Building my library
I posted a while back about my mission to expand my incredibly eclectic music collection, intending to fill my iPod Classic of 40,000 songs. Since then, I’ve purchased a few CDs and have borrowed CDs from various family and friends.
I am pleased to say that I now have 4,499 songs!
I’m up to 26 genres (from 24) with the top three being rock (109 albums), alternative (80), and jazz/bluegrass (72). Country was third last time, but dropped to fourth with just 56 albums, up from 35.
Of course, I’m also getting quite the collection of podcasts but have been neglecting to listen to them all! I currently have 425 in my library including 234 English “tips” for good grammar and 128 Gaelic language lessons for when I (finally) start learning a funny foreign language.*
Most days, all of the music is set to random play/shuffle when I’m at the office. I figured that I must have listened to most of the songs at least once, but after a quick review, it seems that nearly half haven’t even gotten one play! I sometimes think I should do what a friend is doing and listen to everything in order from A-Z, but I’m just not that dedicated so each song will have to take its chance with the listening lottery.
* I did take two years of French in high school, but I didn’t retain any of it. I then took two years of American Sign Language at university and now enjoy eavesdropping on ASL users when I’m out-and-about. (Yes, I’m a little ashamed of this – but only a little.)
The alphabetical thing is just another (and I think, better) way of doing random/shuffle. Like you, I was finding that it was just the same songs coming up on shuffle all the time and there was stuff I was never hearing. So I opted for the alphabetical by song title – and it’s great fun.
Some of the combinations are intriguing to say the least – real juxtapositions.
It’s also great for playing statistical games – how over or under represented are particular letters of the alphabet in your collection? How egotistical are song-writers (a disproportionate of song titles start ‘I’ or ‘My’!)
I know! I spend too much time with my own thoughts!!
I’ve given it some thought and am going to listen to everything on my iPod in order – but not A-Z song titles because I want to be different. (I’m funny that way.) So, I just need to decided if I’ll go A-Z by artist or album name. I’m leaning toward album so that it’s not too monotonous!