I began the process of 'ripping' my cd's to mp3 a couple years ago. I have no intention of eliminating the actual cd's anytime soon, it was done almost entirely for the obvious convenience. Long before I had an IPod, I wanted to be able to listen to any of my CD's whenever I wanted, and believed that I would inevitably join the IPod generation, and might as well be prepared.
ITunes has been the application of choice for this endeavor, knowing that an IPod was in my future (now present) and it is filled with good features, one of which is the Smart Playlist. With this you can filter through your music based on dozens of criteria and sub-criteria. Cool for lots of reasons. You can make a playlist of all songs from CD's from a particular period of time, for example, and call it Big 80's, or whatever.
Following up on a post from Dan, I decided to make a Smart Playlist entitled Never Listened. It's based on the Play Count feature of ITunes that keeps track of how many times you listen to something. Using the Play Count of zero, it compiled a list of all the songs that I haven't listened to since ripping them to ITunes. (there's actually a bit of a glitch since due to technical difficulties I had to restart ITunes once, eliminating that info for a period of time). It's a fairly extensive list, and one that I endeavor to begin to whittle down. Because it's a smart playlist it will constantly eliminate songs that no longer have a play count of 0 and perhaps at some future date this playlist will be irrelevant.
As a secondary purpose, the elimination or archiving of music that I'm unlikely to listen to seems a worthwhile byproduct. I'm often torn about eliminating music since you never know when you might 'need' to hear something, and with storage at little premium, it's seems simply Draconian to delete just for the sake of deletion. But archiving is another matter. Inevitably after a few years of never being listened to, this archived will be easily thrown away, just like the old cassette tapes I never listen to.
Ahh, another little project.
4 comments:
Throwing away cassette tapes seems like it could be a pretty easy project.
Funny! We both had an iTunes post on the same day!
One option to throwing them away may be to give them to your local library. One idea that I had in my head prior to being shamed, was to donate some of my old unlistened to albums. So copying a few songs or an album or two should not be that big of an ethical deal. The library gives me some new, and they get a whole lot of old.
Is photocopying materials out of a book bad?
We actually gave away our old tapes, rather than throw them away. They seemed to be a hit.
I am going to go out on a limb and say yes. However, you can't afford to teach if you did not.
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