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Technology

This Month's Playlist

I use iTunes a lot.1 Like, a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever had it closed on this computer.

Why? you may ask. Well, I like music. Hopefully you’ve figured that out by now, since I listed a music textbook in the ‘what I’m reading’ thing earlier, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned how many music classes I’m taking somewhere.2 It’s what I use to play music on my laptop, and it’s what I3 use to keep my music library organized.

It’s a respectably-sized music library, at that: 2,100+ songs at the moment, and it’ll probably keep going up.4 So, what’s up with the title of this post?

Well, I make a new playlist every month. For a while, I just had one playlist,5 but I got tired of that after a while. 300 songs in one playlist seemed like a bit much, especially when I’d be listening to it on my phone, spot a song that I didn’t want on there… and then forget before I could do anything about it when I got back to my laptop. This way, it’s always fresh; a song I don’t like will be on my playlist for a month at the most,6 and whenever I get some new music I like, the smaller size of the list means that I’ll be able to hear it much more frequently.7

The other really cool benefit of this system, to me at least, is the fact that I can look back and see what I was listening to at any time. I’m a big fan of the whole ‘quantified self’ thing – my phone tracks my steps and distance walked, and I use an app to keep track of what I eat just because I like looking at the charts – and this is, to Grey-the-vague-audiophile a very cool thing.

Anyhow, readers, since I know there’s at least one of you out there – what’s your system for music? Pandora list? Thousands of playlists for every possible mood? Something I haven’t thought of because I only listed three ideas? I’d like to know, so hit up that comment box.


  1. It’s a much less terrible program if you’re using Mac OS X instead of Windows; I’m convinced that Apple was so intense about having it look like it was on OS X that they actually wrote the entire OS X windowserver system into the program and then run iTunes within that. 
  2. If I haven’t, I’m taking 6 music classes at the moment. That in addition to working for the music department at school. 
  3. As someone with not-actually-OCD-stop-calling-it-that, or “I prefer things to be organized, but I don’t compulsively clean them.” 
  4. The nice thing about the remixes that I’m partial to at the moment is that, thanks to copyright law, they’re generally free to download. 
  5. Titled “Main Music List” because I am super creative you guys 
  6. Just because I’ve changed tactics doesn’t mean I’m any less forgetful. 
  7. Handily increasing the efficiency of the whole “repeating a song until I can no longer listen to it because I hate it so much” thing. Y’know, like Owl City’s Fireflies

4 replies on “This Month's Playlist”

MusicBee is one PC alternative I’ve tried but I can’t say I was a big fan. Google Play Music is another to check out – what’s handy with this is you can upload your collection and access it from any device as well as stream like Spotify. Has its fair share of problems (shit-tier organization), but I think you’ve got to take the bad with the good when it comes to music players. No one’s made an end all be all yet.

You should post your monthly playlist as a blog entry! Always love to see some new tunes.

I actually used Google Play Music when it first came out, way back when I had an Android phone, and I liked it for a while… and then the app wiped half my music and erased my playlists. After that, I kinda gave up on it.

I might, although I’d probably do ‘last month’s playlist’ more than the current one, since I don’t call them ‘done’ in any way until the end of the month, when I start the new one.

I am far more lazy with my music on OS X than you are, I typically just select an album from the “Recently Added” and listen to it all the way through–I prefer listening to whole albums. If I need to quickly pick a song, I use Alfred’s built in mini-player which is approximately 10x faster than going through iTunes itself. On iOS, I do things a bit differently. I use and enjoy the app “Workflow,” and I made a personal workflow that when launched creates a playlist of 30 songs that I haven’t listened to in the past month. This is useful due to my overwhelmingly large library (upwards of 6,000, though that has been sized down from 10,000).

I’ve been considering doing something similar to your iOS setup – I’ve got an ‘unrated’ playlist that I use to make sure I’ve listened to everything in my library at least once, but I’d like to get a better mix of old music in as well.
I can’t really listen to a whole album at once, though – I get bored too easily.

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