Updated 8/5/08: Changed one tag and added info about the rating system.
Okay, thanks to a recent Woot purchase, I have upgraded from my first generation iPod Shuffle to a 5.5th Generation iPod with 30 G's of space. It's not enough for my entire collection, but since I listen mostly to shuffled songs, I set up a 1 Gig playlist of random selections and filled the rest of it with my 15 Favorite Albums and the Top Artists from my Last.fm charts, along with some favorite Genre material.
Now it is precipitating my doing a couple of things that I have meant to do for a while. The first of these is a new Listening Project, called "The Great Unrated." The object here is to take all of my songs without a star rating and give them one. I've been working on it during casual listening at home (when I think to look at the recently played songs to see which were unrated), but haven't really put a dent in it. But since the regular iPod gives you the capacity to add or change a rating while listening, the opportunity was ripe.
So I made a giant playlist of Unrated songs, then stripped out Holiday (because I can rate them over Christmas) and Classical (too hard to listen to in the car) for a total of 3,000 songs that need ratings. Then I made a 1G sized playlist that pulls from that master list to save space on the iPod.
I figure this project will take me into February of next year, since during commute listening I get in about 75 - 100 songs a week. However, if I decide to plunk down for a set of iPod speakers for my office, it may go faster. We'll see.
The other project is to go through iTunes and clean up my Genre tags. You've all seen what happens to tags on music you buy. Plain ol' Rock music can be identified as "Rock",. "Rock and Roll", or "Classic Rock". I thought I could distill everything down into 20 or so major genres for a nice, clean interface on both i Tunes and Pod.
Well, I've made my initial survey of what I wanted, and it turned out to be a bit trickier than that. I ended up with twice the number of tags I projected, but I figure that's not so bad. It breaks everything down into my major areas of interest, with some sub- and sub-sub musical specialties as well.
So over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to go through and apply the following to my music files:
Acappella - Voices without music.
Acoustic - Guitars without electronics.
Advertisements - My personal archive of radio spots that I have written.
Alternative - Basically what New Wave (q.v.) became in the 1990's.
Ambient - I only have one album with this designation. Guess which one it is.
Americana - Distinctly American music, in instrumentation or lyrical subject matter. People hold up
Tom Petty and
Neil Young as prime examples, but Young is Canadian. Go figure. Anyway, I put
Stan Ridgway and
T-Bone Burnett here, among others.
Avant Garde - Off kilter stuff.
Brian Eno, Bowie's Berlin period, and some guy named
Dan Sonnier.
Blues - You know. The blues.
Celtic - Irish stuff or related. Also applied to
Clannad and
Enya so I can say I don't have any "New Age" music in my collection.
Christian - More modern religious music -
Charlie Peacock,
Brent Bougeois,
Jars of Clay.
Classical - Stuff with big orchestras. Or big intentions.
Comedy - Woody Allen,
Monty Python,
Tom Lehrer. I burn out easily on comedy, so this lets me take it out of play fast.
Country - There's a tear in my beer, I fear, dear.
Patsy Cline is here by default.
Disco - I will admit now that there were some Disco songs I liked in the 70's. Back then I said they were "jazz".
Easy Listening - Dean Martin, the
The Mills Brothers. The stuff I grew up listening to. Thanks, folks.
Electronica - A really broad category that includes anything with a synth or arpeggiated beats in it. From
Alabama 3 to
Wendy Carlos.
Folk - A narrow designation of Singer Songwriters who seem tied to acoustic guitars (even though
David Gray also plays piano, he's more folk to me).
French - Language tag. Vocals in French.
German - Another language tag. Vocals in German. You get the idea.
Gospel - Old timey religious music, like the
The Blind Boys of Alabama. Southern Gospel is the happiest music in the world.
Halloween - Only one group here,
Midnight Syndicate, which specializes in horror music. Technically Holiday music, I didn't want this stuff turning up over Christmas.
Hip Hop/Rap - Michael Franti/
Spearhead/
Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy lives here.
Holiday - Christmas and New Year's music. Makes it easy to get to during the six weeks of the year I want it around.
Jam - Phish and the
Dave Matthews Band. Odd, but I only like their live stuff.
Japanese - Yet another language tag.
Jazz - Mostly
Pat Metheny, but some other stuff as well.
Jingle - Tag for my collection of Coca Cola jingles by artists from
Aretha Franklin to
The Who. It's great fun to have them in rotation - especially when
The Moody Blues turn up.
Latin - Not so much a language tag as a style.
Lectures & Lessons - Files of some Church lessons I wanted to hang on to.
New Wave - That lovely period of music that started around 1976 and ran through most of the 80's. They started calling it Alternative in the 90's.
