Remember O.A.R.?

Look who decided to recognize 38,363 of my past scrobbles. Also, look at what I was listening to in 2004.

Library Clean Up

Musical standardization really sets my hard drive a-spin. The upside is watching my Play Density neatly propagate itself every Friday afternoon. The downside is shoddy labeling and useless metadata in my library. Nothing gets my goat like seeing an artist listed in my library 5 times because of an alternate spelling or extra space. To that end I've got my Artist, Album, and Genre fields Germanly regularized, along with well established conventions for listing featured artists, associating tracks, and assigning ratings. Until today though the Lyrics field has eluded my teutonical keystrokes due to a combination of its low visibility and relative inaccessibility in iTunes. Today I say, "No to @ThatHustle and no to this kind of crap on my screen." 

So, with a little help from Doug's Applescript site, I've modified some scripts to help me fix my Lyric Problem. And now you can too:

Lyric Playlist.zip

Directions:
1. Care that you have random stuff in your lyrics field.
2. Own an Apple computer.
3. Download file: Lyric Playlist.zip and decompress it.
4. Run file.

• This will search either your entire music library or a specific playlist, depending on what you have selected in iTunes at the time, and make a new playlist called "Lyricality" containing only those songs with between 1 and 200 characters in their Lyrics field. The 200 character limit should weed out tracks containing legitimate song lyrics.

5. Delete the lyrics info manually from the tracks in Lyricality, or use Doug's handy Delete Lyrics script to delete the lyrics field from selected tracks.

I feel better, do you?

25000, 64 Days, 88 GB

My electronic music collection started in the fall of '99 when I went to college and got my own computer. I wish I knew what song #1 was; probably something by The Beatles, or Bon Jovi. Or maybe Boyz II Men. Definitely something with a 'B' though. Unfortunately, due to a hard drive failure in the spring of 2004, my records only date back to May 18th of that year—2 days after graduating from college. In those 5 years I'd added just under 2500 songs to my iTunes library. It took another 6 to increase that by a factor of 10.

Assuming the slightly arbitrary start date of September 1^st, 1999, it's been 3,840 days since that original song. Or put another way, an average of 6.5 songs per diem. And that's a startling statistic.

Song #25,000:
Les Yeux Noirs - Django Reinhardt

Play Density 2.0

My PlayDensity habit has slowly been spreading across Southern Wisconsin over the past 7 months. Any day now it's going to jump the shark and go mainstream. Or at least make it to Iowa. Doesn't everybody want to know what their most commonly played songs are‽ I never stop thinking about mine, and yours. I hope that's not kreepy, I'm just curious. With that in mind, I'm ready to release the PlayDensity 2.0 update which has been in public beta testing for the last month.

What began as a simple ratio of (playcount) ÷ (# of days in library) had been updated to exclude songs less than 7 days old by the time Version 1.0 was released. Why 7 days? A song that's played twice in 2 days may not be that special, but one that's played 7 times in 7 days deserves some recognition. So what does v2.0 have to offer? More standardization(!) and a playlist. To account for the increasing variability as the # of Days increases we'll now be taking the logarithmus naturali of each of our variables, and then doing a small correction to convert into percentages.

pd 2.0 = 100(e^{^(ln(playcount)/ln(# of Days))/100} -1)

Now it's your turn.

⓵ Make a smart playlist with these criteria:

⓶ Export your playlist to a text file.

⓷ Download this Excel sheet:

⓸ Open the Excel sheet. It'll try to read the exported text file, you'll have to tell it where it is the 1st time you open it by editing the text import settings. Once you've chosen your file the other settings should be set already; click through to 'Finish'.

⓹ Select your newly acquired data and sort by descending values of Play Density.

⓺ Show it to me.

Musical Standardization

Playcount vs. # of Days in Library = Play Density