In 2009 I listened to every bit of music in my iTunes library as sorted by track name, and in 2010 I did listened to the entire thing as sorted by by track length, and again in 2010 sorted by play number.

It’s a fun little project, and makes me take notice of the music I have in new ways. Over the past month I’ve listened to every track as sorted by date added.

What did I find out this time?

Of the four ways I’ve listened to all my music in order, it was the one that had the greatest effect. Listening as sorted by track length told me a lot about the kind of music I own, but by date added it told me a lot about me. Changing tastes of music is only the smallest part of it.

Mostly it’s about the triggered memories. This is a great way to relive your life through your memories, in order, as triggered by “Oh shit, I remember buying this!” or “I know where I was the first time I heard this track, and ripped it from that CD!”

If I looked through a diary, that would work, but most people don’t keep diaries. But everyone has a collection of music. Listening by track name is just a whimsical thing that only someone like me would do, someone who has almost unlimited free time, gives in to random impulses, and bloody-minded enough to stick with long term projects.

I think everyone should listen to all their music as sorted by date. Then again, maybe most people aren’t like me, and might not get anything from it at all. Who knows.

Some more notes:

• When you sort all the tracks by date added, if an album has the same time and date (to the nearest minute) it then lists the tracks alphabetically by name, not by track number. I’m not sure why, but it meant that I listened to albums in an unusual order. Unless, of course, the track names were “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.”
• The first track, for the second time, was “5 seconds of almost silence”, a track I use to separate music track on CDs for my show. It’s also the shortest track in my library, as well as the most played.
• Next is a whole load of music that I copied direct from my old PC onto my macbook when I bought it back in February of 2008. This includes 311 songs, 20.2 hours, or 1.5 GB of music. A lot of this is from my collection of CDs from the previous decade, but from CDs I didn’t still have with me physically.
  What did this mean? This batch included a LOT of memories. Stuff I’d downloaded for specific shows, CDs I’d borrowed from friends at university and ripped, some music from Pola’s computer, and lots more.
• The next main batch of music is from a few weeks later, when I wanted to have the titles of every track listed, rather than just “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.” Instead of doing anything manually, I just ripped all the CDs I had, let iTunes grab the track titles from the internet automagically, and deleted the previous files.
  This included a lot more music that Pola and I had bought together, or that we both liked so that we’d carry the music with us on road trips in a CD carrying case. Good times!
• Once I had an iTunes account, much of the music I bought was through that, and not CD. A lot of these were impulse buys, or buying new albums from favourite artists. Also there are many EPs and albums that I bought after hearing the music on a YouTube video, and iTunes is usually the easiest way to grab it.
• At the EJC in 2008 I organized the EJC Open Stages, and put in lots of CDs to rip for the artists appearing on stage. Also someone gave me a USB thumb drive with a big collection of ska music and other stuff, and it somehow got imported into my iTunes library. I liked most of it, so kept most of it.
• Some CDs that someone gave to me. Those were ripped.
• Some music from musicians I work with on cruise ships. Well, to be honest the style of music normally isn’t to my taste, so I don’t keep the music in rotation, except for a very few artists.
• Oh look, all of Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week music. Mixed memories of my own attempt to make a song a week for a just six weeks, rather than for an entire year.
• And then quite a few albums bought at the suggestion of various girlfriends and friends who are girls over the last two years. Lots of memories there too!
• Albums and EPs by musicians I met on my vacation in New York in September 2010. Those guys were all super talented! I still buy their new music as and when it comes out.
• Various nostalgia trip! Downloading albums I owned on CD, cassette tape or (I’m not kidding here) minidisc when I was 20, but since lost. Groove Armada are still cool, right? Basement Jax? Air’s Moon Safari? Jamiroqui? Love it! That reminds me, I should find some Orbital and Leftfield again some time. This way I can get double memories, of when I first listened to that music, and also when I buy it again 10 (or more) years later.

Whew! A lot of memories. That will do for now.

But what next? Listen to the whole iTunes library as sorted by… release date? That might work, but only three quarters of my library has the year of release. Beats per minute? Only a few dozen tracks have that info attached. Genre? Album? Artist? Those are a bit boring. No matter, I’ll think of something.

