How Do Recommendations Really Work?
I'm guessing that the recommendations do not take into account the ratings of songs, just the artists and genres right?
I tested the recommendations by building a play list and I created a seed which was all my higest rated songs in my iTunes library. It's a playlist of 931 songs, quite diverse with many artists in multiple genres. I set the max number of tracks to 250, All Music. When it builds the playlist, the list of recommendations is tiny (under 20 songs), and worse, if I clear the Playlist and hit get tracks again, it loads the same handful of recommendations. I even tried setting the max tracks lower, then deleting tracks in the recommended playlist, then raising the max tracks after the initial playlist load and click Get More Tracks and it keeps bringing up the same 15 recommendations. Makes the whole recommendations feature not very useful.
I don't quite understand what you did to create your seed list, but the Playlist builder function in MyStrands tries with moderate persistency to limit the number of songs in built playlists. Try this: click the checkbox for number of minutes and set the number of minutes high -- I've used 600 minutes (you may wish to try 999 or 1,000 minutes). Then -- and this is counterintuitive -- check the number of songs box and change the number from 16, which appears to be the irritatingly persistent default, to a large number, say, 400 songs. Then hit the create playlist button and voila (I hope), you will have a respectable number of songs in your playlist. This approach has worked for me. I have even uploaded a playlist created in this manner to the site consisting of more than 300 songs. (I don't know how the MyStrands administrators feel about multi-hundred song metadata uploads, but at least you will have your MyStrands playlist created and saved in your own account.
Good luck!
If this works for you, and it should, I'd be interested in knowing how you inserted your created high-rating iTunes playlist into the seed table of the MyStrands playlist builder. The idea is first rate.
Regards.
Sublette