Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Music listening habits
I just posted this on my blog, but it could start some fun discussion/stories here:
Back on the 8th of April I decided to listen to some music. I couldn't decide exactly what. Normally I listen to albums at a time, or just choose random play. This time I clicked the "sort music by track title: descending" option in iTunes. I thought to myself:
"Why not listen to my entire iTunes music library, sorted by track name, and see how long it takes?"
So I did. I only have about 10gb of music on my laptop, which works out at 8 days and 14 hours of music. Some of those tracks are podcasts I downloaded directly without subscribing, so I estimate a rounded off 8 days worth of music.
Every time I worked at my computer and needed music, I resisted listening album by album, as I normally do, and selected the next song on the list. I finished the project in the early hours of this morning. As the last track finished (2007 by Tom Pritchard, iTunes sorts numbers after letters), nothing else played, and for some reason I felt like I'd achieved something. Nothing great, I understand, but there's a sense of accomplishment even with the simplest tasks.
I did learn some things:
- Lots of tracks had incorrect names. I fixed most of these as I went through.
- I had duplicates of many tracks, under different names. I deleted a LOT of duplicates.
- I have a few albums I can't stand. I'm not even sure why I ripped those CDs to my laptop. I deleted most of them.
- With some albums, there are individual tracks that really annoy me. I didn't delete these, so as not to be left with incomplete albums, but I did un-tick them.
- I found loads of music that I forgot I had.
- I remembered why I love lots of bands.
- I realized that, while I don't have a huge music library, my tastes are quite varied. This means I always have music for any mood.
- During the last month I added a few new albums. I think I might have missed some of these tracks. But I did listen to those albums in full a few times, so I think I can get away with it.
- Seven or eight albums have no track names, just "Track 01", "Track 02", etc. This is because I wasn't internet connected when ripping the CD. It's fun to listen to groups of album this way, all track ones, then all track twos, as sorted by artist name.
Also, away from the playlist:
- I'm not very good at writing fiction to music with lyrics.
- I knew this already, as I have the same problem with any non-internet/email writing.
- That's why I usually listen to the same album over and over and over again when writing. The album is DJ SS presents: Jazz & Bass Session 2, and when I sort my iTunes library by play count it's way out in front. As the name suggests, the album is drum and bass, which means the fast tempo keeps me awake and my fingers moving. The lack of vocals is key, as I just mentioned. The sounds aren't overly electronic, mostly based around live recordings of piano, bass and saxophone. It is a double album, about 2hours 20 minutes, and that length normally fits perfectly with the word count I want to bash out on any given day.
A fun project! I think I'll now do it again, but sort by track length. I'll start with the longest tracks, and end up with the shortest. The first track will be "Tchaikovsky - Peter and the Wolf" and the second will be the undeniably awesome "The Most Unwanted Song". The final track will be "Queen Mab Interlude" from the Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack Album. Hopefully the building pace will make me faster and faster at... well, at whatever I'm doing while listening to the music.
I'll post my observations in another month.
Back on the 8th of April I decided to listen to some music. I couldn't decide exactly what. Normally I listen to albums at a time, or just choose random play. This time I clicked the "sort music by track title: descending" option in iTunes. I thought to myself:
"Why not listen to my entire iTunes music library, sorted by track name, and see how long it takes?"
So I did. I only have about 10gb of music on my laptop, which works out at 8 days and 14 hours of music. Some of those tracks are podcasts I downloaded directly without subscribing, so I estimate a rounded off 8 days worth of music.
Every time I worked at my computer and needed music, I resisted listening album by album, as I normally do, and selected the next song on the list. I finished the project in the early hours of this morning. As the last track finished (2007 by Tom Pritchard, iTunes sorts numbers after letters), nothing else played, and for some reason I felt like I'd achieved something. Nothing great, I understand, but there's a sense of accomplishment even with the simplest tasks.
I did learn some things:
- Lots of tracks had incorrect names. I fixed most of these as I went through.
- I had duplicates of many tracks, under different names. I deleted a LOT of duplicates.
