Music Habits

27 October 2006

Much to the consternation of many people I know, I don’t have a record player. Not only that, I don’t have a CD player either, other then in a computer. All of my music listening happens via iTunes, either through an amp connected to my computer or though my iPod.

It suddenly hit me the other other day that my CD collection is now not going to get any bigger.

I don’t buy CDs any more.

All of my new music is digital – whether it comes from iTunes, downloaded from a blog or straight off a MySpace page (for all of its faults, it’s a good place to hear new music).

Once the music is in iTunes, I have a fairly sophisticated set of playlists all geared to maximise the music in my library. To start with, I can’t remember when I last listened to an “album” – I only listen to playlists, and they’re always on shuffle. As a side note, I think this may be slowly but surely having an effect on my music taste; I used to abhor instrumental music, finding it quite boring, but now an album such as Ratatat’s Classics ends up working really well as separate tracks sandwiched between other vocal-lead music.

The main playlist I listen to really utilises the power of Smart Playlists, the basis for any discerning iTunes users listening habits. It’s a aggregator of a set of Smart Playlists, each of which pull in a different set of tracks into the main playlist. The first of these brings in all the tracks added to iTunes in the 6 weeks that are rated 4 star or more. When I add a track it gets rated 4 star by default so it gets a chance to be listened to; I then go back and re-rate tracks up or down when I’ve had a chance to listen to them a bit more.

The next playlist that gets absorbed in is a selection of 150 5 star rated tracks. To keep these fresh, they have to have not been played or skipped in the last 3 days – this means that iTunes will automatically update the playlist with new tracks as you play them. Similarly, the next playlist brings in a selection of 150 tracks from the last 6 months that are 4 or 5 star rated, and not played or skipped in the last 3 days.

To finish off the playlist, one more manual playlist is used. This one, however, contains tracks I don’t want to hear – sometimes some tracks are still good so deserve a 4 star rating, but I just don’t want them to come up in day to day use, so this playlist is used in combination with the “Song is not in x Playlist” option.

At the end of all the combinations of Smart Playlists, I’m left with one playlist that combines all of the current tracks I’m listening to, along with a selection of slightly older tracks and the best of my music library.

I’m not quite sure how people coped when all you could do was press play on a CD player…

From: Articles

27 October 2006