Years and Years, and Years of Music
Posted by Patrick on Wednesday, January 10, 2007Yes, another post about iTunes. Lately I've been thinking about different ways of listening to music during the day. The "Shuffle" feature is just too random, I get metal one song and Bob Dylan the next and it's just weird. I think I'm more of an album listener. Not exclusively, but there's random, and then there's random and it doesn't make work any more fun.
Lately I've been playing around with the Smart Playlist feature in iTunes, where the software scans all your songs and creates playlists based on criteria you give it. For instance you could tell it to only play songs by the Beatles, or just songs that are punk rock, or just songs that you've listened to a cetain number of times. It reminds me a lot of Pivot Tables in Excel, where you get a huge list of data, and the Pivot Table easily sorts it and groups it in useful ways based on the criteria you give it. Almost as cool as Excel Lookup Tables, but not quite.
Back to the story. I've used the Smart Playlist feature to create lists of songs by year. Clicking each year on the left side there shows only the songs released that year. It narrows things down, and envokes thoughts about what life was like during that time in my life. It's kind of like time-travel, but no need for a flux capacitor. In the image below, I chose a 1993 Smart Playlist and the music I was listening to then shows up. I was in junior high, just getting into The Might Mighty Bosstones. I think I had this on cassette tape at the time. 
In 1996 I was listening to Weezer's second album Pinkerton and wondering what the heck they were thinking musically. It was such a departure from their first album, and I had a tough time listening to it all the way through. I like it more now then I did then, I think.
In 2001 I installed the first version of iTunes, looking for an easy way to rip CD's. I was listening to a lot of the Dropkick Murphy's then, and getting ready to finish college. I had seen them a few times live since then, and like the BossTones, the're a great local (local to my locale at the time) band.
The whole Smart Playlist thing is a good way to keep track of recently acquired music too. Last week I got the new Tom Petty CD, Highway Companion, and added it to the collection. It's a high quality album, in the same way that his last solo album Wildflowers was.
One thing about iTunes and mp3's in general, it sure makes me listen to older music more then I think I would otherwise. Back when I had a large collection of CD's, I'd listen to whatever was new and just put it back into the collection when I got sick of it, many of the CD's going unlistened to for some time.
Working at home and having the full music collection at my disposal all day long has also helped in the back-catalog listening, too.
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