quasify

Some musical thoughts prompted yesterday as I was holding two dying iPods at 34,000 feet while desperately trying not to draw the attention of my incessantly yammering seatmate.

My mp3 archive has 17,839 items, which translates time-wise into 53.5 days. Since the computer I’m using is fairly new and I haven’t historically or consistently used iTunes, the ‘play count’ column indicates I’ve haven’t listened to 15,432 of these, or 47 days worth. This aggravates me, particularly for older albums with songs I’ve heard millions of times. Many favorite albums show zero listens (I’ve never listened to Moby Octopad!?! Yarrrgh.).

So as part of the effort to relisten to everything at least once I’ve started using smart playlists with a built in filter of (where playcount = 0) which will randomly pull in “unheard” stuff. If I manually put this playlist on my iPod, the playcounts don’t update in iTunes once I reconnect the iPod. It works if I turn off the manually manage music checkbox and put my faith in iTunes auto-sync, leaving me unable to control what goes on there (including my zero-listens smart playlist). The iTunes auto-sync really seems to think I’m hoping to listen to things that have non-zero playcounts (ostensibly, my favorites). The favorite-based sync is a self-fulfilling prophecy destined to lock us in to a small selection of the same old sameness.

Point being, I fail at iTunes, fail at recharging stuff before long haul flights and fail generally with some of the crap music I’ve collected over the years. Is it ok to delete the embarassingly angry music of my teens yet? Or will this stuff be of historical interest to someone? Maybe my non-existent children will be amused at my poor taste in music someday.