A mute Shuffle

I picked up an iPod Shuffle recently, partly to test my own theories about the thing. It's also a hugely seductive piece of product design of course. I'm generally loving it - it's virtually weightless, which is extraordinarily pleasing, and fits with the idea of having bespoke products for particular tasks (my 15 minute walk to work in this case).

But while I'm delighted with the Shuffle's general functionality in terms of playing music, I'm shocked to discover what I consider to be a massive oversight on Apple's part in terms of the more advanced product design. Simply put, to drive costs down - and perhaps, dare I suggest, due Apple's lack of understanding of community/social software-orientated services - the iPod Shuffle comes with no on-board functionality for storing a record of the tracks played. Seemingly, no internal clock, or capacity allocated to reflecting the basic details of what's just happened on the device. I first noticed when using Audioscrobbler, the excellent music service which builds meaning from aggregating music listening patterns, from iPods amongst other things. I posted to a development forum there, and noted a few others had started asking the same questions. And then the apparent confirmation:

"I just spoke to someone at Apple tech support who confirmed that the iPod Shuffle does not have a clock and therefore probably wouldn't update the Recently Played list the way we'd need it to do. So everybody's right, and everybody's sad."

Note: We could of course be entirely wrong about this, but it certainly seems to be the case, and even if it isn't, Apple must have buried the functionality so deep as to be essentially non-existent.

So, basically, when you dock and sync your iPod Shuffle, it doesn't seem to update your Recently Played playlist, meaning iTunes (and Audioscrobbler's plugin) can't infer what you're been listening to on the Shuffle. The need to keep costs down I can understand. However, arguably the most interesting things about the products and devices emerging today is their ability to create or contribute towards a sense of self - both in terms of the product and the owner. As products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour - in some senses, becoming reflexive - and as their raison d'être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality - in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users - there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.

This was the basis of my talk at Design Engaged. (Which I will write up one day, honest.) I discussed how informational products could become self-centred (or, hello America, 'self-centered') in the best sense i.e. built around a sense of self, the focus being social and behavioral, and becoming personally adaptable. At the most basic level, this requires that the products have some 'understanding' of both their own behaviour - essentially, tracking their behaviour, usage patterns, and context wherever possible - and are built by both designers/researchers who understand 'the social' in depth, and can ultimately be adapted by their own users. It strikes me that the basic condition for these products is to be essentially self-aware - in this specific case, that the iPod Shuffle should be able to keep a track of what tracks the user has played on it, and communicate that information such that that metadata can then be transferred and combined with the overall iTunes Music Library. This ecosystem of music experience software and hardware can therefore keep a track of what tracks have been played (track, album, artist etc), when, on what device, and by whom. Upon this basic usage data, we can build a panoply of useful, interesting services. Look no further than Audioscrobbler for some inspiration.

When I spoke about this in November, I paraphrased and extended Naoto Fukasawa's quote: that design is dissolving in behaviour, and products are emerging from it. I believe this to be a potentially powerful message in informational product design, and I'm disheartened that Apple have not seen that even their low-end devices should be part of this world. I'm not sure how easy it is for Apple to change that, either. I apologise to all concerned if I'm missing something basic, and the Shuffle does do these things and more, but at least it's forced me to articulate this idea of reflexive, social products within software systems increasingly focused on representation of self.

As noted before, I'm generally surprised that Apple haven't taken advantage of their groundbreaking work by building applications which extend functionality and services based on the rich data they're collecting around user behaviour. They could just be keeping their powder dry, but by not making the Shuffle self-aware in any way, I'm not convinced they're seeing the opportunities.

Comments

[Jamie Tetlow]

That would put me off immediately - I've become completely reliant on limited number smart playlists to auto fill my mini. These 100 track lists include 'least recently played', 'least often played', 'most recently ripped' and 'not yet rated' (+ 'five star' as a get out of jail free card). They ensure I consume as broad a breadth of my library 'cos when I go on a record buying binge there's always the one or two albums that slip through the net. I almost solely listen to music on my iPod now (not through iTunes on my mac) and would rely on the 'recently played' logging to do the updating of a Shuffle - I don't think I was gonna get one anyway but this provides a case against, well, for me at least...

