Friday, December 7, 2007

deep iPod thoughts

Okay! Enough with the navel-gazing. Let's talk about important shit like, for instance, my beautiful, beautiful new iPod. I've been transferring CDs for the past three days and I'm now at the point where deciding what makes the cut and what doesn't is getting hard. If I haven't listened to it in this millennium, does that mean it doesn't deserve to go on the iPod? And how many different versions of the same song by the same artist is overkill? (I kind of like that if I play my songs alphabetically, I can listen to "Stan" by Eminem three times in a row without hitting the back arrow. Shut up.)

I also am bemused by what my iPod assures me my album genres are. The Clash, Cracker, Mission of Burma, Morphine, Offspring, RHCP, and The White Stripes are Alternative/Punk but Nirvana, Oasis, The Police, The Pretenders, Soundgarden, Squeeze, and Talking Heads are Rock. Really? NIN is Electronica/Dance. Sarah McLachlan is Rock, Tori Amos is Alternative, and KT Tunstall is Pop. Again, really? Robert Rich is Electronica, but Steve Roach is New Age. It's all very, very confusing.

But Johnny Cash is still country. So that's okay then.

And, in related news, I've found the left earbud stays in much less easily than the right. If this means my freaking ear canals are asymmetric, I don't want to know. There's only so much body hatred one woman can deal with.

xoxo

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, you can edit the genre associated with a song or album in iTunes. On a Mac click on the CD (or song) and then go to File->Get Info->Info and there's a pulldown list for genres.

The genres just come over from the Gracenote CDDB database, which I think is basically created by volunteers so whoever enters the album first probably adds it with their choice of genre.

I find it amusing to discover the odd genres some albums get tagged with, but there's one good reason to change it to what you think it should be: Smart Playlists. You can have iTunes create Smart Playlists based on genre and other rules you chose--then you can just chose to play that smart playlist whenever you're in, say, an "Electronica/Dance" mood without having to create or update the playlist.

malevolent andrea said...

Let's just leave the electronica out of this, 'cause half of it on my iPod is aggressive stuff like NIN and Prodigy that's good to work out to and, um, stuff, and half of it is spacy, trance-y massage music. :-)

But what's your position on how many versions of the same song is overkill?

Anonymous said...

Given my CD collection, in general I'm all in favor of multiple versions of songs.

But given your limited iPod space, probably best to stick with just your favorite version. I think there's a way to tell the iPod to play your higher rated songs more frequently in shuffle mode, so you can get your multiply versioned songs played more often (if you rate them high) which is kind of like having more than one version, but doesn't take up memory space.