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 […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings6 comments
Okay, we have imported, rated, and ran statistics on iTunes. But as your library gets bigger, it becomes more and more difficult to find artists and songs. Thankfully, iTunes uses the Music Genre as its basic sorting system which makes it easier to find the style of music you want to listen to. Default Music Genres include: Classical, R&B, Rock, Jazz, etc. These are fine if you have 40-50 artists from diverse musical backgrounds, but what happens if you listen primarily to one genre of music? What do you do if you are a serious collector and listener of music and are frustrated with the standard labels? What do you do when you have over 100 artists and 10,000 songs? This blog post is meant to address that challenge. To start with there are have been three approaches to what a Music Genre is: 1) People Ignore It. Some people say that Musical Genres are too presumptuous of a field to use. They are indignant that the label ‘pigeon holes’ artists unfairly. That is partially true. Led Zeppelin is considered to be the earliest hard rock/metal band even though they played some folk inspired music. Are they British-Blues? Hard Rock? […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
This next post is not as much a lesson as a confessional. Did you know you can combine music and statistics? iTunes has so many labels and tags that can be added to your music and the database that it is possible to evaluate this music with statistics. (Whatever that can be labeled can be measured and whatever that can be measured can be tracked with statistics). I am a huge statistical geek (an obscure soccer league, political elections, band ratings, etc) so the idea of analyzing the music I listen to in new ways is like combining peanut butter and chocolate. First of all here is the best page with links to great software that can help analyze your iTunes library. It is located at TuneQuest. Check it out… I have tried two different programs. The most polished one is called SuperAnalzyer and it is pretty super. It creates some wonderful statistics and graphs. SuperAnalzyer PDF Document The other program is not listed on that page but is courtesy of a fabulous little script written by Scott Yanff. iTunes Statistics Text Document Now these statistics were taken late December 26, 2009 of my personal library. It is a snapshot […]
by Chris Billowsin Hobby Heedings0 comments
I always thought it would be cool to come up with a way to evaluate musical artists and bands using some kind of mathematical formula. But thinking and doing are two different things. An intrepid author by the name of John Sellers who wrote a book called “Perfect From Now On” answered my prayers and created such a formula. I am not going to provide a book review, except summarize it by saying it is an entertaining memoir from a person from my generational cohort (so that means its full of piss and vinegar) who talks about his devotion to the Alternative Rock scene. What Sellers does in his Appendix that had my geek-senses all aflutter is create an elaborate, pretentious, but all so tasty combination of math and music fandom. With John’s permission, I am pleased to make my own contribution to his formula by enshrining it in an Excel spreadsheet. Now you too can see how your favorite artists align (or don’t) with John’s passion for the abrasive world of Alternative Rock. I would hope that John’s formula could become a template for others to tweak and create their own formulas. Check it out… John Sellars Formula
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