music

[curgoth]

I am craving more music in my collection. I have enough music now that I'm looking at "shaping" my collection so that the proportions are the way I want them. It's hard to maintain playlists when I have 3351 tracks. So I typically just leave it on random and skip things I don't feel like listening to. The problem occurs when I get an influx of, say, Tom Waits, and, by sheer volume, shift the mood of what comes up on random. The easiest solution to this would just be to add more music to balance out Tom Waits et al. I want to go and buy several hundred dollars worth of bleepy European EBM and North American Industrial music.

I can't, just now, so I am whining about it instead.

Ah the problems only moody yuppies have.

Comments

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

And here I am daydreaming about a music player to put my miserly collection of disks on... and I'd have to buy a program to 'rip' them with, right?

So clueless.

But purple, you see. I'm in a very purple phase right now.

[delerium69.livejournal.com]

My problem is that I don't have enough music. But I'm always to chronically poor to buy than one cd every other month. I think I keep thinking of my friends back our early 20s who would buy tons of music and then be broke. So they had amazing music collections but no money for the phone bill.

And then I think of people with real problems and then I feel horribly guilty. Aren't I just the life of the party? ;o)

[curgoth]

I use free linux software to rip my CDs. I think its possible to get "lame" for windows, even. I have a discman that plays CDs with MP3s on them, which is nice. For a serioud portable player, though, I keep lusting over the 40 GB iPod, since anything smaller wouldn't hold my 25 GB collection.

In any case, though, one can get ripping software for free that will rip at low quality (whether or not it's good enough depends on your speakers and how good your ears are). If you have time to fight with open source software, you might be able to find something that'll do it at an arbitrary quality, even.

[curgoth]

Yeah, hence my "problems only moody yuppies have". I mean, the only reason I can't run out and spend lots of cash on music is that I'm saving up to buy a car, and don't want to finance it if I can avoid it. I recognize that I'm whining about problems that I'm really fortunate to have. Though I don't tend to feel as guilty because, frankly I score really low for empathy - I fake it using cold rationality and enlightened self-interest, but the gaps show at times.

Or, to put it another way, I tend to have really small monkeysphere...

[delerium69.livejournal.com]

"I tend to have really small monkeysphere..."

Heh, heh.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

You need an mp3 player that has a weighted random shuffle function, either by track or by track-group (genre would be a good grouping, as would artist).  Then random should do about what you want.  I'm not sure what the easiest way to do this would be... ideally, something that let you supply it a playlist via a pipe or something (assuming you can't find a player that actually does this natively), so that you can just feed in data from a shell script.  Otherwise, hacking an existing open source mp3 player might be doable.

[curgoth]

See, winamp can do this, sort of, by using rankings. My issue is more that at the size my collection has reached, maintaining useful category information (and really, id3 genres aren't good enough) is unwieldly to the point of impracticality.

I've considered at various points having some perl/java code scan my mp3s nightly and have a postgres DB with some arbitrary catgories that I can apply through some kind of front end, and have a cron job compile play lists out of that.

But I don't know that there's a reasonable way, short of going through each track and assigning a dozen or so categories to it, to really make it useful.

[pez-minotaur.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....that has given me a thought. Perhaps you can set up a script to log how many times you skip over a song using that somehow to weight the shuffling. Of course, it'll take it a while to "learn" which songs you like and don't like, especially given the extensiveness of your collection, but it might be worth it. Just a thought.

By the way, this is Ravynne posting from Pez's account since he doesn't log off and I'm in his room right now. I guess I could do something mean if I wanted, but I don't so =P

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

That's cool. I am actually going to have a Linux box come April. They have an 'installfest' at Penguicon. So. That sounds like a solution, right there.

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but your whining has brought me knowledge, yes?
So it's not totally pointless.

Just don't do what I do, and waste all your energy on it...