A Tale for Your Bemusement

This is a tale for your bemusement; no other point to it, really. I’m posting because no one I know would have the kind of emphatic understanding that some of you may have.

For 13 years or so, I’ve owned and enjoyed a Sony HAP S-1 music server, the little sibling to Sony’s more featured HAPZ-1ES. The machine analyzes the files for each disk transferred to it and puts them into general categories, e.g., Genre, Artist, Album. It also has a feature called “SenseMe Channels.” Each file (or track) is analyzed and put into one of fourteen “channels” (playlists) which broadly correspond to the emotional content of the track, e.g., Morning, Evening, Midnight, Energetic, Mellow, etc. Although I usually selected Albums for my listening, I enjoyed using the SenseMe feature; I liked the unexpected juxtapositions encountered on the playlists, and I liked listening to tracks that I might not have listened to in a while.

A couple of years ago, the HAP S1 misfunctioned after a power outage. When I tried to play an album, only the first track would play. Finding no answer in Sony’s online support, I contacted ES support by phone. The service rep said the only thing I could do was a factory reboot, which meant erasing all 14,000 tracks of music from the internal hard drive. I did that and then reloaded the tracks. The machine’s Album selection feature worked again, but it wouldn’t analyze the 14,000 tracks for the SenseMe feature. I contacted Sony ES support again and was told that they didn’t have an answer and wouldn’t find one because the machine and its software aren’t supported any longer. Since then, every time I see an announcement for a new music server, I look to see whether any has a “SenseMe” feature. So far, none of them has.

About ten days ago, I saw that the machine was analyzing the tracks for SenseMe purposes. I can’t tie that to any particular event. We had bad weather here in Portland in January that resulted in a prolonged power outage at our home,, but that preceded the SenseMe revival by six or seven weeks.

In its support literature, Sony advises that the analysis for each track can take 5 minutes or more. So far, the machine has slowly but surely churned its way through analyzing about 2500 of the 14,000 tracks, so it’s going to be a while yet.

Thanks for reading.

Jim