Greg In The Desert

My father, James Richard Smith, died on 12 June 2009. He had a stroke a few years ago and his heath has been poor since. He died at home which is where he wanted to be as opposed to having to live his life out in a hospital.

For the last several weeks I have been dealing with the aftermath in Arizona. Originally I thought I would write more about it but for now I am going to leave it at that. Although I am far from done with Arizona, I’m going to try to get back to some normalcy and start blogging again.

I primarily listen to my music collection through my iPod. I don’t care what Apple says, the shuffle feature of the iPod (and to a lesser degree iTunes) does a poor job of preventing the same Artist from playing randomly. Even with the the scheme I came up wit here, my iPod still played 3 songs from Metallica in a row the other day. These methods do a good job of addressing the issues.

I start off with master playlist called “Filtered”, it’s filtered for genres. Second playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played”. This ensures that songs which are rated have actually been played. I ofter will rate new songs high but not really listed to them (I have another playlist for new songs). The next playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played last 14 days.” Finally I’m to my primary playlist, “Filtered – 4 Stars + w/o last 14 days.”

Unfortunately the iPod does not automatically update these playlists, they only get updated when I sync my iPod with iTunes. At one time “The Stroke” had 2x as many plays as any other song, I like that song but not that much, this does a reasonably good job of reducing this effect. I’d prefer to have a playlist that removes, say the top 10% of played songs, but iTunes doesn’t have this option in the filter lists. This also doesn’t prevent the same artist being played in a row.