So I got tagged on facebook with ’30 songs’. Interesting concept. Basically you hit shuffle on your ipod and list the first 30 songs that show up in your playlist. The idea behind it of course is to get to know people better as well as occupy a considerable amount of time. Kind of like asking a green Airman to look for the keys to the plane. (for those not in the know, There are no keys) This may just be my perspective as I do not have an ipod, or any other eyepod type device. (Melissa does and I believe she may have worn a hole on the interface) at home I have a PC hooked up downstairs to the TV. It plays mp3’s as well as movies, games, as well as checks my email and surfing the web. all in glorious HD. In the car I have a laptop hard drive hooked up to stereo. It has the majority of the music I would listen to in the car on it. (no sense in putting Don Giovanni on there, the drive to work isn’t long enough).
Having established the fact that I do not have an eyepod device, the concept still sounded interesting to me. My taste in music is extremely eclectic by many peoples standards. Pretty much anything goes, with the exception of a lot of this grindhouse churned pop stuff that has come out in the last few years. Even then, if it entertains me I won’t turn the dial and may even buy an album or a single to throw in to break up the mix. My tastes severely depend on my mood, and what I’ve doing. I won’t listen to Heavy Metal while I’m in the shop. A track or three is OK, but too much and my work suffers. Gotta have stuff I can sing along to out there if I have any music on. Basically I have a lot of varied music in my collection. Add Melissa’s stuff in there (mostly the same) and it makes for a very wild mishmash.
So I get tagged with ’30 Songs’ while I’m at work. Like I said, the concept seemed really interesting to me, I wondered what would actually pop up for me. I figured when I got home for lunch I would launch rhythmbox (Gnome music player for Linux) hit shuffle and see. I then went about my morning workload. At lunch, I launched the program, and it gave me ‘updating library’. over the last few weeks I have rearranged the files to be filed alphabetically by Artist name instead of genre, so all the files were in different places. After 20 minutes I had to get back to work so I left it running. When I got back after work I clicked random. Nothing happened. I clicked play. It played in a random order but doesn’t actually display it. So I began my search for a player that would generate a random playlist AND display the contents. Not having found one I went to bed. at 4am I woke up with a few ideas. So far none of them have worked. One of them was not quite what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless. It generates a html file of just your mp3’s in a directory. It gave a bit of an answer to my issue. After 1 minute 22.55 seconds it generated a 4.4MB HTML file with only text, no pictures. It lists 9387 files, track length, and their directories. This has only made things worse. Now I really want to know what will show up in the top 30. Worse still, I discovered that iPods’ shuffle feature is just completely random. it is an algorithm that not only makes shuffle appear more random (technically ‘random’ could reproduce the same list only backwards, think monkeys typing Shakespeare) but it incorporates files you play more often into the list as priority.
So now I am left with finding a player that’ll make a ‘random’ playlist, and I’ll have to wait a while to let it figure out what I play more often, knowing full well that it is a completely trivial and useless exercise, and that no good will come of it. :-)
Got my geek on!