Entries in "CASPER"
The Return of CASPER
This post is not related to Knoware, but an old half-finished project called CASPER.
CASPER is a recursive acronym standing for Casper Artist-Sorted Playlist Entropy Reducer. The idea relies on the fact that there are two extremes dominating the way people can sort a playlist: alphabetically or completely random. Since the former would be a strange way to listen to music, most people go with the shuffled approach. In my experience, the reasoning behind listening to a shuffled playlist is to promote variety. But while complete chaos might increase variety, it certainly does not maximize it. Some people notice that their media players seem to have an affinity for certain artists or songs. So I came up with a method to increase the variety of any given attribute in a playlist.
The method places songs throughout the playlist such that items with the same key (for example, songs by the same artist) occur as far apart as possible, and it does this for every song in the list. For example, if the playlist contains 3 songs by X and 3 songs by Y, one result might be X2-Y3-X1-Y2-X3-Y1, where the order of the songs by X and Y are random (so there are lots of possibilities for even such simple cases). With large playlists, this careful song placement is much less apparent, so it appears random. The total entropy of the shuffled sequence is decreased, but the variety is increased.
I've decided to release some simple, documented Python code demonstrating the algorithm used for CASPER. This should make it easy for anyone to implement this shuffling method into their media player if they so desire. If your media player can easily make use of Python, it would probably take less than a minute to do. Check out casper.py if you're curious. Running the script as-is will produce a simple example. Requires Python 2.4 or higher, but is easy to port.
The full source code of the linked file is in my extended entry if you're really lazy, but it's probably formatted poorly and won't have syntax highlighting.