Music you both like
Here's an idea for a piece of software that could come in handy (perhaps it already exists).
Background:
iTunes lets other people on your local network listen to whatever subset of your music collection you mark as shared.
So say you're sitting somewhere with someone else. You're both running iTunes on your laptops, and you've both got your music marked as shared.
Now say you want to listen to some music (without putting on headphones), but you want it to be music that the other person likes. You've got some overlapping tastes, but also some non-overlapping tastes.
I'd like to be able to tell iTunes “Play music that's on this other person's shared music list, but only if it's also in my music and we've both rated it [say] three stars or higher.”
For that matter, why not generalize to as many people as are in the room? Automatically generate a list of music that we all like.
(A more sophisticated version of this could try to guess/predict what songs people might like that aren't already in their shared collections. But I'd be perfectly satisfied with the simple straightforward approach of looking only at what they've already got.)
The iTunes Smart Playlists almost already do this. I can tell it to create a list of songs that appear in my playlist A and my playlist B, for example. But as far as I can tell, I can't tell it to create a Smart Playlist based on songs from someone else's shared collection.
I suspect it would be pretty easy to write an AppleScript that would do this, but I don't have time to look into that at the moment. So instead I'm tossing out a quick blog entry.
Anyone tried anything like this? Are there scripts out there that do it? Is there some easy way to do it without a script?