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Hi, I've been trying The Filter on the recommendation of some of you who work there. (Hi David!)

Here are some of my thoughts.

I am only really interested in music, I don't want or need movie or web video recommendations, but they take up two thirds of the space on the page and I can't get rid of them or go to a music only page. (I know there is a music only page, but it still only has the same 6 recommendations on it, filling the space with other irrelavant stuff)

The six albums it does recommend are shown as tiny tiny album covers and I have to mouse over them to find out what they are (nav by album cover is annoying in Vista MCE where you own the albums, when you don't you definitely don't know what they are its very irritating!). Don't give me 6, give me 20, with some text about the artist.

When I set them playing there is no obvious way in the player to bookmark or buy the playing track. Playback stops after the six tracks, I'd expected it to carry on with 7-12.

I pointed it at my last.fm account, and eveything there has now come back rated 10/10. This is wrong; I'm sure I'm not unusual in having my iPod on random a lot of the time, so all a last.fm scrobble shows is that a track is on my iPod. But it doesn't mean it's a favourite, or even that I like it - loads of stuff on there comes form mag cover disks, or albums I used to like but now I'm not sure, or records I bought on a whim and turned out not be much cop, etc.

You need to bring in the number of plays count into your importing, to give the most played tracks a higher score.

I also let it  loose on iTunes, and I'm pretty sure that it's done the same there and rated all 23,000-odd songs in my collection at 100%. I cannot find any way of seeing or editing those tracks, and as it knows I own them it will never show them again, so it's now convinced I love my favorite band as much as I do that crap CD my brother gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.

Having 23,000 tracks all at 100% in multiple genres might explain why the recommendatons engine doesn't seem to be working that well as it has no subtlety to work with. It is coming up with artists I've never heard of, which is good, but when I play them i don't particularly see why it would think I should like them.

 I have had TiVo, and found that if you gave too many things a maximum thumbs up, it constipated the suggestions algorithm, and I wonder if that's happening here.

 I tried the generate playlist function in iTunes, and found it didn't reconise quite a lot of the tracks, so couldn't do anything, and if it did recognise them the playlists tended to be really obvious stuff - I need to do some more experimenting with that though.

 I'll keep playing and give more feedback as I find it.

Hi there,

Thanks for your feedback...

Customisation of your homepage is in the plan for the site, so in the future you should be able to focus on music if that's what you want to do :)

Oops, it seems there's a bug in the Last.fm import that is rating things 100%, sorry about that. It's being fixed as I type; although not sure when we can do a release given we tend to try and avoid this on Fridays.

When you say "let it loose" on iTunes I assume you mean you installed the client? (Windows or Mac btw).

If so what happens is the details for your library are sent to the server for identification, and marking as owned by you. This should not be rating them aswell... why do you think that all 23k of them are rated 100%?

If you want to send me your email address in a private message I can look into this in a bit more detail for you...

Regards,

Westy 

Hi, had to create new log-in as the forum wouldn't let me back in.

I was assuming it would give everything a 100% rating as it has with last.fm.

If it isn't rating them, isn't that a bit of a problem?That means I can't rate any peice of music I own, as they will never be shown in the recommendations - it's going to be rather hard for The Filter to build up a profile of what I like if I can't rate tracks I actually like enough to buy!!!!

Hi, sorry for getting back to you late...

No, the client marks tracks as owned by you, which is interpreted differently from your ratings.

It also registers when you play them, further hyping them up.

You can still rate music you own by going to it on the site.

The ratings you give items are just a part of the way our recommendations are tailored to you, I can assure you.

Cheers,

Westy 

Hmm, with the best will in the world I'm not going to go searching for artists and rating them, so if you're not capturing my preferences through my ratings of your suggestions you're not capturing them at all.

 All my music is played on my iPod or via Media Center extenders, neither of which is captured by your utility.

BTW, can you make the splash screen when the software loads optional please, I really don't want to stare at it every time my PC starts up.