Apple Inc.

Paul C Irvine

Thomas M Alsina

Arvind S Shenoy

Cody D Jorgensen

Priyo Mustafi

Venkat Kranthi Chalasani

Taylor Gerard Carrigan

Christopher John Sanders

Drew Rocky Domm

Edward T Schmidt

Matthew Joseph Cielak

Amandeep S Jawa

Fredric R Vinna

Daniel Cartoon

Mark Hilary Levy

Erik Lindholm

George D Bottas

Bekir B Dundar

Denise L Chen

Generating a customized playlist may include identifying a user account for which a playlist is to be generated, where the user account is associated with a user listening history, a taste profile, and a social profile, identifying one or more friend accounts linked to the user account based on the social profile, obtaining an indication of a plurality of songs associated with one or more of the friend accounts, determining a listening history for the one or more plurality of songs based on the friend accounts, obtaining a subset of the plurality of songs based on the listening history of the plurality of songs, and generating a playlist from the subset of the plurality of songs.

Generating a customized social-driven playlist

The present disclosure relates to synchronized sharing of playlists from a source client device to a listening client device. To facilitate synchronized sharing, a current playlist of one or more tracks of digital content is obtained from the source client device. A current playback location within the currently playing playlist is also obtained from the source client device. A shared queue accessible by the listener client device is generated. Further, a shared queue context for the listener client device is identified based in part upon the current playback location. This enables the listener client device to start playback synchronized with the source client device.

Synchronized shared playlists

Some implementations allow users to create and share data including playlists. Such playlists may be subscribed to by other users. Changes to such playlists, such as updates by the curator of the playlist, must be propagated to subscribers in a timely manner while efficiently utilizing resources. Some implementations allow updates to be propagated using a push notification to cause client devices to request the update (push). Alternatively, updates may be made when the client devices of the subscribers next accesses the system (pull). An aggregator system may be used to make decisions on which users to send push notifications, and which users to wait to pull updates on their own. Additionally, the aggregator may determine that certain playlist updates should be distributed using push notifications. The aggregator may determine that only certain playlist subscribers should receive push notifications regarding playlist updates.

Updating playlists using push and pull

In some implementations, a computing device can be configured to manage playlist-only media items for a user's media library. For example, when a user adds a media item to a playlist, the user can be presented with an option to add the media item to the playlist as a playlist-only media item. When the user selects to add the media item to the playlist as a playlist-only media item, the computing device can update media metadata associated with the user's media library with data indicating that the media item is a playlist-only media item. When the computing device performs operations (e.g., displaying, searching, etc.) on the user's media library, the computing device can exclude the playlist-only media items from the operations. The computing device can change the playlist-only settings for a media item to add and/or remove a media item from the user's media library.

Playlist-only media items

Growing community of inventors

Mill Valley, CA, United States of America

Paul C Irvine