Outsider - Jandek,
Daniel Johnston,
Scott Walker. Rules were made to be broken.
Pop - The cotton candy of music, but eminently listenable.
Post Rock - Modern stuff that doesn't really fit the rock mold.
Battles,
Explosions in the Sky.
Power Pop - Pop music with an edge. Usually identifiable by jangly guitars, hooky arrangements and catchy lyrics.
Progressive - Rock + Jazz + Classical + Odd Time Signatures + 20 minute instrumental solos + Obscure lyrics = Prog. And I love it.
Psychedelia - That wonderfully druggy, take-itself-too-seriously music that came when garage bands discovered hallucinogens in the 1960's. And modern practitioners like
Kula Shaker and
The Dandy Warhols.
Punk - Because
The Clash and
Sex Pistols shouldn't be classified as New Wave.
R&B - Got soul?
Rock - Traditional rock and roll music, nowadays mostly found with the word "Classic" in front of it.
Russian - Yet another language tag.
Sea Chanties - Songs of the sea. I love them. This makes them easy to find.
Singer Songwriter - Composer/performers who transcend the traditional "folk" label for a variety of reasons:
Paul Simon and
Brian Protheroe.
Soundtrack - Music from the movie. Or the show. Or whatever it was that they tapped
David Byrne to do that week.
Source Noise - The sonic equivalent of Found Art.
The Conet Project, and McGreevey's recordings of audible auroras. And the cicada recordings, when I get around to downloading them.
UPDATE: I have changed this to
Field Recordings since this was the term I was groping for when I came up with "Source Noise." It's better. Sure, it's better.
Spoken Word - Interviews with Woody Allen and Stan Ridgway, and the
Orson Welles Frozen Peas Spot.
Swing - Harry James,
Squirrel Nut Zippers, and
Joe Jackson's
Jumpin' Jive album.
Vaudville - A special designation for my
The Bonzo Dog Band anthology. I should file them under Comedy, but I don't get tired of them like I do regular comedy, so this keeps them in play when the rest gets banned. And it fits them so well.
Generally speaking, the narrower categories take precedence over the broader ones. So my copy of Stan Ridgway's rendition of "Hanging Johnny" goes under "Sea Chanties" as opposed to "Americana".
Mark Knopfler's soundtracks will be tagged "Soundtrack" as opposed to whatever it is I will end up labeling him.
You would think that this would make things easy, but it isn't. For example,
The Beatles fall into three distinct categories for me, depending on the period: Pop, Psychedelia, and Rock. Depending on the album,
David Bowie is Prog, Electronica, or Avant Garde - and I don't have all of his albums. And Joe Jackson is all over the map.
There are other twists and turns to this, too. Like
Nash the Slash, who came out of Canadian prog band
FM. He belongs there by all rights, but he gets his sound by running his violin through cheap guitar effects pedals, and the sound he gets is definitely Electronica.
And what on earth am I going to do when I get to
Tom Waits?
UPDATE: A brief word on how I'm using iTunes' star system to rate the music.
5 Stars - A song of sheer genius. Iconic. One that can change your whole day when it comes up in rotation. When it comes on you say, "Hooray! There it is!" Examples:
Bad News From Home,
Prairie Wedding,
Heroes,
The Mariner's Revenge Song,
Sunrise,
1952 Vincent Black Lightning,
Casimir Pulaski Day.
4 Stars - A great song. Has the potential to alter your mood. When it comes up in rotation you say, "Oh yeah!" Examples:
Hush,
Does Everyone Stare,
Something in the Air,
Factory,
When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty,
...And In Every Home,
The Core.
3 Stars - A Good song. It's not going to make your day, but you wouldn't turn it off if it came on the radio. When it comes on you say, "Oh, okay!" Examples:
Susan's House,
She's Always a Woman,
Rockin' the Suburbs,
Should I Stay or Should I Go?,
Babylon,
Rose Darling,
Swamp.
2 Stars - A marginal song. You might turn it off if it came on the radio. When it comes up in iTunes rotation, you listen to it because you like the artist, not the song. You say, "All right, I'll leave it on because it's Joe Jackson." Examples:
Newspapers,
Wrong Side of the Moon,
19th Nervous Breakdown,
Bad Day,
Love To Be Loved,
Walk of Life, and most of the album
Animals.
1 Star - A Bad song. When it comes on you go "Ick" and change the station or click to the next song. Someday you're going to sort your main playlist by star rating and delete them to make room for some Genesis bootlegs. Examples: What do you know, I seem to have deleted all the one-stars from the computer I'm on right now. But you know in your heart that
Revolution 9 is on your hit list.
Tom Lehrer