8,500 fucking songs in iTunes. 8,500 songs. <\/p>\n
Weekdays, I come home from work and I have to make dinner, and sometimes I like a little music in the background to keep me from dwelling too much on the shit rattling around in my head at the end of the day. So, I crank up the laptop, and tell iTunes to shuffle those 8,500 fucking songs<\/i>. Well, fine - but a bunch of those songs are things like Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising<\/i>, which I can only listen to if the stars are aligned just right; or lame-ass latter-day Van Halen albums that I know I'll never<\/i> listen to, but got in a batch deal along with all their early stuff, and I can't bear to delete cause what if someone comes over really wants to hear Poundcake<\/i>; or they're from a half-dozen crappy Doors bootlegs; or a bunch of my own stupid stuff that I'll never play for anyone else, but keep archived just 'cause<\/i>; or mothafukkin You Can't Always Get What You Want<\/i>, which I never<\/i> want to hear again, ever, but shows up on a half-dozen different Stones' records, and iTunes doesn't give you a way to share individual songs between albums so I gotta keep six copies, if I want to preserve the albums' structures; or the annoying little turds bands smear between real songs (Haha, Unrest and your Volume Reference Tone<\/i> song, good one). I don't want to hear any of that crap. I need a filter.<\/p>\n
iTunes allows you to make playlists, of course. But to me, that defeats the point of shuffle<\/i>. If I wanted to manually choose what I wanted to hear, I'd just go ahead and do that. Maybe what iTunes needs is a way to mark songs with a flag that says: \"when I choose Shuffle, never play this song.\" That would help a lot - I could build anti-lists to filter out crap I don't want to hear after work, or to filter crap I don't want to hear if I'm on the back porch drinking beers with friends, or to filter crap I don't want to hear if I'm washing my car in the driveway. So, I'm stuck with playlists. I could make a special \"Cooking with Cleek\" playlist, but again: manually choosing is the opposite of random (yes, I know manually choosing which to exclude<\/em> is logically equivalent to choosing which to include <\/em>- but I'm assuming I'll have far fewer things to exclude than include). iTunes also has something called \"Smart Playlists\", which let you sift and sort through your Most Frequently Played lists, through your song ratings, etc.. I rarely pick individual songs, so Most Frequent is out. And I don't rate things, so that's out too. Or is it... ? No, it's not. Friday, I started rating songs on the iPod at work. I hear 120 songs on the iPod in a typical work day - so that means it would it something like 2.5 months to rate all the songs that way. But, you can also rate them en masse<\/em> in iTunes. So, I've started doing that, too. Someday, I'll have all those 8,500 fucking songs \"rated\" on a scale of 1 to 5 stars<\/em>. <\/p>\n Stars? The concept of 1-5 \"stars\" brings up some questions: <\/p>\n Yes, this is the kind of thing I spend my day thinking about. And then I write it out like anyone else wants to hear about it. What a dick. Kill me now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 8,500 fucking songs in iTunes. 8,500 songs. Weekdays, I come home from work and I have to make dinner, and sometimes I like a little music in the background to keep me from dwelling too much on the shit rattling around in my head at the end of the day. So, I crank up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}But, iTunes doesn't have that feature.<\/strike> [Edit: it does <\/strong>have that feature. You may stop reading now] [Edit #2: but, you can only apply that option to one song at a time - no multi-select or by-album allowed. sigh]<\/p>\n\n