does anyone else use itunes like this?

so for a long time i was annoyed with itunes because there was so much more i wanted to do with playlist management… and there still is.

but recently i find myself doing something very interesting that i must grant is only possible with the ginormous always-there library that is itunes trademark, and that is this:

i think of a song or album i want and type in a keyword to trim the list down – like “river” or “hotel” – and then i listen to the song i was after, but when it’s done i listen to all the other songs that came up, too. it’s kind of like getting a themed shuffle playlist, but the theme can be like “songs with the letter ‘g’ in them.”

once i realized i was doing this, i started having fun with it, and sometimes i just type in a random word, or i take the word i was going for and erase a few letters to see what happens. like just now i typed in “great” because that’s my new favorite way to get all of david’s gift of the greatest jazz recordings of all time while also getting other good songs for kicks, but then i scaled back even further to “gre”, and as a result my playlist now has songs, albums, and artists with “green” in their name and, for some reason i don’t understand, all of OK Computer.

people wonder how we will slice and dice our music when we are perpetually confronted with a full lifetime library. so there’s my random data point for the anthropological record. :)

2 Responses to “does anyone else use itunes like this?”

  1. Tim Says:

    I tend to go with the super time-consuming method of rating absolutely everything. (~40GB / 7,000 songs rated, just got a batch of new CDs that I’m putting in now)

    I have 1 main playlist that’s manually created: “Non-English” (as you might guess, this includes anything with vocals that’s in other languages… about 10% of my music)

    This is what I’ll tend to listen to:
    3 Stars (includes stuff that I like, but don’t absolutely love: I find that much of the time I enjoy listening to a variety of things I like more than just things that I absolutely love)

    4 Stars (sometimes I just feel like listening to the things that I really enjoy… there’s no 5 star list since that’s only about 30 songs out of 7,000)

    Non-English 4

  2. Michael Burton Says:

    I totally do this! I’ll actually just pick a word and see what we come up with… “rain,” “someone,” “dark” and there’s always something fun! I just made a mix CD and started off with a search for songs with the word “dream” somehow in the title.

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