[Aaron]

The shuffle has no onboard clock, and doesn't update the 'played last' field - but it does update the play count folder. Which isn't much good for Audioscrobbler, but does the job for any playlists built on play count.

[Dan]

Agreed, Jamie. Although I'm still really enjoying it as a device for 'lite' listening. Just frustrating that I know there's no (or little) metadata around that behaviour being recorded.

And thanks Aaron - that's interesting. I could see it was updating something, but play counts aren't enough for me. There's a basic set of contextual data which should, in my view, be recorded and communicated by devices - which should include as much about context as possible. And time is surely a key part of that - to generate playlists or inferred patterns such as 'songs listened to whilst walking to work', 'songs listening to while sending people off to sleep etc.'. Something like the behaviour patterns inferred from Tom's posting habits at plasticbag.org, say.

Many more unknown possibilities, but the pre-requisite must be to capture and communicate plenty of raw (meta)data in the first place (it's tiny amounts of bytes after all, what with regular synching.)

[Aaron]

Agreed, generally. I hope, when iTunes gets a proper revision, that Apple looks seriously at the number of hoops you have to jump through to preserve the metadata from portable listening.

[William]

While generating context may be a useful purpose for the device, in one sense, Apple is sidestepping a problem that the iShuffle might create when paired with Audioscrobbler: ironically, shuffling.

I you use Audioscrobbler to track trends in personal listening taste ("What's been on repeat for the last week?"), then any shuffle mode is going to throw off the statistics engine with un-selected, pseudo-random music. This isn't necessarily a problem, but if you use the software the same way I do (i.e., to answer the question "What have I been choosing to listen to?"), then it does influence the validity of those results.

Apple seems to have (inadvertantly) side-stepped this (admittedly minor) issue.

[Dan]

Some truth in that, William, for sure ... However, it's still a subset of your preferences (and in the case of the Shuffle at the moment, a real subset of 100-200 songs) and therefore an indication of your preference to a fair degree - seeing as music doesn't end up in your iTunes Music Library randomly in the first place. There's a active decision involved somewhere in the process. And Audioscrobbler is smart enough to discount tracks that you skip over too (ignoring anything skipped over at <2mins/50% of song length in) ... So I'd argue there's still a fair amount of preference involved.

[William]

True, Dan, but one of the things Audioscrobbler is good for is straining out those "throwaway" tracks in the cd's we load into iTunes.

Since the iShuffle reduces the user's agency (i.e., they aren't manually selecting the music they want to listen to), I suggest that this will throw some invalid data into your Audioscrobbler data, even if it's statistically negligible. I will admit that skipping tracks mostly resolves the problem, however.

[dave]

ok i just got a ipod shuffle but i do not know how to put songs on/off of it i need help i got it from a friend and he didant give me the directions or anything.

[Dan]

A set of trackbacks sent to this post at the time (before I turned trackbacks off):

» Design is dissolving in behaviour, or should be from Preoccupations
City of Sound:So, basically, when you dock and sync your iPod Shuffle, it doesn't seem to update your Recently Played playlist, meaning iTunes (and Audioscrobbler's plugin) can't infer what you're been listening to on the Shuffle. The need to keep [Read More]

» these are the days of miracle and wonder from anti-mega
Currently in a phase of taking melatonin at night to combat jetlag, and then burning it off with a SAD light in the morning. Which means lucid thought is at a slight twist. So instead you get another penny in the evergrowing pile about the iPod shuffle... [Read More]

» On iTunes and iPods and the data they don't capture... from plasticbag.org
The more I think about it, the weirder I find it that iTunes doesn't keep track of every time you've ever listened to a track from your library. It would seem like such an obvious thing to do - why... [Read More]