A week or two back, I decided I wanted to shake up my music listening a little bit. Normally when I’m in the studio I keep iTunes in random-by-album mode, going through a smart playlist that constantly rebuilds itself to only include music I haven’t listened to in the past three weeks. But I found myself bouncing to an album that I’ve had in regular rotation since the late nineties, and I wasn’t exactly sick of listening to it but I just felt like I was kind of done listening to it. If that makes sense?
Anyway. The last few times I felt myself being Just Plain Done with a band for a while, I unchecked all their albums for a few years. Oingo Boingo’s appeal to me would be revived by spending some time in the dungeon, contemplating the marks left on the walls by previous inhabitants such as the Beatles, TMBG, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry. But lately I keep having this nagging feeling that my entire collection is getting stale; I haven’t loved a new band in years.
So I made a new smart playlist. This one would filter out everything that iTunes had played more than fifteen times. I chose this number fairly arbitrarily, saw that it would indeed filter out all those Boingo albums, and decided it looked good.
I’ve been letting iTunes wander around this playlist, one album at a time in random order, since doing that. And damn I sure am finding a lot of difficult listening in my collection.
also oh wow that’s why I’m so tired of a few Beatles album, I have two copies of them in my collection, a normal and a remastered edition…
“I keep iTunes in random-by-album mode, going through a smart playlist that constantly rebuilds itself to only include music I haven’t listened to in the past three weeks.”
I do the exact same thing, although my threshold is something like two months for last listen and two weeks for last skip. I’m glad to hear someone else uses iTunes in this way – and now and then I want to switch music players but I haven’t found anything else that gives this sort of flexibility. So I’m stuck with iTunes (and iOS) for the foreseeable future, just for this one should-be-obvious feature.