Musical Spelunking

A few months ago I read a series of article on "power" use of iTunes. Most power uses of iTunes require one's music collection to be ranked (1-5 stars). Well, it really helps to weed-out tracks you have no interest in hearing, anyway.

A couple of disciplines have helped me in this process. First, I'm not importing new music without immediately ranking all the songs. This forces me to listen to every track on an album, even if it's just an abbreviated listen.



Second, I've created a Smart Playlist to help me go through my music collection and listen to to the things I haven't ranked yet (that's it in the image). Believe it or not, it took me a while to figure out that you can create a "no stars" filter by clicking out in the blank area inside the star box. *sigh* It took too long to figure that out. Oh, yeah, this is pretty dependent on the "Music Only" playlist isn't it. I'd better show that as well. Oh, I name my organizational playlists like this "ZZZ Org ..." to sort it to the bottom of my playlist list window. Any playlists suggesting music to me are prefaced with "IDEA". Just my personal naming convention.


This is a playlist inspired by Merlin Man over
at 43 Folders. The idea here is to create a playlist which doesn't include video, podcasts, or other specialty-listening tracks (Chant is an example of that for me). There's definitely a "cascading tasks" effect here, as you need to make sure all that stuff has the genres (or however you choose to do it) set correctly. It's not actually that big a deal.


Finally there's the actual listening task. My unranked music playlist is the one I listen to by default. I usually split my attention and listen to most of a song that I haven't heard before while doing something else on the computer, then switch back to iTunes to forward to the next track and rank the one I was just listening to. If I've heard the song and know my ranking, I won't even play it, just rank it. Since the music was imported by album, I'm ranking by album, and I'll cherry-pick the tracks I'm sure of my rankings, then listen to the rest.

A word of caution: It's easy to think you know what you think about the incidental tracks on an album. However, I've found that I tend to like those tracks more than I thought, especially on albums I originally bought and listened to as an entire CD. Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" is an example that I can point to (within the past half-hour, actually). I always pointed to it as a great album, but still thought I'd be 2-star'ing most of the tracks (3 stars is my threshold for wanting to hear something again). Wrong. Fall Out Boy's "Take This To Your Grave" is an example of an album I hadn't heard before that ended up with lots of 3+ star tracks. So it's worth actually listening to the tracks you're ranking even if just to confirm what you think you know.

A surprising side-effect of doing this is finding some tracks, albums, and bands which I had in my collection, but had no idea I liked. Not just Fall Out Boy, which I just mentioned. Maroon 5 is probably the band that had the most 4 and 5 star tracks that I had never listened to. I also re-discovered Digable Planets "Reachin'" which I remember loving, but hadn't listened to in years. There's gold in them hills! Well that doesn't fit my spelunking metaphor at all. There's a gold mine in those musical caves!

The eventual payoff is a Smart Playlist which bubbles mostly 4 and 5 star tracks which you haven't heard in a while, sprinkled with some 3 star tracks to keep things interesting.

Ooh, just hit a block of more that 100 Depeche Mode songs. 14-year-old John is overjoyed! And only 1935 more unrated songs to go through!