Lesson Six.One in Using iTunes: Creating A Playlist To Queue Music

My first Playlist that I will share with you is about queuing up music to be played.

This kind of playlist may not be necessary if 1) you don’t believe in rating your music, and 2) you don’t have that many songs to queue. I have over 20,000 songs, so managing what I am going to play requires some planning. Also, being a bit of a obsessive type I find organizing things to be a source of enjoyment for me.

First of all, create a Playlist in iTunes by going File > New Smart Playlist, then name it. I called mine ‘Rating Queue”.

iTunes prompts you with a new window asking how you want to filter the music in your Smart playlist. Use the following filters:

1) Plays is less than 2 (This is important since I listen to songs at least twice when I rate them. Sometimes, I will rate a song as soon as I hear it, other times it will be the second go around).

2) Media is Music (this filters out movies and podcasts and audio books).

It will look like this:

Now, if you have thousands of songs, your new Smart playlist will have thousands of songs to queue and rate.

Next, you create a second Playlist, by going File > New Playlist, then name it. I called mine ‘Selected Rating Queue’ which is a manual Playlist (it is not a Smart Playlist as it has no filters) and this is an important distinction as you will soon see.

So now you will have two playlists: A Smart Playlist called ‘Rating Queue’ filled with all of your songs, and a standard Playlist called ‘Selected Rating Queue’ that is empty.

Clicking on the ‘Rating Queue’ Smartlist brings up our entire library of music. Because of the filters there will be no movies, audio books, or podcasts. Also, since we have not played any of these songs they are pure, virgin music that is waiting to be listened to.

Each Playlist has its own window that you can adjust and sort by as you see fit. I sort the ‘Rating Queue’ by Date Added, but you can sort by whatever you want by clicking on the sort column you wish.

With our Smart Playlist sorted, we can move the songs over the manual Playlist.

Using the mouse and shift key, I select the songs I want to listen to. I then drag the selected songs into the ‘Selected Rating Queue’ list (the 2nd manual list we created). Alternatively, you can right click on the selection and then send them to the list that way.

Clicking on the ‘Selected Rating Queue’ we now have a portion of our library for us to add to our iPod, listen to, and then rate. Because it is a manual list, it is dependent on what you add and remove from it.

Plug in your iPod and add the ‘Selected Rating Queue’ Playlist to your device. Take the device and enjoy the music. Don’t forget to rate it! Here is a suggested guide for how to rate your music. Don’t add your ‘Rating Queue’ Smart Playlist to your iPod because that just adds all of the songs. The goal here is the organize your play queue to be manageable.

When you have listened to and rated the music, you reconnect your iPod to get the next batch of songs. What happens is that because you played your songs twice or as often as you wanted, you will see the ‘Rating Queue’ get smaller because those songs are now considered to have been played and hopefully rated. It is possible to build in a more complicated filter in the Smart Playlist to require you to rate your music before it is taken out of the queue, but I am assuming that you rate your music happily and consistently.

Clicking on your ‘Selected Rating Queue’ list you will see the songs you listened to, and you will also see the number of plays have increased. It is at this time, that I remove these songs by selecting them and hitting ‘delete’. Don’t worry, you are just removing those songs from the playlist, not from your library.

So now you have rinsed the manual playlist clean, time to go back to the queue and repeat the cycle.

Congratulations, you have just found out how to now organize your music so you can listen to it in a systematic way. Next we will talk about how rating our music can create a better listening experience for you.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Finally Organizing My Business Assets

I finally reached one of my goals for 2011. I have started to amalgamate my corporation’s assets with my sole proprietorship. This will make the ongoing management and accounting duties much easier for me.

Copia Enterprises will be rolled into Promaginy. This has coincided with a relaunch of Promaginy.com with a new website design which I am quite pleased with. Check it out.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Book Review: The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin

An ambitious title if there ever was, The World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, attempts to explain how music is so integral to human evolution that the entire human experience can be mostly summarized in six meta-songs. Daniel Levitin captured lots of imagination and excitement with his previous book ‘This Is Your Brain On Music’ so expectations were relatively high. Unfortunately, he did not deliver on two levels: 1) This book was not as well received as his first book, and 2) This book did not accomplish what it claimed to do.

I have always been intrigued when I see writers attempt to take a complex topic and try to simplify it. Daniel Levitin makes his own attempt by saying that entire human experience can be captured in six different songs: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. Each has a different function, but all serve to bind us together and make us stronger as a species. He reinforces the truism that music is what makes us human. While I can’t disagree with him, music is only one function that makes us human, an important one, but not the only one. I can’t help but feel that because Levitin is so enthralled with his field, he is guilty of projecting the importance of music beyond what is rational.

Each of the six songs is treated to its own chapter, but he lost me right away as he starts off talking about how friendship music can be manifested to become ‘fear’ when it is played to strike fear in an enemy. Further manifestations are found where songs of sorrow are found in the section on comfort, etc. Really, Dr. Levitin? Is it six songs or twelve songs? I found this to be annoying and intellectually dishonest that he suddenly copped out to allow the six songs to possess different manifestations.