The inspiration (way more entertaining due to funny animations):

“Three minute hero is the new underground open stage in berlin, right on the platform of the ubahnhof schönleinstrasse.

Songs, breakdance, stand up comedy, performance whatever you want to show you can!! only limitations are the three minutes between trains arriving at the station.

Wanna show? Simply come up and you get a slot in the show. Just passing through? Well, you can always take the next train.”

Hosted by Duo Desolato.

Guitar and singing!

Hint: nobody asked permission to do this! How long could it keep going until security turns up?

Quick! Make it look as though nothing special is happening!

Magic!

Juggling!

I performed some music and juggling, but of course I don’t have photos of me.

Dancing!

Drunken singing!

Party!

Oh shit! Security! Length of show: one hour and 30 minutes.

The BVG security allowed one final act. Andy Snatch closed the show with a club routine.

Later at the Another Country English Bookshop, playing Jenga.

]]> http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1292/feed 0 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1288 http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/archives/1288#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:29:49 +0000 admin http://www.lukeburrage.com/blog/?p=1288 I made a post on a forum about my “computer history” and thought I’d share it here on my blog, for the sake of nostalgia.

First computer in the house:

Amstrad Word Processor. Also good for Basic, text adventures and chess.

A bit hazy on the order, but:

Amstrad 464. Games and more Basic programming. Save your games to cassette tape!

And then I got the next model up! An Amstrad 6128, with a colour monitor and a disk drive. The games loaded sooooo fast!

That one was mine. My brother got a black and white TV, so didn’t need a monitor. He got:

ZX Spectrum +2

Next up, Amiga 500:

This was actually usable as a word processor, for image creation, even making animated movies. Also the sound on this system was way ahead of any other system. Oh yeah… it had a mouse!

And then, Amiga 1200:

This motherfucker had a HARD DRIVE! Enough to store something like 20 floppy disks worth of games for super fast loading. And 2MB of RAM. Awesome! I did my first music sequencing with this one.

To be clear, I never bought any of these new. Always second hand, so I was always a bit behind the curve.

Then I bought a 386 PC, with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I used it to run Cubasis, a very streamlined midi sequencer which could control my keyboard. Yay.

I guess it looked a bit like this (just like every PC tower case).

Next was 486. It was a bit better.

Next was a Pentium computer, which was my first ever brand new computer. Windows 98! It ran the latest games, and had a 20gb Hard Drive. I put in a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live card, with a breakout port in the front slots where a CD drive would go. Now I could do audio recording, and play back multiple tracks in real time without lags and skips. I upgraded a few times, and added a DVD drive.

I then bought an all-new PC system, but only used it for a few months. I bought a Macbook for traveling, intending to use the more powerful PC when at home. It turned out that once I got used to OSX, I could never face going back to Windows XP.

As I bought the Macbook as a travel laptop, it was a bit underpowered right from the start. So a few years later I upgraded to a waaaaay more expensive MacBook Pro.

15 inch high res screen, SSD hard drive, 8 GB RAM. Super fast and works perfectly as a desktop (with an external monitor) and for traveling. I also run Windows 7. Moore’s Law kind holds true for me, but I think the price went up each time too.

80′s themed birthday party? Time to go shopping. I found the red bodywarmer/vest and knew what I had to do!

This pose was from memory (and while drunk), so excuse the mirror imagery. And this photo was taken with my iPhone, so please excuse the quality.

THE PREHISTORIC ALIGNMENT OF WORLD WONDERS

“Easter Island, Nazca, Ollantaytambo, Paratoari, Tassili n’Ajjer and Giza are all aligned on a single great circle. Additional ancient sites that are located within one tenth of one degree of this great circle include Petra; Perseopolis; Khajuraho; Pyay, Sukothai and Anatom Island.

Near Ollantaytambo, Machupicchu and Cuzco are within one quarter of a degree. The Oracle at Siwa in the western Egyptian desert is within one quarter of a degree. In the Indus Valley, Mohenjo Daro and Ganweriwala are within one quarter of a degree. The ancient Sumerian city of Ur and Angkor temples in Cambodia and Thailand are within one degree of the great circle. The Angkor temple at Preah Vihear is within one quarter of a degree.”

