The Difficulty of Too Much Music

[mishalak]

It is a nice problem to have, really. But it does represent a problem at times because the sheer mass makes it hard to find music I want to listen to at that moment. This is partially because Richard and I both have music on iTunes and some of our tastes are very different. But I would guess that half or more of the music in iTunes is my own and I have quite a varied taste. And the categories are imperfect. Not every one of the 357 songs that have ended up classified in the "classical" category is the same. And making a playlist can be time consuming work with 3823 songs to pick from. That's more than a month of music. And then I could listen for another 3.7 days just to my audio books. All this stuff takes up 28.33 gigabytes of space on my 234 gig external drive (not to mention another couple gigs for books I removed from iTunes but have yet to delete entirely). Thank heaven that I put it there rather than on my computer's main drive. It has also made it much easier when moving from one computer to the next.

The thing is that after spending an evening categorizing things I don't feel the satisfaction that I did back in the day making a mix tape to listen to in my car or something. Perhaps there is a dissatisfaction with not having a physical artifact of what I've done. Or it could be that my playlists are just not very good.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

An unfortunate side-effect of having a lot of music in iTunes is, of course, managing all those songs.

I've gone through and tweaked my genres a lot. Since a lot of "classical" isn't actually classical music, I've created "contemporary orchestral" and "contemporary opera" and "baroque" and "renaissance" to split them out.

I've similarly broken out progressive rock from "rock" (because it's a significant sub-category in my library).

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

One of your categories has me curious. What do you define as progressive rock?

I've been thinking that I have too many one off odds and ends categories and I need to consolidate. Or get serious about putting things into the right category, which is hard. Where is the line between rock and goth rock?

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Prog Rock, "Classic Rock" and 70's "Album Rock" are pretty much intertwined. Queen and Yes are good examples. It's the arty lushly-orchestrated complicated stuff that punk was a reaction to.

Put the line wherever you feel like. I tend to double-check an artist/group against Wikipedia for their genre classifications just as a sanity check.