I want a music player that doesn’t require me to explicitly rate songs by assigning them a number of stars or some such nonsense. I want it to keep an internal representation of ratings and to gather data implicitly to alter those ratings. A song’s rating should go up when the song is played. It should go down when the song is skipped over. It should go up when I raise the volume just after it starts playing. It should relate the rating for one song to the ratings of other songs by the same artist, or in the same genre.
If iTunes had been paying attention to all of my actions so far it would know that when I add a new Foo Fighters song to my music library there’s a fairly freaking good chance that I’m going to like it more than average. If I started skipping over it a lot (possibly because it’s one of the crappy acoustic songs from the second CD of In Your Honour) it should have adjusted the rating to reflect that.
Software throws out too much useful information about user behaviour.