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> click on the “books” tab - the author is a technologist

That's rather underselling him. Charles Petzold wrote the canonical reference works for programming Win32 and MFC.

It's like calling Donald Knuth a lecturer.

His 'Annotated Turing' (a reproduction of On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, with explanation and walk-through) got me into CS vs. prior interest mainly in EE.

His book ‘Code’ is his masterpiece, IMO.

It’s a tour de force in technical communication. A fascinating book for both the Computer Science novice and expert.

“Code” is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t usually read 500 page books but this one flew. Even if you know most of what’s being discussed it’s such a delightful ride.

For the curious:

> Microsoft provides two frameworks for developing Windows applications: MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) and Win32. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) is a Microsoft framework for developing Windows applications in the C++ programming language. Win32 is a collection of functions and data structures provided by Microsoft for the development of Windows applications. [0]

[0] https://www.tutorialspoint.com/article/difference-between-mf...

That's old info. Now there is also .NET Framework, .NET (Core), C++/WinRT and more. In the end all of them use either pure Win32 APIs or COM APIs including MFC.

Apologies, I wasn’t familiar with his work.

I was surprised to see a post by Petzold on this subject. I know who he is. But I don’t think you owe an apology here. I think you made a thoughtful comment. A post like his should be critiqued for what it says, not for the author’s previous work. And, fortunately, other people could give context on the significant work he has done.

The MF what?

Classes. MF classes.

That stuff will never wash out of my mind.

Pascal, C, or C++, it depends what mood they were in.

> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.

Given the author's background I believe it's intentional ragebait. It's as ridiculous as saying LLM can't count the number of Rs so it cannot generate grammatically correct sentences. No way he really thinks the logic is sound.

Spotify's DJ also isn't an LLM. It's just a shuffle with structured interludes and a TTS engine. IIRC it launched in early 2023 and has been the same since.

That explains why it is always/only wanting to play stuff that I listened to recently, or in 2023.

> This is a product issue.

The product organization at Spotify is a master class in dysfunctional product organizations. Compare the feature parity of the desktop and mobile applications and you'll find random features available in one but not the other. Try to do basically anything in CarPlay other than select a different recently-played playlist and you'll be able to do it 10x faster by picking up your phone and doing it there.

> For example, when the author says “if it can’t do this, how could it compose music?”, that’s a category error.

That isn't really a category error. It's more begging the question. It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music, and uses that assumption to suggest the conclusion that a failure to DJ classical movement would necessarily result in the failure to compose same. A category error would be assigning a property to AI that it cannot have. It would look more like, "if AI can't DJ music, we have no way to know what color it is."

Also, a DJ isn’t typically tasked with playing an entire symphony (or pop album, for that matter) on request from start to finish. I’m sure there are a handful of DJs in niche situations who do this at listening bars and on the radio, but it seems pretty rare.

Honestly a human DJ might well do what the Spotify DJ does — play a popular piece that matches the outlandish request and then transition to other music.

To torture the metaphor further - it's also a personal dj, with an audience and customer of 1. Somewhat by definition there can be no outlandish requests, certainly not "play this entire piece".

If I told the DJ at my wedding to play an album front to back, and they transitioned to Aerosmith, I'd be tapping a friend to run the music the rest of the night.

I’m fairly certain Spotify’s core meta data adheres to the US music industry largely set / reinforby Nielsen. I’m curious why the author would want to happen with the feature if not move from 1 artist to another

For chart reporting? Am unfamiliar with the Nielsen standard, but given the state of musical metadata more broadly it's probably not very sophisticated.

Would expect any provider like Spotify to just export the reports Nielsen requires, not design their core systems around it.

> It makes the assumption that the ability to DJ music is the same ability as being able to compose music

And yet an awful lot of musicians are also DJs. It's almost like spending a lot of time playing music and watching how people react to it give you a good sense of how the underlying processes of creating it can work.

GP was obviously talking about AI's abilities, not people's.

I think quite the opposite for precisely the reason you're saying?

Which is to say, he's doing a very good job of reminding you/us nerds that "there should be no excuse for this, technical or otherwise." The technology exists to make this work very well and has for sometime; I GET why it's not working now, but that doesn't make it any less garbage.

Every modern streaming platform seems to be focused on the relationship between contemporary singles - who featured on what, what's trending, if you like this current pop artist you'll like this other one. Setting aside OP's interest in classical music this approach doesn't even work for popular music from the 60s to 90s when the primary format was the album. God help you if you try to use voice commands to play Help! (the album by the Beatles) and instead get Help! (the title track by the Beatles).

Who would even DJ on classical music?

If you have the slightest knowledge of classical music you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.

Why would you even have a classical music station? What is public radio even doing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRR_(FM)

I believe the person you are responding to was being facetious.

What the AI doing now is in fact what classical radio DJs do; the author wants a general purpose smart music playing robot, not a “DJ” per se.

I think you could pick out a movement from this and then a movement from that. I can see somebody wanting to have classical music playing all day without having to pick out specific tracks, like listening to the radio.

I think the auto DJ feature is already well capable of that: having tracks playing the all day.

But if you want to preserve the original composition of classical music, you have to play the track start to finish, preferably with a small pause between tracks as well.

I have to admit that my rock and pop music listening is still album-oriented whether it is The Kinks or The Super Furry Animals or Charlie XCX.

I think it is totally reasonable to want something that plays all movements from one work, then finds similar works to play after that.

Sure, that might not be what a DJ algorithm is optimized for, but a more generalized AI like an llm should be able to figure that out.

You are very right, using a generalized LLM in combination with good music search and metadata tools works very well for this sort of thing. I know because I built a platform that does this. The big limiter isn't the tech, it's what the rights-holders will allow. They maintain tight control over their catalogs because renting that intellectual property is their entire business model. This makes them very cautious about letting any actually useful AI near their music and metadata.

> you would know it should not be mixed like in a dj set, and you would not optimize your dj algorithm for it.

Yet the computer program happily tried to do it anyway. It would be much better to fail with a clear error message than to try to proceed and emit garbage.

Yeah, if he wants to listen to your complete albums, it’s unclear to me why he would be using a DJ feature or expected the DJ to do that. Just play the albums manually or set up playlist. It’s like having a six CD changer and putting it on shuffle and then complaining that it shuffles.

And then we have artists such as Gas who famously mixed classical with dub techno.

Interesting, i never heard of anything similar before, but i'm quite sure the classical music fans would also hate on him for ruining the original compositions.

I love electronic renditions of classical music. Trance does this often (Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, William Orbit, Ferry Corsten and others) and it's some of the best work they put out. To me, it's like a natural progression from classical minimalism, such as Phillip Glass or Max Richter.

I've played the violin since I was a kid (only for fun now). I can find something I love about almost any musical genre and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

BT is a trance dj that's classically trained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_(musician) and Armin van Buuren has classically trained parents

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFanGv_ReU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1YwlPH_o50

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fNloJAge0 (same chord progression as la folia https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7v8zxoEoA_Q)

La folia itself has been "remixed" many times by both classical and modern composers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folia

He is a very influential artist in the techno subculture. I don't think anybody hating him for making those masterpieces...

The blend of classical and techno must come from the techno side. I remember many years ago listening to CBC Radio as they breathlessly talked about some avant garde classical piece that purported to blend classical and techno. It was a mid tier modern classical composition with occasional cheap synth sound effects. And this was ten years after Portishead released their entire first album, recorded with an orchestra, or all the work that Massive attack was doing.

William Orbit did an album of electronic arrangements of classical music 25 years ago. Not that it prevents anyone else from doing it. But it's not a completely novel idea.

Yes, at least 50. Folks applied electronic instruments to classical music shortly after they moved out of the experimental phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach

And there was this fun disco version as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fifth_of_Beethoven

Remixing art has been done since the invention of art. It doesn't ruin anything if the original work is preserved.

No one is required to like it. But the word 'hate' is a bit extreme, even in your example. Also, the group comprising "the classical music fans" is certain to include many who disagree with you.

I consider myself a "fan of classical music". We go to Philharmonic a few times a year and I own a remarkable collection of classical music. And I do go to parties and love techno...

It is not uncommon to have parts of a classical music movement in a DJ set, even if it lasts only a few seconds.

Until 2009, WGBH FM… then they shuffled it. Which went about as well as this tool.

Deodado?

When "me" is most classical music and this is a music platform I think the critique is not unwarranted. They could adapt it with special system prompts for classical.

Probably 50% of my listening is classical. If I want to listen to classical I just listen to albums. I’ve never had a problem with this. The concept of a DJ for classical music is just kind of weird.

Spotify is still bad for classical music because you can’t ex. search by composer or label of find alternative recordings of the same piece etc. If you know what album you want already its ok, but if you like classical you should really consider IDAGIO.

And if you want one subscription for popular & classical music, Apple Music is miles ahead of Spotify.

Music.app is already better than Spotify at handling the relevant metadata. But the dedicated Apple Music Classical app is roughly the same as IDAGIO.

