9.19.2005

Wired News: My IPod for a Random Playlist

[click title above to get the article]

I couldn't agree more with the point being made in this article.

I've experienced exactly what he's talking about with the current generation of music shuffling technologies. I've yet to find a solution that works well using either itunes or rhapsody, which are my current top 2 sources of music. [BTW - I can't remember the last time I purchased a CD. ]

I finally had what you might call some "offline downtime" with my laptop this past weekend, as I schlepped my laptop and bag 'o gadgets with me for a relaxing weekend of solitude in the north cascades.

Being offline and not having to focus on anything work-related, gave me the opportunity to get back to the task of cleaning up my music collection, something I've been putting off for years. I started by creating a bunch of smart playlists, organized them into folders, and for as many songs as I could bare, ranked, categorize, and cleaned up the metadata song by song.

As I began the task of cleansing my 7000+ songs, operating under the premise that if I clean the metadata and categorize and rank all 7000, I'm hoping that I'll eventually be able to more accurately slice and dice my collection.

Right?

My goal? To be able play what I want, when I want it, on the device/medium that is most appropriate for the environment I happen to be in at that particular point in time. Is this really too much to ask for?

Even though I got through over 1000 songs this past weekend, I was mostly ranking songs (1-5 stars) directly from my ipod(s). I did spend some time using itunes to cleanse my metadata, but there's only so much that one can take performing such a tedious chore.

After spending a pretty good chunk of time on it over the weekend, I started to think that even as my collection "gets smarter" and my media players are able to take better advantage of my playlists, rankings, and cleansed metadata, it is still REALLY REALLY hard to access and manage my 7000+ song collection.

There has got to be a better solution. I know that I will probably have to take the hit and do a bunch of research on the apple forums and various ipod lounges to see what others are doing so I can squeeze the most out of their collections, but I really don't have the time.

Regardless of the outcome of my current effort to better classify my collection, it's a slightly different set of problems than what this article is focusing on. Unfortunately, inaccurate metadata only contributes to the problem.

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