December 16, 2003

Many Songs, Played at Random, Part II

Well, between the busy thanksgiving time, then going on a little trip to Florida, I am back in blogland.

I burned a few cds using the method I described here for the thanksgiving travels. I quickly found a few shortcoming of the method, and had to make it a little more involved. Here is what I did:

a) I had a fair amount of ambient and what I will call "abstract electronic" tracks. I set the genre of all these tracks to ambient or abstract electronic. I usually don't bother with genres in iTunes, but this time they came in handy. I set the smart playlist to exclude songs of this genre, along with "books and spoken", of which I have a whopping number of three tracks, all parts of a Ralph Nader Speech.

b) I was afraid of getting duplicate tracks, so I set another condition in the smart playlist: "Comment does not contain random". After burning the playlist, I would command-a (select all tracks in the playlist), then command-i (edit info on all the tracks in the playlist), I would then set the comments field to "random". This would automatically make all the tracks leave the playlist, as they no longer satisfied the condition, and they would be replaced with a fresh 80 minutes of music. This works for me, because I never use the comments for anything.

So, I filled my cd case with 28 cdrs of random music. The wife and I had a great time listening to them on our drive to and fro.

Posted by brad at December 16, 2003 05:10 PM
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