- I have a few albums I can't stand. I'm not even sure why I ripped those CDs to my laptop. I deleted most of them.
- With some albums, there are individual tracks that really annoy me. I didn't delete these, so as not to be left with incomplete albums, but I did un-tick them.
- I found loads of music that I forgot I had.
- I remembered why I love lots of bands.
- I realized that, while I don't have a huge music library, my tastes are quite varied. This means I always have music for any mood.
- During the last month I added a few new albums. I think I might have missed some of these tracks. But I did listen to those albums in full a few times, so I think I can get away with it.
- Seven or eight albums have no track names, just "Track 01", "Track 02", etc. This is because I wasn't internet connected when ripping the CD. It's fun to listen to groups of album this way, all track ones, then all track twos, as sorted by artist name.
Also, away from the playlist:
- I'm not very good at writing fiction to music with lyrics.
- I knew this already, as I have the same problem with any non-internet/email writing.
- That's why I usually listen to the same album over and over and over again when writing. The album is DJ SS presents: Jazz & Bass Session 2, and when I sort my iTunes library by play count it's way out in front. As the name suggests, the album is drum and bass, which means the fast tempo keeps me awake and my fingers moving. The lack of vocals is key, as I just mentioned. The sounds aren't overly electronic, mostly based around live recordings of piano, bass and saxophone. It is a double album, about 2hours 20 minutes, and that length normally fits perfectly with the word count I want to bash out on any given day.
A fun project! I think I'll now do it again, but sort by track length. I'll start with the longest tracks, and end up with the shortest. The first track will be "Tchaikovsky - Peter and the Wolf" and the second will be the undeniably awesome "The Most Unwanted Song". The final track will be "Queen Mab Interlude" from the Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack Album. Hopefully the building pace will make me faster and faster at... well, at whatever I'm doing while listening to the music.
I'll post my observations in another month.
Comments
If I'm at home, I'm always listening to music. The only exceptions being if I'm reading or writing, playing an instrument, or doing something on the internet that requires sound. My typical routine is to come home, crash in my chair, put something on, and space out for two hours. Then I make sure to do my math and more brainless homework first so that I don't have to turn it off. After homework, I've always either got an instrument in my lap or listening to music until I fall asleep.
While listening to my entire library at once sounds like an intriguing experience, I definitely don't need to do this. I listen to everything that I have on my iPhone all the time, all precious 15 gigs. I'm always swapping out certain albums for others and, if there's any wasted space, it's almost immediately eradicated because I do end up cycling through everything I have over time.
Right now I have 11:05:24:57 in time. Whoa. I haven't tried to listen to it all at once, but I thought about the idea and blogging about each song. But I'm lazy. I do the same with my PSP all the time. I don't think I cycled over everything in my library yet though. I'm always getting something new or going through music phases. Right now I'm the the gothic rock/ska/No Doubt phase.
1) Listen to everything I have of a given Artist
2) Bounce from song to song based on mood (not mood of the song, but the mood it elicits from me which occasionally differs from the song's intended mood), essentially using music like a drug.
3) If I am listening to a particular artist or album for the first time, I listen through the entire album at least twice in a row. I have noticed that when listening to new music, it will put me in mind of familiar music - thus distracting me from the new music and requiring a second listen.
I sorely need to clean up my downloaded music. I have a lot of music that is poorly labeled or duplicate. I may use Luke's method to clean it all up.
On a bit of a tangent, I noticed that I listen to music a lot less frequently the past year. I used to require an almost constant soundtrack, but now I listen to NPR, BBC Radio, audio books and talk podcasts more frequently than I listen to music. As internally analytical as I am, I could not tell you why the shift happened. Maybe I need a new artist or two to jump start my music listening.
I think my failure was that I was getting entire discographies. I think I'm going to try again soon, and concentrate on greatest hits albums. Sure, I'll miss some great b-sides here and there, but I will have a collection of music that comprises mostly of things I will actually listen to.
