my next itunes scripting project
I think this is one of those things that won’t be so horrible once I get down to it, but I’m putting it off because from the outside it looks obnoxious.
My CDs are gathering dust – not much, because they’re in our nice new shelves, but dust nonetheless. I open them, rip them, and put them away. That’s fine and dandy, but there’s one big problem: I end up never listening to my albums. Instead, I listen to my tracks. I have a lot of smart playlists that have served me well, but they just randomize my music and keep me hearing stuff I like.
When I lent my iPod to Louis, I suggested a number of albums, but they weren’t on there in whole. It got me wondering why I never noticed: of course it was because I never listen to whole albums anymore, and now I want to fix that.
I’ll have to build a summary of whole albums by reading the iTunes music library XML file, eliminate partial albums and loosey tracks, and then pick the albums that I like and haven’t heard lately. Probably I’ll pick albums that have at least half their tracks rated with a average rating over 3.5 stars, then pick some number of albums with average last-played dates furthest in the past. I’ll shove those into a playlist, then listen to them with shuffle on album mode.
I’m hoping I can do this over the holidays. It’d be a nice present to myself.