I know this may sound a little funny but,
whenever I turn on the \'Append Suggestions\' feature, amarok first appends songs that match the genre of the currently playing track. But as time passes, no matter what style of music I started with, amarok ends up adding Rolling Stones tracks most of the time (about 80-100 tracks later).

Well, I have nothing against Rolling Stones, in fact I like them; but you know.. It gets boring after a while.

Is the author of this \'Append Suggestions\' function a big Stones fan?

This used to happen since I started using amarok (I guess the first version I used was 1.1) through 1.2.3 .

Note: Stones does not take a really big part of my collection, I can say, 50 Stones tracks out of about 1000 total.

It gets its suggestions from Audioscrobbler. I\'ve noticed this as well, not Rolling Stones, but there\'s about 8 or 10 albums that Append Suggestions usually leads itself to.

amaroK 1.3 will have the dynamic mode, which will give more flexibility. For now, 100 Random Tracks smart playlist works surprisingly well (at least it surprised me)... since gee the music you have is the music you like.

Can you tell me more about this Random Tracks smart playlist?
Is it included in amarok 1.2.3? If so, how do I enable it?
Thanks

Playlist tab on the left of amaroK.

Bottom of that tab is various \"Smart\" playlists

Thanks a lot!

The reason why it\'s leading back to the stones is probably an audioscrobbler \"problem\" rather than an amaroK one, I feel. After using append similar obsessively when i first installed amarok, it tends to lead back to the same twenty or thirty well-known artists, no matter how obscure the music you start with (i have about 2000 different artists in my collection), which of course gets boring after a while. The reason is this, the similar artists algorithm of audioscrobbler seems to be designed so that obscure artists point to wellknown artists, but wellknown artists only point (are similar) to other wellknown artists.

A workaround for this i suggest (for the developers) is that when a similar artist list is downloaded from an artist, that you make artist similarity data a two-way relationship. If artist x is similar to artist y, then why shouldn\'t artist y be similar to artist x? The arguments against are a bit slippery, imho. So fix it that the collectiondb is updated in a way that makes similar artists always mutually point to each other. Not a major problem, just a suggestion, if anyone is at a loose end

On a related note, i personally would like to be able to alter the following: (perhaps somewhere in the configuration dialog)
1) The number of tracks appended. I\'m surprised 4 is the default and unchangeable, If 1 was the default, then every track you play is directly related to the next one, which would enable a smooth listening experience without any user interference. This is the most important thing for me.
2) The range of similarity. By this i mean how close to the top of the similar artists list to select tracks from. A glance at the code shows it\'s currently 16 (and only 30 out of a possible 49) are downloaded in the first place. It would be cool to alter this so that if it gets stuck in a rut alternating between artists (at 16 i used to get regularly stuck in a Paul Weller/Gemma Hayes loop) so you can allow for greater variance.
A slider going from narrow to wide would be good. Increasing the pool of artists that are used to select tracks that get shown in the suggestions panel would be nice too, they\'re currently limited to only selecting from the top 10.
3) An expiry time for the similar artists cache. Afaik the similar artists data at audioscrobbler is only updated manually, and not very often. I suggest around six months, should be fine. As far as i can tell it\'s never updated, once you get your similar artists for an artist, that\'s it, you\'re stuck with them, which wont be good for new artists (nothing will point to them other than other new artists), and changing trends and perceptions of trends.
4) Song routing. This is a complex one, but might be fun to try and achieve. You select fifty or so songs, and amarok finds the best order for them somehow using the similar artist data. Maybe the user could specify what song they want to start with and end with (and maybe points along the way), and amarok could find the best \'route\' between the two. This would be useful for parties when you want to bring a party gradually up and/or down again. Just a thought...

I realize work is already being done on the suggestions/similar artists for the next version of amarok and look forward to seeing what the devs come up with.