Overlapping tastes
I share a living space with my wife and family (a concept not unheard of, I guess). For the time being and seeing as the eldest is about 2.5 years old, the children have very little to say about what songs get played. Actually, I make a concious effort to expose them to the full scope of my own taste in music (which has in the past attracted comments like 'stretches the meaning of eclectic')
In any case, the only relevant tastes I need to deal with are my own and my wife's. Fortunately, mine encompasses all of hers.
What I did to create the possibility to switch between her taste and mine, wilst maintainting the cool dynamic of my Shuffle playlist, is to assign meaning to four ratings:
- no stars
- This track has not been assessed yet for this purpose.
- 1 star
- Definitely outside my wife's taste
- 2 stars
- Possibly inside my wife's taste
- 3 stars
- Definitely inside my wife's taste
For my wife's automatic music playing needs, I use a smart playlist that is exactly the same as TheShuffle
, but with the added rule that tracks must be rated two stars or higher.
One nice aspect of this mechanism is that by adjusting the rating, she can influence tracks appearing in her playlist or not. Another (deliberate) effect is that I can codify my unsureness about her liking a certain track.
Last (but rather obscure) benefit of the overall setup is that my main playlist reacts not only to itself being played (in the intened way), but also to her playlist being used, or any other track selection mechanism, for that matter.