(no subject)

[miko2]

When I first got my iPod I carefully picked out favorite songs from my entire mp3 music library. It took several hours to do, but in the end I filled up the 4 gig hard drive. I played the iPod on shuffle and was happy.

Then it crashed and I had to restore it to factory settings and go through the whole process again. This time, I set up a folder/playlist in iTunes so I would never have to repeat the process of hand-selecting all of my favorite songs again.

Then my hard drive crashed, wiping out my playlist. I still had the music on my iPod though, so over the course of a week or two I went through my iPod list very carefully and for each song on my iPod, I placed that song into a new playlist/folder in iTunes. This time I made multiple folders such as "blues" "bluegrass" "world" "alternative" and "goofy". When I was done I was able to restore my iPod easily any time it needed to be reset.

As soon as I was done doing this, I went ahead and wiped my iPod and put a bunch of different music on it. This was in January, and I created a new folder called "New Music" into which I dumped whole albumns of mostly heavy metal -- stuff that I'd recently bought, stuff that I had owned for a while but hadn't listened to much, stuff that I'd downloaded and hadn't listened to.

For a while I listened to this on shuffle, which was interesting because I never knew what was coming up and wasn't very familiar with most of it. As I got new cds I'd rip them and add them to my "New Music" list and delete stuff that I wasn't interested in listening to anymore. But then I started creating smaller playlists of the songs I liked the most, and for the last couple of months I've mostly been listening to three or four small playlists, each about 30-50 songs each, with varying themes. I had my "Dark Stalker" list, my "Dreampop" list, my "New Orca Mix" list. (I named my iPod "orca" naturally.)

I took my iPal radio/speaker to work yesterday for the first time, and listened to a couple of my playlists while I worked. Normally when I take my break it's an opportunity to put the headphones on and listen to my iPod a bit, and since it was a sunny day I did just that while I went for a walk -- but it felt different. I wasn't very excited to listen to music on the headphones when I'd been listening to the same music all afternoon played through my iPal. And I realized that I'd been listening to the same 3-4 short playlists for a month or more, and I was getting pretty bored of them.

So last night I removed my gargantuan "New Music" playlist, most of which I hadn't even been listening to. It's neat to be able to have 20-some full cds of music on your iPod but I wasn't listening to them. I started adding other playlists to the iPod... my bluegrass list, my world list, etc. I kept adding lists and then seeing how much space I still had left. 4 gig is a lot of space when most of my lists only fill up .2 gig or less.

Today at work I started listening to my world music list. I listened to it all afternoon. I wondered if I was near the end of the list, so I checked... now playing song 59 of 140. In other words, not even close to the end of this one playlist, one of many currently on my iPod.

I've been listening to such short playlists recently that I'd completely forgotten how much music you can put on a 4 gig iPod. ^_^ And they sell 8-gig versions of the iPod I have now....