I was looking at my iTunes playlist this morning, and realised that I've started getting bored with my music. The problem is that I've got a few hundred songs that I tend to gravitate towards at the expense of the several thousand others.
So, in the interest of novelty, here's the deal:
- I will play through the 3362 songs on my iPod in alphabetical (well, ASCII) order by song-name, starting with Regurgitator's ! (The Song Formerly Known As), and finishing with Faith No More's Zombie Eaters.
- I may only use rewind to hear again the song I just listened to, if I happen to really like it.
- I may only fast-forward to skip songs that are duplicates (I just discovered I have three copies of Filter and The Crystal Method doing (Can't You) Trip Like I Do), or songs I actively dislike.
- I will resist as best I can the urge to skip songs that I am merely indifferent to, or that don't fit my mood.
- No other navigation of the playlist is permitted, except to find where I last left off.
- Exceptions may be made for newly purchased albums with songs that fall in the "already played" part of the playlist.
I should be done in a couple of months. :)
Starting off, it's surprising how many songs start with punctuation: particularly parentheses. I also have four songs starting with double-quotes, and they're all from Philip Glass movie soundtracks (One from Dracula, three from The Hours).
Now Playing 16/3362: (Exchange) by Massive Attack, off Mezzanine.
Aside: I just Googled for Philip Glass, and found this:
The IBM glass engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.
Funky. Must have a look at it some time.
You've put an extra ":" at the end of that glass link.
Thanks. MT-Textile has a wonderful knack of being inconsistent when you least expect it.
If you have a dockable iPod, you should rate tracks as they play. I've been systematically rating 7000 songs this way, and it's led to two listening modes: Variety, with tracks that haven't been rated (3000 left), and Favorites, for only 4- and 5-star ratings (700 so far) when I don't want to touch the iPod, but just listen to good music.
I bumped into that (glass engine) a year ago. The interface is interesting... indeed, very nifty. At the time I was Googling for "interesting interfaces" or something like that. I wonder what (other) real-life applications such interfaces have...
Speaking of which ...
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Philip Glass.
Ha. Ha. :-)
I found myself in exactly the same position, oh, about 3 years ago. So I started hosting an icecast stream and 'encouraged' friends in irc to tune in once in a while. I played very different stuff when I had an audience. After a while, though, this too paled. So after a lan party this summer (with many of the same people) I worked up a front end for the stream to take requests & what not: http://fiftyfly.mine.nu/RFM . Now I hear all kinds of stuff I prob wouldn't have requested my self, but have good tools in place to skip stuff I really hate, or merely vote up (or down) other requests. Where there's nothing in the playlist it requests stuff from the pool of old requests, so chances are good that _sombeody_ liked it. Seems to be working fairly well. In fact I've gotten to rely on it fairly heavily so when I travel my iPod, which usually just holds audiobooks, gets a dump of the N most requested tunes. I like it.