{"id":1041,"date":"2010-11-10T09:09:18","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T14:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bourdaghs.com\/blog\/?p=1041"},"modified":"2010-11-13T12:34:37","modified_gmt":"2010-11-13T17:34:37","slug":"1041","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bourdaghs.com\/blog\/?p=1041","title":{"rendered":"Unhealthy Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have about 20,000 songs stored on my I-Pod. A few months ago, I became haunted by the bizarre notion that I should listen to them all at least once: some vague idea about the ethics of ownership, about taking responsibility for music that I’d decided to hoard. I started going out of my way to listen to tracks with a 0 play count, proceeding alphabetically by artist name. <\/p>\n

I’d gotten up to K with that method. But I was faltering, because this procedure required me to devote, for example, several days to listening solely to the Beatles or Blur. I’d get bored listening over and over to the same artist. Wasn’t there a better way?<\/p>\n

I finally figured it out this past Monday: I’ve created a “Smart Playlist” consisting of all the songs that have zero plays (excluding those from the genres of classical and podcast) and then use the “shuffle songs” setting when I play it. The I-Pod now randomly plays songs from the list and, because I used the “live update” setting, it eliminates them from the collection once they been played. I started out with about 3500 songs in the playlist; that’s down to 3300 at this point. <\/p>\n

You can’t imagine how pleased I am with myself over this technological breakthrough. I’m exploring the nether regions of my music collection, skipping around from artist to artist so rapidly that I never find any particular style tedious. <\/p>\n

While typing in this entry, I’ve listened too:<\/p>\n

“All Night Stand,” The Kinks (bootleg unreleased demo)
\n??????, Southern All Stars
\n“Love’s Gonna Walk Out on Me,” Toots and the Maytals
\n“COLORS,” Utada Hikaru<\/p>\n

Four down, 3296 to go…. I’m so excited about this.<\/p>\n

It’s kinda sad, really. <\/p>\n