The strongest trait of this book is that Levitin’s writing style is eloquent and sincere. While this makes the book easy to access, it is problematic because his personable tone undermines his authority when he trying to make a major claim about music and the human condition. Other critics have written that he is guilty of name-dropping, which sticks since he ends up not writing the book as a scientist, but as an enthusiast. His reference to “my good friend Joni Mitchell,” or how “Sting confided to me…” and “when I was on-stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with Mel Torm….”, become testimonies that this book has become about him, and less about the fabled six songs we wanted to learn about.

He causes further derailment when he inserts long rambling personal stories, most of which have little if anything to do with the subject matter. While they can be seen by some as being amusing and humanizing, I found them to be a distraction and an irritant. I was annoyed he went into a irrelevant digression about his childhood experience of the Vietnam War. Levitin waxes nostalgic about anti-Vietnam War protest music and how it influenced political life in the Sixties and later. Yet. what does this have to do with the Six Songs. Nothing.

When he does take on the subject matter, I was disappointed with ridiculous broad statements that were offered up without any supporting evidence. He claimed that snapping fingers to music uses up cortisol (pg. 101), that cavemen used songs to remember geography (pg. 108), and it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in spoken language (pg. 141). Really? Where is the research to back these claims up? He seems to be drawing more on his experience working in the music industry than his work as a neuroscientist. Finally, he makes a critical error of focusing mostly on Western Pop songs as his examples of the Six Songs, even though his entire premise is that these Six Songs have been with us since the dawn of humanity. I expected to learn more about the anthropology of music, yet this was fundamentally lacking.

So Dr. Levitin ends up delivering us a book that is not about Six Songs, but one that is worth only one star.

Rating:

(1 stars out of 5 – an atrocious waste of time. Dr. Levitin should know better than to masquerade personal opinion as a scientific treatise meant to help us understand the relationship between humans and music)

Popularity: 6% [?]

Five Star Song Parade: The Reels – World’s End

My next song of the Parade is called World’s End written and performed by a relatively unknown band from Australia called The Reels.

The Reels consisted of:

Dave Mason (vocals), Craig Hooper (guitar, keyboard), Colin “Polly” Newham (keyboard, saxophone, guitar, 1977-81, 1985-92), John Bliss (drums, 1977-82, 1985-86), Paul Abrahams (bass guitar, 1977-92), Karen Ansel (keyboards, 1980-82), Stefan Fidock (drums, 1982-83), Scott Saunders (keyboards, 1982)

They were formed in 1976 and initially disbanded in 1991, but eventually reformed in 2007. They were part of Australia’s New Wave.

Another ethereal song by the Reels! This song’s pacing has a funeral procession feel, its vocals and timbre is solemn and mournful, yet their synth instrumentation contains just enough playful contrast to demonstrate that the Reels know how to balance a song. Like their rendition of Bad Moon Rising, this song possesses an ethereal feel, that makes you feel as if your world is about to end…

World’s End by The Reels on Amazon

Lyrics:

Mrs. Brown stood right there
Breathing in good Christian air
She stares with such despair
Her faith would not tear

So many years so many dreams
Have gone forever
To world’s end

Mr. Hadwick looked forlorn
His wife was well and baby born
Yet at earth he yelled his scorn
For soon his family would be gone

Johnny Danger played it cute
He thought the whole thing was a hoot
Dressed up in his very best suit
He grabbed his friends to purge and loot

Popularity: 31% [?]

BilLOGs in 2011

Happy New Year.

This past year flew by. Turning 40 seems to have sped everything up!

2010 came with some transitions. It is typical of life to have expectations and find them changing or missing the mark. Some of our financial goals were met (loans paid off) and new challenges taken on (home renovations – yikes!)

My posting went down as I expected. I averaged a blog post about one every second week. (There were 25 posts in 2010; 54 posts in 2009; 81 in 2008).

My company Promaginy was looking forward to the launch of three new titles from partner Complex Games, but with new market revelations, products had to be reviewed and withheld. One title was launched and it remains to be seen if it sticks. (Yes, pun intended if you realize that the game is Monkey Poo). I expect 2011 will bring some product launches as I have at least two new websites I will be launching and Complex will continue to explore its exciting opportunities.

Meeting with an accountant gave me the rationale to amalgamate my business assets, meaning that I am going to deactivate my corporation Copia Enterprises this year. This will make 2011 and beyond a lot more easier for me.

So what has 2010 taught me personally? That I am half way to the grave! I am going to continue to try practicing a healthy balance of detachment and engagement. I have realized that the pursuit of pleasure is not what creates joy in my life and that my meditation has taught me the benefit of inner happiness.

To your happiness. CB

Popularity: 9% [?]