From the irate stats department...
Started: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 22:16
Finished: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 22:33
I got bored, and decided to tabulate what the distribution curve looks like on the music I've rated on irate. I honestly wasn't quite certain how it would look, but the results are interesting.
Here's what it looks like, as of a few minutes ago:
| Rating Category | # of Tracks |
|---|---|
| "Love it" | 14 |
| "Cool" | 33 |
| "Not Bad" | 77 |
| "Yawn" | 100 |
| "This Sux" | 53 |
I started by using the interface to sort by rating and manually counting. Not only did this prove somewhat painful and prone to human error, but I also couldn't count "This Sux" using this method, since they immediately get sent to /dev/null after being given a 0 rating.
So, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place, and used a few lines of perl to run through trackdatabase.xml. Now I have all the info, and know it's accurate.
What might we conclude from the results of this study?
I could say a few things, but I think I'll leave the floor open. Or maybe the data speaks for itself, and needs no further comment.
by Bitscape (2004-01-13 23:09)
I know some consider it silly to reply to one's own post. But since this web site is pure vanity anyway, I'll do what I damn well please. After posting, I thought of something more to say.
Part of what prompted me to grab these numbers was that whenever I randomly glance through my irate list, it sure seem like there are an awful lot of 2's ("Yawn") in there. Naturally, the statistics confirmed my suspicions.
2 (yawn) is the rating I generally give when a song doesn't particularly inspire me, but I don't find it terribly annoying either. Clearly, out of the music databases irate draws from, there are a LOT of songs that fall into that category. (But there are still more than enough good songs to make it worthwhile to use.)
One thing about irate that sometimes annoys me is the way it keeps all the Yawn songs around on the hard drive indefinitely, even though it doesn't play them very often.
In certain cases, I like the way it works, because sometimes, if I listen to a song in the wrong mood, I might not like it at first. Later, when I hear it again, I might enjoy it more. (There is, in fact, one instance where I initially gave a Yawn rating. Upon hearing it again a few days later, I decided to upgrade it to Not Bad. The song grew on me, and eventually made it all the way up to the "Love It" category.)
But that doesn't happen very often. Most of the songs in my yawn list are indeed Yawners every time I hear them. So it kind of annoys me that they continue to occupy hundreds of megabytes of hard drive space, and as long as I continue to use irate, I'll probably never get rid of them. Oh well. Such is the price of running a customized virtual radio station simulation, I suppose.
Obviously, I'm quite selective about what I give a 10 (Love it) rating. Or maybe the real issue is that there's not that much really awesome stuff available for legal download, at least in comparison to the masses of idiots like me who throw together a few chords on a keyboard, upload it, and call it a composition. (Well, I'm not one of those idiots yet, but I might become one before too much longer.)
Anyway, long live Internet music. Despite its occassional flaws, irate rules.