Last entry I talked about my desire for simplification in all facets of my life, and basically deconstructing everything down to the bare essentials. This apparently does not apply to my music listening preferences, however, as I have completed one-half of a rather extensive project which has little to no real practical application.
I must digress here and say how much I hate labels. I don't like being pigeonholed by people, and I don't like confining people -- or other things -- to labels. This naturally extends to music. So it's only natural that I would spend forever and a day meticulously tagging all my .mp3 files down to the littlest detail (BPM). I scored a handy utility from mixmeister.com which will go through .mp3 files and determine their BPM, and then I can just go into iTunes and re-capture all the file info to get that loaded in there.
I figured that once the BPMs were loaded, I would be able to create "chill out" mixes and such so I could make "smarter" playlists (more on that later). Here's what I found out, at least from my work music library (which consists of 307 songs with a median BPM of 112), that many of the songs that I consider "chill" have a higher BPM. So, while I now have two new smart playlists -- Uptempo and, um, Not -- divided along the 120 BPM line, I will still have to go through and tag songs according to if they're "chill" or not. I will have to find a way to get that taken care of. :-) It's not that I don't want to listen to all the music on my hard drive (and at home the process is what *really* scares me), it's just I don't want to sit there and tag all the music, especially with my huge music library at home where I'm adding albums by the truckful, without necessarily listening to all of the songs.
About the Smart Playlists thing -- I'm trying to figure out why it appeals to me so much. I think a lot of it has to do with the computer programmer/data manipulator in me. Sure, having a consistent style of music going from the speakers so I don't shuffle from, say, Public Enemy to the Tabernacle Choir, is very appealing, and I love that idea.
I have officially forgotten where I was trying to go, so I'm ending here and "quitting while I'm ahead".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment