Adventures In Dreamsville
Posted on | March 14, 2008 at 10:48 pm | 1 Comment
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 40°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Tango Shoes” (Bif Naked)
- “West of the Fields” (R.E.M.)
- “The Silvery Light of a Dream, Pt. 2″ (The Apples In Stereo)
- “The Lost Years” (Bill Nelson)
- “Mystery” (Inspiral Carpets)
- “You/Me” (Mitch Easter)
- “Dog” (Dada)
Pet Peeve of the Day: Bill Nelson showing up on my jogging playlist almost every day. For one thing, the songs that show up are often dull, ambient instrumentals or slower vocal songs. The jogging playlist is supposed to be “fast tempo” songs only, but BPM Analyzer sometimes miscalculates the tempo of songs that don’t have prominent drums or beats. It’s not surprising that his songs show up a lot in the playlist, since I do own something like 40 albums by the guy. And all of them are ripped into iTunes as part of my 256kps project. I ripped his catalog as one of the first sets of discs I did, not because I wanted to hear most of it so badly, but because his catalog occupies such a vast portion of my CD collection that I wanted to get it out of the way. I have far more albums by him than by any other artist; Bill’s quite prolific.
By my count, 734 out of the 19913 songs in my iTunes are Bill Nelson songs, which is like 4%. So statistically (figuring 7 songs a day while jogging), I should on average hit a Bill Nelson song every three jogs or so, but only if all 734 are eligible for the “fast tempo” playlist, which I’m not sure they are. So something about the iPod’s shuffle algorithm really seems to favor old Bill if I’m hitting him almost every run.
I know I could just remove him from the Smart Playlist by adding an “ignore” criteria for his name, but there actually are a number of songs/albums that I would like to keep in the rotation and I don’t want to specify them one by one. Maybe I should just “uncheck” the dull songs/albums in the iTunes browser so that they never play under any circumstances. But I like hearing them sometimes, just not when jogging. I need fast tunes when I’m running!
Sorry, Bill. Get out of my nano!
Latre.
Comments
One Response to “Adventures In Dreamsville”
March 15th, 2008 @ 10:40 am
Uh, if the BPM analyzer is faulty, why not manually create a smart playlist, as you go, of “jogging songs”? I’m assuming there are enough songs that you know well enough to categorize tempo correctly, particularly the more songs you load. If you’re not sure whether a song fits, leave it off until it comes up and you go, oh hey, this one’d work.
I mean, I realize that’s nowhere near as fun as letting a cool technological device do it for you…
Generally I’m not surprised that BPM is hard to detect: all you need is something prominently hitting eighth notes in a slow-tempo song to fool the analyzer into thinking it’s twice as fast as it actually is.