Cool!

And then he goes on to use this cherry-picked data to try to locate Atlantis. Fail!

Read all about it here.

“Catch up with Dexter.”

Partial win. I finished season two and three. Season four on DVD is still too expensive to buy, and I can never be bothered to pirate anything. Also I have a general principle which states I will never watch anything made for television for free, I will always pay for it. This way I will only spend time and effort on a series I really care about, rather than filling stupid amounts of time with dross. By paying for television it’s like I’m putting a dollar value, or euro value, on my own time. That I’m the one paying the dollar value means I value it even more.

“Watch more than the first episode of Battlestar Galactica.”

I did watch more than the first episode, although I haven’t made it to the end of the first series. Maybe in 2011. However, relying on semantics, this is a win.

“Play more Natural Selection and, if it is ever released, Natural Selection 2. I might need more memory for my PC though.”

Win. Natural Selection is my only gaming vice, but one I’m very happy with. I’m improving quite a lot, and it’s a great way to turn off my brain. I only ever play when I’m at home though, as it relies on stable Internet connection for multiplayer, and there is no single player.

I didn’t buy new memory for my PC, instead I installed Windows my new MacBook, and it plays PC games no problem. Natural Selection 2 is only just out as a beta, and doesn’t work very well on any computer, let alone my MacBook.

I also played through all of Half Life 1 and 2, and preferred Half Life 1 in almost every way except graphically. And I played through Portal too, which is very good, but way too short and way too easy.

This section total: 2.3 out of 3.

However, my blog really isn’t about numbers or even the readers. The
subtitle is “A place for Luke to share all his stuff” which means also
to share with the future me. If ever I need to find a photo to show
someone, of a place I’ve visited, or I need to find a video, or a
story, or anything I’ve produced online in the last two years, I just
search my blog. It is for me to keep track of things I’ve done, just
as much as it is for other people to see what I’ve done. There are
years of creative output and stories and places that I shared online
before this blog, but now I can’t find them online, or even on my hard
drive. To keep it all in one place is the main reason I keep doing
this. I just wish I’d kept up blogging from the first time I tried it
back in 2001.

The first time I listened to all the tracks sorted by track name.

The second time I listened sorted by track length.

In October I listened to all the tracks by play number. I started with tracks I’ve only listened to two or three times, and ended with tracks I’ve listened to over a hundred times. This is since February 2008.

My most listened-to track is actually the shortest track, so was the first one I listened to when I sorted by track length. It’s a 5 second piece of almost silence which I use to separate tracks on my show music playlists and CDs for performing. Number of listens? 902.

The most listened-to piece of music which isn’t something I use in my show, and I play repeatedly when practicing, is By My Side by Kasabian, from the album Empire. This is one of my favorite “writing” albums, and listen to it on repeat when plugging away on a novel. Play count? 87.

Some other notes:
- If two tracks from the same album had the same play number, for some reason the later track number was listed first. This lead to me listening to quite a few albums in reverse.
- The least-listened albums were, of course, those I’ve only bought or otherwise acquired most recently.
- Next up came albums that I don’t actively listen to. As in, when I flick though my iTunes Library, I never thing “Oh man, I’ve got to hear this band again!” I normally listen to these if they come up randomly, or when the album I wanted to listen to ends, and these play next.
- Tracks that aren’t part of albums are listened to less, as I don’t actively select them either.
- Earlier tracks in albums have more listens than later tracks. This is due to me starting an album, but not reaching the end.
- If a track is part of a playlist, it gets more plays, of course.
- The most listened to albums are quite varied, but each reflects a different mood. I guess whenever I feel like putting on music, I subconsciously return over and over to the same few albums.
- It doesn’t matter if an album is quite new, if I like it, and it fits a mood, it moves up the play count rankings pretty quickly.
- Shorter albums and EPs get more plays.

I think that’s it for this time.

Next time I’m going to listen to my entire iTunes library as sorted by “date added”, so chronologically by when I first listened to the track on this or my previous laptop.

A quick glance at that sorting option shows that the very first track is… you guessed it… 5 seconds of almost silence!