Right now I have a lot of music, and I primarily interact with it via playlists.
I have a cronjob that generates, and populates, ~/Playlists/ every night. I generate playlists on multiple criterion:
- ~/Playlists/Artist/
- ~/Playlists/Albums/
- ~/Playlists/Titles/
- ~/Playlists/Keywords/
Playlists for specific artists & albums are probably self-explanatory, but the others might be interesting.
For every unique songtitle I have a playlist. In most cases that means there is a playlist called "Song Title" having one entry. But, as an explicit example, I have a playlist called "Under The Bridge" with two entries:
All Saints/Under The Bridge.mp3 Red Hot Chili Peppers/Under The Bridge.mp3
Similarly I break each song title into words, and generate one playlist for each distinct word discovered.
As a matter of randomness I have:
| Term | Count |
|---|---|
| Girl | 83 |
| Boy | 31 |
(e.g. Songs containing "girl" in their title: "Madonna:Material Girl", "Amy Whitehouse:Hey Little Rich Girl", "Garbage:Stupid Girl"..)
There are times when I want something specific and my playlist approach doesn't work. For example "All songs which are 2 minutes long, and happy". I guess the problem is working out which meta-data is worth searching/storing, and then working out how to jump from that data to a playlist.
Today, whilst walking into town to buy some new pies, I wondered "How many songs do I have that end in a chuckle, or laughter?"
If I wanted an "ends in laughter" playlist right now I'm screwed. Yet no system I've ever seen allows you to add that level of detail. (To be honest I'd probably give up even entering it.)
In conclusion, my music collection is vast and various, and dealing with it is sometimes harder than I'd like.
How do you handle the music on your computer(s)? (When it comes to mobile-music I just use an ipod telling it to play all, randomly. If a song comes on I don't like I just skip it.)
ObFilm: Lolita
Thats good to know, foo.
When you say you can search - does that mean you can "Search for word: blah", save that as a playlist? Or just play from the resullts?
if id3, are your scripts public somewhere? ;)
Rhythmbox also has an "Automatic Playlist" feature (like "smart playlists" in iTunes and others), which allows you to create automatically-updated playlists based on search criteria.
Also their "Genius" playlists are great for rediscovering bands I've forgotten about (I have subscribed to eMusic for years)
The code that I have uses both ID3 and OGG tag data read from the files to generate the playlists. Any file which has no data is just not indexed/included.
You can grab a copy from here:
I've never used iTunes, even though I have an ipod. Still I've heard good things about its smart playlists :)
I've rated my music on a 1-5 star scale. For me the rating represents how often I want to hear a song.
5 stars equals "play once a month"
4 stars equals "play once every three months"
...
1 star equals "never play unless manually scheduled"
I created a number of playlists, one for each rating, that says "all music of ... stars that has not been played for ... months". All these playlists are mixed into one big playlist, and sorted by album.
This way my music is played proportional to how much I like it. Secondly it keeps the songs of an album more or less toghere. I prefer to hear all songs of an album in order once every while, but I don't want to hear the boring filler material that is on so many albums too often either.