The A-Z of my iPod
In Misc | 6 comments | permalink
So recently I’ve found myself skipping more songs than usual on my iPod when listening on shuffle. Seems I’ve struggled to find songs in shuffle that match my mood. So I came up with the idea of picking on artist per letter of the alphabet, and listening to only one of their songs. I also decided that it would need to be something that I like but that I hadn’t heard in a while. The results of my journey from A-Z are shown below and make some quite scary reading (certainly in terms of what I’ve got on there!!). So here we go, starting with A:
Alien Ant Farm – Smooth Criminal
Band of the RAF College, Cranwell – The Luftwaffe March
Counting Crows – 4 white stallions/Big yellow taxi
Damien Rice – The blower’s daughter
ELO – Turn to stone
Feeder – 7 days in the sun
Groove Armada – I see you baby
Hoobastank – Disappear
Incubus – Nice to know you
Jean-Michel Jarre – Oxygene V (Cities in Concert Houston-Lyon)
Keane – Bedshaped
Lostprophets – Rooftop (A Liberation Broadcast)
Muse – Knights of Cydonia
Neil Diamond – America
O – no artists starting with O!!!
Primal Scream – Country Girl
Queensryche – Walk in the shadows (Live)
R.E.M. – The great beyond
Seether (featuring Amy Lee) – Broken
The Travelling Wilburys – Handle with care
Ultravox – Visions in blue
Van Halen – You really got me
Warren G – Regulate
X – No artists
Y – No artists
The Zutons – Valerie
So there we have it. No classical music in the list, but that’s because the composers don’t appear in the artist list, although I’m sure Holst’s The Planets would have featured in there somewhere. So now I think it’s time to start again…
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[...] The A-Z of my iPod Tired of your current playlists? Psychotic Monkey hits on a novel playlist-making idea that encourages deep iTunes digging. I think I’ll give this a try soon. [...]
Hey,
This looks pretty fun, my kind of thing. I make playlists all the time (for all sorts of emotions – happy, down, in love…, activities – driving, flying, train…, days of the week, and a whole lot more on top of that.
If you like, I can write an Applescript to do just this, it would actually be really pretty easy. Randomly selecting an artist whose name begins with a letter is easy enough, putting a repeat loop around that wouldn’t take more than about 5 minutes. Only songs from a particular playlist? Of course.
Good idea, hope it catches on. And I really should iMix my playlists some day. As a taster, my driving playlist includes Anberlin – Autobahn; RHCP – Can’t Stop; 12 Stones – Crash; New Found Glory – Head On Collision: you get the idea. lol.
P
p.s. there’s loads of artists starting with O! O-Zone, Olivia Newton-John, Oasis, OPM, Our Lady Peace, Outlandish, and more! X has Xzibit, Y has Yellowcard and more…you should acquire some more music!
Hi Peter,
cheers for that. I know there are loads of artists beginning with O (Our Lady Peace certainly takes me back a few years!). I definitely need to expand my music collection by the sound of things! I’m sure I’ve got an Our Lady Peace album somewhere, just a case of digging it out I guess! If you have any other suggestions of novel ways to make up playlists I’d love to hear them. I’ve started at A again but have decided to go for different artists this time around so I may well do a list of these when I get to the end.
Monkey.
I can always burn you a Xasthur CD if you like…
OK, I wrote the script at last! (Sorry, it’s been sitting in my To Do list for 3 months, I’ve had other things on my mind – first girlfriend and IB – so I’ve not had much time to write unnecessary programs). Here it is, enjoy! I actually find this quite fun, despite it being a really simple script.
(*
A to Z from Playlist: Creates a playlist using songs from an existing playlist with one of the tags beginning with each letter in the alphabet, as theorised on http://www.psychoticmonkey.co.uk/2007/01/31/the-a-z-of-my-ipod/#comment-1194
©opyleft Peter Burkimsher 2/4/2007
*)
property tags : {“Song Name”, “Artist”, “Album”}
tell application “iTunes”
set tag to (choose from list tags with prompt “Choose the tags to title case” without multiple selections allowed) as string
set header to “A-Z ” & tag & ” ”
set this_playlist to (view of front window)
set playlist_name to name of this_playlist
set alphabet to {“A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “E”, “F”, “G”, “H”, “I”, “J”, “K”, “L”, “M”, “N”, “O”, “P”, “Q”, “R”, “S”, “T”, “U”, “V”, “W”, “X”, “Y”, “Z”}
set playlist_tracks to {}
repeat with this_letter in the alphabet
if tag is “Song Name” then
set letter_tracks to (every file track of this_playlist whose name starts with this_letter)
end if
if tag is “Artist” then
set letter_tracks to (every file track of this_playlist whose artist starts with this_letter)
end if
if tag is “Album” then
set letter_tracks to (every file track of this_playlist whose album starts with this_letter)
end if
set number_tracks to (number of items of letter_tracks)
if number_tracks > 0 then
set this_track to item (random number from 1 to number_tracks) of letter_tracks
set end of playlist_tracks to (location of this_track)
end if
end repeat
set new_playlist to (make new playlist)
set name of new_playlist to (header & playlist_name)
repeat with this_track in playlist_tracks
add this_track to new_playlist
end repeat
end tell
Interesting. Maybe you can have more than one A-Z lists to give yourself more variety.