SmartQ Logic

[danfoord]

@Stephen Healy - our discussion in a different thread got lost, and the thread was locked (for other reasons) so wanted to re-open this discussion (previous comments below for reference):

I've been listening to different SmartQ results - I seem to have much more appropriate results, if I clear my listening history first, and then start with a fresh playlist or queue. So I understand, does SmartQ base the recommendations on what's in your queue, or your uncleared listening history?

If it's the latter, I can see why I have had some very odd results.... I may have been listening to dance music yesterday (or last week!), but today decided to play a coldplay best of playlist (for example)... SmartQ then adds a bunch of dance music to the queue, which seems very off, compared to the current listening vibe / genre.

Just checking if this is the reason? If I clear the history before listening, then the above example I get much more appropriate results... Snow Patrol, Travis, Kaiser Chiefs etc etc

Listening history can be quite long, over multiple days / weeks / listing sessions... so if it's based on this I can see why it would then appear to be pretty random, rather than similar to the current ambiance

Previous thread:

I'm sure SmartQ will be a continuous process and get tweaks/adjustments in the future, but as Dan says generally it will pull relevant music from all the tracks that were most recently added to the queue before that queue then runs out. So, the greater variety of tracks that were just added, the more variation you will get in related artists and genres that will play. It could be possible that there are one or two 'flukes' where, for example, a dance track could be a cover of a song from a totally different genre but is still credited to the original artist as a contributor, and then starts playing from that composer - I'm thinking along the lines of a dance/lounge remix of Satellite of Love (originally by Lou Reed), then suddenly you are listening to The Velvet Underground etc...

danfoord: I've seen (heard!) what appears to be some strange results... but I'll do some more listening and post a few examples for feedback if useful. I saw the other comment on smart mixes... (also a great addition by the way!).. perhaps a consideration would be, to extend these smart mixes to randomly select from a streaming catalogue if desired, rather than only whats in the users library / virtual library.

 

[Stephen Healy]

Hi Dan!
I'll need to check on this, but my understand was that it should only go off the current queue technically, but then the exact behaviour thereafter will depend on if SmartQ is set to balanced or more towards new or existing. I've been giving this a test on Balanced mode so far, and generally i find that music that seems to be new discoveries are very much of the same flavour of what was in the queue, but there is also a few existing tracks from my library that are added but seem to have a bit of a bias to recently-imported or recently-favourited rather than perhaps being very genre-accurate.
The behaviour may also depend a bit on the source of the music - do you have TIDAL or Qobuz connected, and do you play more from them than local files?

 

[danfoord]

ok, thanks. Would be great to know what you find.
I'm currently running in balanced mode, connected to Tidal. I play a mix of music, but I would say in general more from my local library, than from Tidal.
I've got a pretty vast catalogue - ~1400 albums / ~28k tracks, across about 60 genres (tags), if that helps.

 

[Stephen Healy]

I have checked and am told the older History is not factored in to SmartQ, or nothing older than the last 5 tracks anyway. So in your case reported above, I am not sure if just a bit of fluke - the test here might be to try and seriously shift the SmartQ behaviour to the one extreme or the other in terms of New discoveries or Existing content, and just keep testing/repeating. If you seem confident there is an inconsitency then the best I can suggest is to send post screenshots of the queue/recent history to show what SmartQ tracks have appeared relative to the queue, and we can try to make a determination as to how/why SmartQ made those selections.

 

[danfoord]

I have checked and am told the older History is not factored in to SmartQ, or nothing older than the last 5 tracks anyway. So in your case reported above, I am not sure if just a bit of fluke - the test here might be to try and seriously shift the SmartQ behaviour to the one extreme or the other in terms of New discoveries or Existing content, and just keep testing/repeating. If you seem confident there is an inconsitency then the best I can suggest is to send post screenshots of the queue/recent history to show what SmartQ tracks have appeared relative to the queue, and we can try to make a determination as to how/why SmartQ made those selections.

Thanks @Stephen Healy . I will run a few more experiments when I get a chance and report back.