Accesible Music

Between the new Genius playlist system in iTunes and Pandora's instant internet radio on my iPhone, I've been having an easy and good time of creating excellent playlists on the fly.

The nice thing about the Genius playlist creation is that its easy to remove songs that don't fit, click refresh and that song is replaced by a, hopefully, better fit for the mix. I wish the same functionality was built into the iPhone version of the Genius function.

But I'm not really complaining, just digging on having a never-ending supply of good music to enjoy. And finding those long-lost hidden nuggets of sonic brilliance!

So Meta My Head Asploded

I've been fooling around with the iPhone 2.0 upgraded software since I installed it late yesterday. So far the most fun I've had is playing with a free app called Remote that lets me control my iTunes with my iPhone.

I can instantly see a couple of uses for this. With some external speakers, you've got a total solution for music at a party. With some remote speakers, you could play whatever music you wanted into the kid's room while they slept.

But I'm going to try something different to see if it'll work or if I'll just tear a hole in the universe. I'm going to connect my Bluetooth headphones to my laptop and see if I can listen to iTunes on the computer but controlled through my iPhone which doesn't support stereo Bluetooth usage for some ridiculous reason (unless this has been fixed in the 2.0 release but I haven't heard of it yet).

I just got finished trying this setup out and it did work perfectly. Kind of nice if you want music and aren't going to be much further than 20 feet from the laptop.

One app that I wish worked better because it strikes me as a goofy and grin producing little thing is called World 9. It is supposed to tap into the accelerometer and produce sound effects based on the movements. Which are supposed to be played through headphones but who knows, might be fun to amplify them.

Yeah, definitely liking being able to control iTunes in the living room now with my laptop hooked up to the speakers in the kitchen (yeah, I do keep a set of speakers in my kitchen for iPods and laptops, don't you?).

One Major Step Done in the iTunes Library Consolidation

Without much fanfare yesterday afternoon I completed step one in a long project to consolidate and clean up and categorize and make the most of my iTunes libraries. I'd somehow gotten myself into an arrangement with multiple libraries with lots of crossover music but no one place where all of it resided together.

When I got my laptop back from Apple with a much larger hard drive I was given the opportunity to drag and drop four or five libraries into iTunes and then go through the slow process of removing duplicates. When I started I had more than 6000 duplicated songs, most were simple dupes but a good proportion were live versions of studio songs and not really things I wanted to get rid of.

I did a little bit here and there every few nights and, over the course of about a month, whittled down the duplicate list.

The next step has already begun, making sure all of an artist is listed in the same genre, adding ratings and re-categorizing songs in their own unique genre (I've got stuff like House Punk, Retro Dancehall, one just labeled cmz, Soft Rock and more).

The next consolidation project after the music one is to collect all of my photos (somewhere around 20,000 of them by now).

An iTunes History Exploration

Totally and shamelessly taken from the Midvale School for Gifted Alumni. I think I'm going to try and do this from memory just for fun, guesses will be in italics.

How many total songs?
6096 but this may be low since I'm still recovering from the hard drive failure earlier this summer.

Sort by song title - first and last...
A-Plus by Hieroglyphics
30,000 Pounds of Bananas by Harry Chapin

Sort by time - shortest and longest...
Chico Boy by Scapegoat Wax at 14 seconds
Blues for Y2K by Robert Walter's 20th Congress

Sort by Album - first and last...
Billie Holliday's The A - Z Encyclopedia
Deltron 3030's 3030 Instrumentals

Sort by Artist - first and last...
Woke Up This Morning by A3
I Need a Hot Girl by 504 Boys

Top five played songs...
Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone by Bill Withers (84 plays)
Take Your Mama Out by The Scissor Sisters (76 plays)
Your Latest Trick by Dire Straits (72 plays)
Dibi Dibi Rek by Ismael Lo (67 plays)
A Love From Outer Space by Tahiti 80 (67 plays)

Find the following words. How many songs show up?
Sex: 37
Death: 13
Love: 313
You: 545
Home: 53
Boy: 162
Girl: 112

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle...
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC
No Particular Place to Go by Chuck Berry
Think by James Brown
The House of Love by The Beatles
Removable Tattoo (rare jungle remix #1) by Sade