggering events at specific musical moments. I wrote that up in my old Sims design notes, along with the broader idea of letting the game recognize a player's own CDs and fetch associated "moody tracks" from the network. In hindsight it was quite adjacent to MIR, affective computing, adaptive soundtrack systems, and some of the ambitions that Echo Nest represented. That's why I was so excited about The Echo Nest when I was working with Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club on a music spatial organization and navigation system.https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus Prototype developed for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Clubhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc>This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata.>It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.

rrr_oh_man: For the curious:> Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data structures provided by Microsoft for the development of Windows applications. [0][0] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/difference-between-mf...

lozenge: How could software engineers in London and Stockholm understand the effects of racial segregation on music preferences?

AlyssaRowan: Well, it's less of a technology problem than it is an industry one. You can have multiple entries in the genre list and they're freeform, for example Ambient;Electronic, in both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. For Vorbis Comments, you have multiple GENRE= tags. Some players support this.In my interactions with distributors, it seems streaming services tend to support up to two genre classifications; though they're pretty outdated and general (even more general and dated than the Winamp genre list). I don't think they use the metadata presented much in the classification; in fact Spotify does its own estimation of 'energy' and other subjective emotions using various classifier algorithms.

sd9: I guess I’m just separating out the fact that I agree with the OP from my criticism of the way the argument was presented.

twelve40: no idea how spotify ai specifically works (i don't use that service) but:> fitting the track into the set as a whole. It’s not a random music discovery processthere have been plenty of attempts to analyze music and to automate track matching like the music genome (going back to '99) and while human DJ's definitely have their place (i actually listen to lots of those) it's not inconceivable that a lot of modern music could also be mixed and matched automatically with at least half-decent (to a human) results.

vintermann: It has been tried. I don't remember its name, but I remember that they have changed names at least once. It's a pretty obvious "app" for Spotify's API which they opened up a few years ago.

Gigachad: Does it even make sense to DJ classical music? It’s done with electronic music to keep a continuous energy level for hours.

Gigachad: Using recommendation engines feels like wading through the sewers. Eventually you find some gems but you have to pass a lot of shit on the way. Listening to actual DJ sets is gem after gem. Only problem is if you are looking for stuff to dj with yourself, most of what they are playing is yet unreleased or private edits that never come out.

gorgoiler: I am indeed a human. The variable quality of my contributions here ought to attest to that!My grandfather was a typesetter and print designer. My other grandfather was part of Gill’s circle and his bookplate was inscribed by Gill. My first and only kickstarter in which I participated was Linotype: The Movie. I am currently reading Jury’s Type Designers of the Twentieth Century. I also have Peace’s catalogue of Gill’s inscriptions on my desk. Justin Knopp from Typoretum set my personal card from his digitized collection of rare founts. I’m interested in type and page design.But mostly I just like iOS’s automatic replacement of 2x hyphens.

eps: Classes. MF classes.

I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?

sneak: > I’ve heard people claim that an AI can compose music. But how can that be when it can’t even grasp basic concepts in music?Why do people who hate AI think that every use of the term AI is referring to the exact same software program?

I’m aware that many people are unfamiliar with this musical tradition, but it forms one of the sturdiest pillars of what we casually refer to as “western civilization.”

projektfu: More like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.