December 21, 2003

Big Gun, Number One

There is nothing like waking up to AC/DC.

Posted by brad at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2003

The Pointless Music Conversation of One Continues

As I mentioned in my last post, it is time for me to get some new music. It is a daunting task, and I have no idea where to begin.

I was looking at the iTunes store for a little while, and seriously considered buying music it from it, mostly for the novelty value of it. But, I still couldn't bring myself to do it. That's It. It. It. It.

So my next stop was to see what was new at the most excellent 365 days project. I am now listening to my new favorite song on continuous play.

Posted by brad at 11:14 PM | Comments (2)

December 18, 2003

Many Songs, Played At Random, Part III

Another benefit of section b of my previous post about my iTunes random cd burning saga is that I can create another smart playlist that contains all the tracks that I have already burned. This, in turn, allows me to do a little analysis of iTunes randomization. It seemed to me that there was way too much They Might Be Giants on the cds I burned. So I thought I would see if iTunes was including more TMBG than was statistically probable.

I had burned a total of 512 tracks. 62 of these were TMBG.

62/512 = 11.92%

I had to make a new smart playlist to include all of the tracks I was considering candidates to be included in the random cd. (see section a of Part II). There were 1482 tracks. (My collection is not as large as some people's.) Of these 1482, 165 are TMBG.

165 /1482 = 11.13%

So, as you see, ITunes was not selecting TMBG tracks a disproportionate amount of times.

I also thought I would do another analysis, this time using minutes instead of number of tracks. I had burned 1849 minutes out of 5398 minutes. I had burned 112 minutes of TMBG out of a total of 311 minutes of TMBG.

112/1849 = 6.05%

311/5398 = 5.07%

A disparity - but since iTunes is picking tracks at random, not minutes, I am not sure if this means anything.


It also seemed like I was hearing too much Kool Keith. So I ran the numbers:

7/512 = 1.37%

17/1482 = 1.15%

25/1849 = 1.35%

68/5398 = 0.15%

It also seemed like I wasn't hearing that much Beatles. So I ran the numbers:

28/512 = 5.47%

69/1482 = 4.66%

83/1849 = 4.49%

200/5398 = 3.70%


hmmm, what does all this mean? I think it means I need to work on growing my music library.

Posted by brad at 10:09 AM | Comments (5)

I'm in the Black Lodge

Two eggs over hard. I know, I know, it's hard on the arteries, but old habits die hard--just about as hard as I want those eggs.

-FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper

Posted by brad at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

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 05:10 PM | Comments (0)