Consider this scenario:
Your computer, which provides the soundtrack to your day for most of your waking hours, seven days a week, suffers a system crash that leaves you with a substantial music library none of which has allegedly been played. You’re regularly buying new music and need to get things sorted.
Here’s the state of play around eighteen months ago...
Reflection: Hughesy's New Listening Paradigm
With all the talk about New Paradigms that's been going around since the 2010 Federal election, you might suspect that Hughesy's doing a bit of bandwagon jumping here, but really it's a fairly natural evolution from the Great Computer Crash in early 2008 that I've referred to elsewhere.
While the aforesaid crash didn't wipe out the iTunes music library it did manage to hijack all the related metadata, leaving me with somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five thousand tracks that allegedly hadn't been played. They had been, of course, but the crash meant playlists and that sort of thing needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
At the same time it was obvious thirty-five thousand tracks didn't leave a lot of hard disk space for other stuff, so something had to give. The something has been, over the course of eighteen months, about eight thousand tracks. Actually, it's more than that because there's been plenty of new music going in while some of the contents have been selectively culled. How many more is something I can't calculate, but regardless of the relevant gross figures that's a net gain of a fair bit of hard drive space.
It's also effectively the end of the Paradigm Before Last, the conviction that you could take your entire music collection and have more or less instantaneous access to everything through your iTunes library. Actually, with 27097 items taking up 148.79 GB of disk space as I type, it would’ve been the Paradigm Before Its Time had I been able to buy a machine with a drive larger than 250 GB.
Considering that the base line 27 inch iMac now comes with a standard terabyte of drive space and $210 allows you to double that, I could go up to ten times the current track count and still have a quarter of my drive space (and double the current machine's capacity) for non-musical content.
We won't, however, be going down that road because the thought of losing the metadata under those circumstances would induce a gross fit of the screaming abdabs. No, we're not going to have everything on the drive at our notional fingertips. Between now and the time when the current machine decides to turn up its digital toes I'll be trying to maintain things around the twenty-seven thousand mark.
So the Old Paradigm was all about cutting down the size of the library, and now we're looking at an efficient way of giving new stuff the attention it deserves so it can get a write up over there in the Reviews section of these pages.
The cutting down operation ended up relying on the Smart Playlist side of iTunes, and worked on number-oriented playlists that the reader might care to consider if you need to sort out large quantities of digital music. For a start you need a way to separate your latest acquisitions from all the other stuff in the library. You could do that through an Unheard list (Smart Playlist Plays is 0) or a Recently Added list (Smart Playlist Date added in the last (say) six months Plays is less than 7, or whatever figure you specify). I like to have both, because Recently Added gives you a way to get to those recent additions after you've heard them once.
From there, I have a number of numerical Smart Playlists (named, predictably, One, Two and so on) (Smart Playlist Plays is whatever number you're looking at).
That's handy when you've been doing what I've been doing and adding the contents of all those CDs that come on the front of magazines like Mojo to the library.
Unless you're in a position to give that Unheard playlist your undivided attention there's every chance things you don't really need to keep are going to slip by unnoticed. The numbered filters make it increasingly likely you'll catch the little devils, particularly if you've checked the Controls: Shuffle By Albums option). Not sure about the contents of the Tom Waits-selected CD that came with the Mojo before last (Step Right Up!, it's called)? Well, here you go. William S. Burroughs doing a number called Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fuss Auf Liebe Eingestellt (Falling In Love Again) slipped past once, but I suspect its days are numbered.
For that sort of reason, I try to keep the lower-numbered playlists as small as possible.
Looking at the current Unheard list there's a self-titled album by a Canterbury band called National Health (the less-than-well-known spinoff from the less-than-well-known but quite wonderful Hatfield & The North) and a bunch of downloaded Radio NZ broadcasts about the Canterbury scene, which explains why the National Health is there).
Things blow out a bit at Ones (currently right on 1500), Twos (10037 and falling) and Threes (10079 and rising). Needless to say I'm currently playing my way through the Twos, and once the counter hits the 10000 mark, I'll switch to the next one up, looking for things on the Recently Added playlist that I need to review.
Keep working through things that way and soon enough you'll be back with a fraternal sibling named Robert. I find it helps to have an less arbitary cut-off point at which you hop onto the next step, but there you (may or may not) go.
But it's at that point where the Unheard count is minimal that the New Paradigm cuts in. Despite the fact that I've got plenty of music to listen to I'm still buying my share, and I'll be reviewing most of what I buy over there in Reviews and posting selected extracts in Hughesy's Newsletter.
Purchases start to kick in early in the month, when the latest copies of Mojo and Rhythms arrive on the premises. They're not the only sources of information, of course, but they're the most likely source for multiple systematic purchases rather than the odd off the cuff decision.
That means prior to their arrival the decks have to be cleared, Unheard down to stuff all, Ones sitting on 1500, 1200 or wherever we are on the path to a month-to-month zero count, Twos and Threes on their 10000 and everything else on a nice round number.
New purchases arrive, are backed up, and filter their way up through the process, producing website content and newsletter material.
And, along the way, some of the stuff that's sitting there in the music library is going to go. It'll have to, at least until the iMac gets replaced. At that point, of course, self discipline is going to be vital. There's no way we're going to be letting that 27000 escalate up into six figures, is there?