by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
My first Playlist that I will share with you is about queuing up music to be played. This kind of playlist may not be necessary if 1) you don’t believe in rating your music, and 2) you don’t have that many songs to queue. I have over 20,000 songs, so managing what I am going to play requires some planning. Also, being a bit of a obsessive type I find organizing things to be a source of enjoyment for me. 😉 First of all, create a Playlist in iTunes by going File > New Smart Playlist, then name it. I called mine ‘Rating Queue”. iTunes prompts you with a new window asking how you want to filter the music in your Smart playlist. Use the following filters: 1) Plays is less than 2 (This is important since I listen to songs at least twice when I rate them. Sometimes, I will rate a song as soon as I hear it, other times it will be the second go around). 2) Media is Music (this filters out movies and podcasts and audio books). It will look like this: Now, if you have thousands of songs, your new Smart playlist will have […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
An ambitious title if there ever was, The World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, attempts to explain how music is so integral to human evolution that the entire human experience can be mostly summarized in six meta-songs. Daniel Levitin captured lots of imagination and excitement with his previous book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music’ so expectations were relatively high. Unfortunately, he did not deliver on two levels: 1) This book was not as well received as his first book, and 2) This book did not accomplish what it claimed to do. I have always been intrigued when I see writers attempt to take a complex topic and try to simplify it. Daniel Levitin makes his own attempt by saying that entire human experience can be captured in six different songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Each has a different function, but all serve to bind us together and make us stronger as a species. He reinforces the truism that music is what makes us human. While I can’t disagree with him, music is only one function that makes us human, an important one, but not the only one. I can’t help but feel that because Levitin […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings3 comments
Last year at this time I posted about how it is possible to analyze your iTunes library and generate some statistics about it. Well, another year has come and gone and I have been listening lots to my iPod Touch. I have discovered and rediscovered a ton of great music and love how iTunes helps me to organize my hobby. I use two different programs to run the statistics. The most polished one is called SuperAnalzyer and it creates some wonderful statistics and graphs. SuperAnalzyer PDF Document The other program is a fabulous little script written by Scott Yanff. iTunes Statistics Text Document These statistics were taken late December 26, 2010 of my personal library. It is a snapshot of a year of iTunes use and listening. After listening to a song a couple of times I will assign a rating to it. Some changes of note: 12,626 songs has grown to 21,108 songs with over 8,400 songs being added to the library. This is kinda a slow down mostly because I had imported most of my CD collection in the previous year. I have also begun purchasing albums and songs through iTunes so the physical CD collecting is going […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
A powerful feature of iTunes is its ability to create custom playlists of your songs. You can create playlists of particular genres, years, and anything else you have listed in your tags. As I stated in Lesson Five, having information in your tags/comments section that relates to an artist’s city of origin or listing the names of? their earlier bands can all be searchable and thus become the basis of a playlist. I extensively use Playlists to create music lists to listen to. In a future post, I will list how I use playlists to queue music to rate and to organize my songs to further polish them. My playlists operate like an instrument that makes me feel just like a musician, fluidly allowing me to play great music. Here is an introduction to Playlists courtesy of Apple. But one of the most sophisticated playlists I have ever found is listed here. Check them out.
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings1 comments
In response to a couple of blog posts, Growing Up Games and Games vs Art, I feel compelled to respond with my own perspective about how to evaluate Computer Games as Art. Computer Games is a medium that is criticized for being immature and adolescent. Games are seen as being full of violence, escapism, and lacking any maturity. As an avid fan, investor in a computer games company, and an amateur philosopher, I wondered why do Computer Games get saddled with these labels. After some thinking, I feel that there are three related reasons: 1) Computer Games are relatively new form of entertainment and communication medium. 2) And because of #1, Computer Games possess its fair share of adolescent content. 3) And because of #2, Computer Games do not possess the sophisticated traits consistent with Art. So let’s start with the first reason. My read of 20th century history is that all new entertainment mediums start off being criticized for being frivolous. When Movies were first created, they were seen to be superfluous compared to theater. The first movies were not documentaries, but skin flicks that were used in various naughty arcades. Movies started off as pure bawdy entertainment, but […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
One of the things I appreciate about iTunes is the fields you can use to add extra tags to your songs. As we discussed earlier most people use Genre as their default sorting system, but that is just tapping the surface of what you could get out of your music collection. If you have an extensive library, it would be worth your while to ‘polish’ these song tags so that you can create some great play-lists. Here are some essential tags you might want to consider using: Date – Should be the date of the song’s release, not the date of the album release. This is especially important when it comes to greatest hit compilations. Having the correct date allows you to listen to an artist’s evolution as a musician. Location – I put this in the Grouping header. I put the city, state/province, and country that the artists/band was born/formed in. Having a location can allow me to listen to bands from California or from Scotland. Other Info such as Member of XXX Band – I put this in the Comments header. When I do a search for the Police, I will also see my albums by Sting, Andy […]
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