Well if you’re anything like me, you’ve got an obscene amount of music managed by your favorite jukebox software, probably iTunes. Chances are that even if you love all your music equally – not unlike a proud father – you have favorites – hopefully less-like fathers and their children. So some gets played on heavy rotation, such as my Thelonious Monk albums, which are constantly on rotation. (Speaking of, Live at the It Club just started playing!)
There are a couple of little features in iTunes called “Last Played” and “Play Count,” that are pretty much as advertised: “Last Played” will tell you the date and time the song was last played, and “Play Count” will tell you how many times a song has been played. Well, that’s not completely true. Both will tell you only when the song was last completed; that is, they both count a song as complete if the end of the song is played through. For every time you stop a song half way through, none are counted as played.
So even though it’s an imperfect algorithm, it can still be a useful metric about how much you listen to particular songs and albums from your library. Your iPod also counts these nice stats and syncs them with your computer automatically.
Feeling indecisive one day, I decided to see what hadn’t been on my rotation in the past few months, so I decided to create a playlist called “Zeroplay” that would only play songs that I wanted to hear that I hadn’t been listening to. What emerged was probably one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done to rediscover some nice hidden gems in my library of music.
Playlist details
I basically create a smart playlist that matches all of the following rules:
-Play Count is “0″
-Genre is not “Podcast”
-Genre does not contain “Live – “
-Kind does not contain “video”
-Kind is not “Audible file”
-Limit to “25″ items selected by “random”
-Match only checked items
-Live updating
This is all nicely automated within the smart playlist, and very easy to configure. Even though it’s “song-centric,” it’s been great to hear some stuff I haven’t heard in at least a year, such as Jodeci’s “Forever My Lady” live on the Uptown MTV Unplugged album, some Maceo Parker from Life on Planet Groove, and India.Aire’s Voyage to India.
All great stuff. Anyway, create a surprising playlist and replay some high school jams and stuff you haven’t heard in awhile but once loved.