(They bought IDAGIO's former competitor Primephonic to do it)

Isn’t fundamentally the issue that for any symphony by Beethoven or whoever that there are thousands of recordings of performances? So if I decide I want to listen to a certain one then I also need to pick a particular performance that a particular orchestra did a certain time?

Apple Music has a totally separate app for classical music. It was specifically designed to address exactly this.

For each composer, it shows all their well known works, and then you can tap on each to see all the recordings of that particular piece.

Smart move on Apple’s part, if you ask me.

As mentioned above, they bought Primephonic, which already had all those features. For myself, I used Primephonic until Apple bought it, then switched to Idagio, in order to minimize my connection with the Apple machine.

I love that app. They have Dolby atmos mixes which seem like overkill but I was completely floored putting on a double bass work and being completely immersed in the center of the sound. Obviously great for large ensembles but surprisingly awesome at solo works

And the play history integrates with the main Music app

I always wondered why there were separate apps, and this makes total sense.

building recommendation systems for classical music has a simple data problem- most recommendation systems (for spotify and others) are based on simple user listening histories that look at "people that listened to X also listened to Y".

this is a problem for classical (and jazz) for two reasons a) these genres are not particularly popular on the platform so there are few unique users and b) the songs are LONG so listening sessions contain fewer songs.

track cooccurance based recs work well for popular genres, but these other genres need a different approach to recs and that's actually where AI could do really well by digging into the unstructured data associated with the tracks (sonic analysis of the song, biographical information about the composer, details about featured soloists, etc) rather than relying on piles of user behavior.

There’s plenty of rest stations that specialise in classical music. So it’s not that weird of an idea to have a “DJ” for classical.

It’s just a different kind of DJ. Like how HipHop DJ is different from a trance DJ. And a wedding DJ is different too.

By “rest stations” I meant “radio stations”.

I missed that autocorrection early. Sorry

You never listen to NPR?

I’m British so I guess the equivalent would be Radio 4. But no, not really tbh. I just find what I want and listen to it. I know some people really like Radio 4 though.

I'm not in the US, but have listened to various of their tiny desk concerts that they put up on YouTube.

There is a long history of using AI to analyze, compose, and perform music.

Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: David Levitt shows Music Box on his Lisp Machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys

Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Music box with Tom Trobaugh and drum machine with Jim Davis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s

Cynthia Solomon has shared a treasure trove of rare classic videos of Seymour Papert, Marvin and Margaret Minsky, kids programming Logo and playing with turtles, and many other amazing things at the MIT AI Lab, MIT Media Lab, and Atari Cambridge Research:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28604629

Spotify is definitely not trying very hard, the author is justified in complaining. I had a very similar experience. They are in a perfect position to be able to make something amazing, but they (and other streaming companies) are somewhat limited in what they can do because of their music licensing relationships. I was able to build something 100x better than their DJ using an off-the-shelf LLM and some well-crafted search/metadata tools. It has no problem doing what Petzold wanted. It's a much better way to interact with music than what the general public has access to now, and I would love to commercialize it, but the rights-holders (UMG, WMG, Sony, etc) are very protective of what they own. If you want to know more reply here or reach out to me at info@tunistry.com.

Mr Petzold's book, Code, is marvel and you should read it btw

Perhaps not so strange in that from a practical standpoint many "AI problems" are actually "Data Problems" when you start peeling things back.

> There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.

Google’s Nest speakers have or had similar issues: they’d start any requested piece of (at least multi-movement) classical music somewhere in the middle and simply defy any instructions to start at the beginning, bizarre behaviour for a smart speaker.

Seems pretty harsh for somethign it may not have been designed to be good at.

Maybe Spotify works more off lyrics, and classical music usually doesn't have lyrics.

I'd love to have AI that could hear music.

I'd like to have Spotify without videos and podcasts. Simple, but forbidden to do it.

The problem with this article is there are more than one way to be a DJ

>This is a product issue. Spotify DJ is essentially “shuffle with some voice interludes”. There’s probably some non-AI code in there to explicitly prevent it from playing an album end to end.

And I would argue that is one of the stupidest ways.

https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-complete-playlist-e8eb3...

The Complete Playlist argues for shuffling and serendipity for achieving accidental surprise and delight and clever juxtapositions, something that if you had an actually competent DJ could be guided and not left to chance.

A competent DJ makes musical arguments in relation to an aural environment in the same way a competent Philosopher may make intellectual arguments in relation to an environment of ideas.

Totally agree. And also, this limitation of Spotify probably affects 0.00000001% of their users. In other words, it just doesn't matter (except to those 3 people)