Also, I used Pandora or Last.fm and such, so there really isn't much of a reason to store actual mp3s unless they are obscure.
Otherwise I'll pick a genre to listen to, and have my player go randomly through that, or I'll just go randomly through all of my music.
Related to that, I often find I can't listen to a lot of the same artist or style of music all in a row. Even if I really like an artist, I find that I'll get tired of hearing their vocals if I keep them on for too long. My music brain just prefers variety, I guess.
Anyway, I tend to listen to my music in either one of two ways: 1) on shuffle, or 2) in order by date added. Specifically, I have a playlist set up for music that I've acquired within the past month. I tend to give that playlist priority so that I can familiarize myself with all of my music as it comes in and thus be able to better remember most of what I have later on down the line. I pride myself on being able to quickly identify about a good 75% of the songs I have without looking at the titles (is it a surprise that I'm probably best known in my area for running Anime Name That Tune games?).
(This is around 150 GB of music.)
“Why not listen to my entire iTunes music library, sorted by track name, and see how long it takes?â€
I actually listened to all the music in my library again last November and December, not sorted in any way, I just made sure I listened to everything within a month.
Over the past few weeks I did something similar, and finished this morning. I listened to my iTunes music library, sorted by track length. I had a lot fun, certainly more than the previous times I’ve listened, as I’ve deleted all the duplicates, and got rid of lots of music I actually didn’t like.
At the end of my post about this last year I said: “I think I’ll now do it again, but sort by track length. I’ll start with the longest tracks, and end up with the shortest.†I forgot I wrote that though, and started with the shortest.
Some notes:
- The first track was a 5 second piece of silence which I use in my show.
- The last track ran 12:44, Slow Movement from the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack.
- Lots of short tracks are used on albums as filler bits between other tracks.
- Indie bands often have a minute long piece of music on an album.
- Sound track music can be any length. The final ten tracks were all sound track pieces or classical music.
- Techno, drum and bass, and other electronic music hardly showed up until I got to 5 minute-long tracks.
- Final tracks of albums are often artificially long, with a few minutes of silence before a “hidden†track.
- This method of sorting created a far more random mix that sorting by track name.
I don’t think I have much else to say about it. It’s just a fun project, and I recommend you do something similar. Album by album is good, but this way different tracks stand out.
Now all of that is cleared up, and I have shoved all 13GB of music I have acquired over the past 12 or so years onto my 16GB iPhone. Now I realize that I have a lot of crap that I don't actually like anymore, and need to figure out what should go and what should stay. I've noticed that back in the day, when tracks where typically downloaded individually, it was more common to slowly acquire songs by an artist as you got into them. Since the switch to Bit Torrent years ago, it's been much easier to just grab that entire discography, and I think that is how my collection became flooded with stuff I was not really into. It's an overload if you are just giving that artist a try. What I've resorted to doing is creating a separate music folder of "music purgatory", where I will hold new stuff until I've decided it is worthy of going in the collection (and making sure that download is properly tagged upon doing so).
Since everything in the main collection is tagged properly, this listen-through will be to identify whether a song should be added to a general "all songs shuffle" playlist, put into a purgatory playlist for stuff I am not quite into yet, or put into an "I like this, but it shouldn't come up on shuffle" playlist, which is useful for stuff you are only occasionally in the mood for. Some people list to just pick an artist, but I rely on shuffle a lot, so this will prevent me from having to skip songs so much. Nothing is better than being handed several good songs in a row that you weren't expecting, w/o having to skip a single one.
When I got this computer I decided to put all my music on it and I'm still working on that. I wanted it to be VERY organized and now I am also super anal about the album art,. I have probably 10 Cd's UI have to rip but haven't gotten to it because of Album art. but it is VERY rare in my collection for things to be wrong. the worst that will happen is a typo or no track name. But I have a zune pass so my collection is constantly growing.
Also, as bullshit as the writing gets for their album reviews, you could to a lot worse than to skim their Best New Music section, pick out a few things that sound like they might appeal to you, and listen to them.