Launched this week
The Stochastic Music Tyrant
Apple Music fed true shuffle with tryranical impulses.
13 followers
Apple Music fed true shuffle with tryranical impulses.
13 followers
A typical "shuffle" re-weights and re-recommends, so a deep library collapses into the same forty songs. Stochastic Music Tyrant runs a true Fisher-Yates pass over your whole Apple Music library: every song performs before anything repeats, with a counter that proves it. You are the tyrant: banish the ones that fail you and pardon the ones you love. Share cards that proclaim to your court. Muster your musical subjects. Starve the algorithm.
Stochastic Music Tyrant is a true shuffle for Apple Music. It runs a real Fisher-Yates pass over your entire library, so every song plays once before anything repeats, and there is a counter that proves it. You pass judgment as you listen: pardon what you love, or banish what fails you. A banished song leaves the rotation and lands on The Block, a real playlist in your own Apple Music library where the condemned wait. Ordinary listening turns into a deliberate cleanup of a library you may have been carrying for decades.
It started in the car. My wife has thousands of songs and we kept hearing the same thirty on every drive. Standard shuffle re-weights and re-recommends, so a deep library quietly collapses into a small rotation. Once I fixed that, the opposite problem appeared: playing everything means rediscovering thousands of songs, and not all of them hold up. The app needed a verdict mechanism, and after an unhinged brainstorm with friends, the medieval tyrant was the persona that fit.
Every tyrant needs an executioner, but the ecosystem mechanics kept me from building one on the phone: no iPhone app may delete a song from your library (I checked down to the SDK). But a Mac can, so that is where the executioner lives! The Headsman is a free companion that reads The Block: you check the names, sign the warrant, and every sentence is struck from your actual library in one stroke, synced everywhere.
The court holds session in any desktop browser adjacent to the Headsman and on iPhone independently, one purchase for both: $7.99 lifetime for the first 25 to take a seat, $8.99 for the next 25, then $9.99.
What I would love from you: tell me how many songs are in your library, and what the first thing you banish is. I want to know whether your number surprises you as much as mine surprised me. I will be here all
finally something that actually plays every song in my library before looping. the banish and pardon mechanic makes skipping tracks feel satisfying instead of guilty.