How I listen to my extensive music collection

I have a lot of music. I used to listen to the radio just about 24/7 but now we live next to this big hill that prevents us from getting a radio signal (seriously, it’s really annoying). Working from home, alone, I really need to listen to music at all times in order to properly function. I download indie artists I’ve never heard of when they offer their albums for free. I download the free songs on Amazon. I ripped every CD in this house to MP3 (and we have a TON). I’m not picky. I just like music.

I do  listen to internet radio a lot as well. But I can only hear the same commercials on Pandora and Yahoo Radio in a row before I want to kill people. Also, there are many times during the day when I cannot spare the bandwidth for internet radio because I’m doing something  online that needs it all.

But, as I’m sure is a common issue for the iPod generation, I started to run into a problem with how to listen to all this. See, I’m one of those people that obsessively listens to their favorite song of the minute  over and over and over again and, while this makes me happy, it meant that I really didn’t listen to most of my song collection. I enjoy the random thrill of a song I used to love in high school popping into the playlist between my new favorites but true random shuffle wasn’t working for me because it was repeating songs and also giving me stuff like Christmas music that I don’t want to hear year round. I also felt like there were some songs I never ever heard.

It took me several years of tweaking, but I finally found a way to play my music to my satisfaction. 

I use the free open source Songbird but this would work in iTunes, Winamp or any player that does Smart Playlists. First I made sure all the songs had the correct genres on them (especially what I think of as less mainstream stuff like showtunes, Christmas music, etc that I don’t want to hear every day). Then I set up a smart playlist that automatically excluded those genres, thus automatically guaranteeing me a playlist of normal mainstream music.  (You can also just do this as you listen, changing genres whenever you catch a song that doesn’t fit.)

Then I set up a parameter that told Songbird to only pull a playlist of 250 songs from that pool of mainstream music based on what song was played the least recently. Now, this playlist automatically updates so that 250 is an arbitrary number… every time a song plays, it gets removed from the playlist and another song gets added in its place so there are always exactly 250 songs on the list. I just picked 250 because it was big enough to give me selection when I feel like playing DJ instead of trusting shuffle, small enough to not kill my computer.

The beauty of this system is that the newest music (with a most recently played date of nothing) automatically goes on the list but then the rest of the list is filled in with the songs it’s been the longest since I’ve heard. So, for instance, today’s playlist is some new music and a bunch of songs I last listened to a few months ago. The more music I listen to, the sooner between song repeats but it guarantees I’m always listening to music that I haven’t just heard and I’ve always got a wide variety. That Beatles binge I went on in April? The playlist is going to force me to give those songs a rest and listen to some other stuff for a little while before it puts them back on the list. Instead of obsessively listening to my favorites, it lets me rediscover the music I forgot I loved.

This may seem insanely OCD to you but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do this since college so, when I finally tweaked this into the currently system, I can’t tell you how it increased my happiness level. I love hearing my favorites old and new and this makes sure there’s no music I never listen to… every song gets a turn on the playlist and doesn’t leave the list until it’s gotten a listen. I never have to tweak the playlist, I just open the player, hit play and go on with my day knowing I’ll heard nothing but stuff I haven’t heard in a while. It’s awesome.

Anyway, after this rare glimpse into my insanity, I have to ask you… how do you listen to your music?