Tips and Tools

A tunequest wordle

Wordle is a neat little tool I discovered over the summer. It takes blocks of text and turns it into a picture highlighting the most commonly used words. More common words appear in larger type. You can input text by copy and paste, by pointing it toward a rss feed, or by giving it a del.icio.us username to analyze. When it is finished, it presents you with an attractive graphic that you can stylize by changing the layout, font and color scheme.

With a few moments to spare this afternoon, I decided to run my iTunes Library through it, to see what words appear most frequently in my song titles. I did this by exporting my library to a tab-separated text file, opening it in a spreadsheet and copying all the song titles into Wordle. In total, it was more than 58 thousand words and it took several moments for my iMac to paste all of them into the Java applet, but I was quite surprise to see Wordle itself chew through the list without any delay.

Below are is the result:

A lot of generic music terms, like ‘title’, ‘mix’ and ‘theme’ as well as a good representation of classical music. If I really wanted a qualitative look, I could always edit out those common words, but for now I think what I have is pretty cool.

Get your own Wordle.

Side note: Frequent readers may have noticed that my writing frequency has slowed to barely a trickle as of late. The reason being that I’ve re-entered college to pursue a second bachelors degree I’m changing fields. So between a full time job and ten credit hours at a school an hour’s drive away, I find myself with very little time for hobbyist writing. That said, I’m unwilling to completely abandon the site. My output may be at a trickle, but it’ll still there. So keep that feed reader fired up for the occasional return of tunequest.

Smart Playlist Idea: Eldest Tunes (that need attention)

This is a fun little playlist.

In my last Smart Playlist example, I showed how to create a list of the most recently added songs that had not reached a certain play count. Today’s list takes the opposite tack: what are the oldest songs in the library that haven’t been played a certain number of times. I call it “Eldest Tunes” and it is a great way to give attention to songs in your library that have, for whatever reason, found themselves neglected. I’ve found it to be particularly good for reminding yourself just how much you loved those songs of yesteryear.

Before I continue though, I have to point out that if you started your music collection before July 2002, then this playlist works best if you’ve back-dated your library’s Date Added field.

Setting the playlist up is actually ridiculously easy. Here’s a screen shot of mine:

Playlist is tunequest

Songs must be in my master playlist. If you haven’t set up a master playlist, then you can leave this criterion out.

Play count is less than 4

This number is arbitrary and can be whatever you want. In my case, I want to find songs that have been played 0-3 times. When a song reaches 4 play counts, it can no longer appear on this list.

Last Played is not in the last 3 months

This is a recycling mechanism. If, like in my example above, you’ve set your threshold to 4 and then listen to a song that only has 1 play count, the count increases to 2 and the songs stays on the playlist.

When I first put this playlist together, I found that I was listening to the same songs over and over again for that reason. It was taking multiple listens to rise above the 4 threshold that I had set. So I added this rule that says once a song has been played it is “embargoed” for 3 months, giving other songs an opportunity to be heard.

Finally, the last two criteria:

This is the actual engine of the playlist. Limit your playlist to the number of songs you want, but make sure you select least recently added. That least recent part is why it’s important to have accurate info in your Date Added fields. iTunes uses the date in that field to determine which songs will go on this playlist and in what order.

In my case, the oldest songs that currently appear on my Eldest Tunes playlist are from Primus’ Pork Soda and Blind Melon’s debut. I originally bought them over the summer 1993 (backdated in iTunes), but I’ve hardly listened to them in the past few years, so their play counts are low. But now that I’ve seen that they’ve been under-appreciated for so long, I can take steps to give them them proper consideration.

As for your playlists, I wish you happy listening!

iTunes Tip: Back-date the songs in your library

I’ve mentioned before that one of my standard library organization procedures is to back-date the “Date Added” field for all the songs in my iTunes library. That is, if I originally received an album for my birthday in 1999, I make sure the Date Added field in my library is my birthday, 1999. Same goes for every CD I’ve bought or mp3 I’ve downloaded.

Unfortunately, Apple for whatever reason, has decided that the Date Added field should not be user-modifiable. You can’t change it yourself, either manually or via AppleScript. And honestly, I’m tempted to think of that behavior as a bug/product defect. In this digital age, where at some point each and every iTunes user *will* have to rebuild or replace their library after some sort of data catastrophe, it seems like an obvious feature to be able to reconstruct one’s musical history chronologically. Why should users have to settle for the post-reconstruction dates for albums they’ve actually owned for years?

Well, there’s a bit of a workaround, but it is a tedious one. So make sure you regularly backup your iTunes Library file so that you don’t have to do it all over again in the event of a hard drive crash. I use my .mac/Mobile Me account to upload my library file to my iDisk every night at midnight.

How To

The secret is that iTunes relies on your computer’s system clock to assign the Date Added to songs in the library. So back-dating is as “simple” as changing your computer’s clock, dragging your music files into iTunes, then resetting the clock to the current time.

If you have hundreds of albums to do this with, the procedure can get quickly tiresome. Unfortunately, there is no way to automate it. Plus, if you are trying to fix songs that are already in your library, you have to remove them, change the system date, then re-add them. In those cases, make sure you note the play counts and star ratings, because you’ll have to re-enter those manually. Like I said, tedious.

But all that work is worth it when, in the span of five seconds, you conjure up a Smart Playlist called Best Music from High School:

Date added is in the range 8/15/1993 - 5/15/1997 My Rating is 5 Stars

That is truly awesome.

One warning though:

If you are using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and you use iCal alarms, be sure to disable them in Preferences before setting your clock back. I found this out the hard way when I was suddenly flooded by couple hundred notifications for events that had already passed. It seems that iCal travels back in time with you, then when you return to the present, it feels the need to update you on all the stuff you missed.

Smart Playlist Ideas: Master List and Newest Tunes

With more than 16,000 songs to manage, there is no more essential a tool in my library than iTunes’ Smart Playlists. From building simple playlists for listening to creating complex queries for examination, Smart Playlists turn what would be a tedious burden into a trivial task. At the moment, I have more than 50 of them slicing, organizing and corralling my expansive collection of tunes into an easily navigable, self-sustaining ecosystem of music.

It seems a shame to keep all those playlists to myself when they could be benefiting other iTunes users, helping them find new ways to organize and listen to their libraries. On this first of a new tunequest segment, I’ll share some of the criteria for playlists that I’ve developed to help manage my library.

This first installment is a two-for. We’ll start with the foundation of my listening habits: the master tunequest list.

The master tunequest list was one of the earliest Smart Playlists I created. Its job is to act as a filter on the main iTunes library and determine which files are eligible for inclusion in other Smart Playlists. The premise is that only properly tagged music without any playback glitches should be included in subsequent lists.

Podcasts, audiobooks, iTunes U courses, videos and other files that are not strictly musical should be excluded from the standard rotation. But how to do it?

master tunequest smart playlist selectors

This is the actual criteria for my master list. There are multiple ways to create one, you just have to tell iTunes what to exclude. Here’s a brief description of the selections I’ve made:

Date Added is not 1/3/02.

I had a major hard drive crash on 1/2/02 which wiped out an early version of my Library. When I restored it from back up the next day, I discovered that the id3 tags for 5 years worth of mp3s had only been made on the library, not the back ups. I took the crash as an opportunity to re-evaluate my songs and make sure that all my files were “up to code” with proper tags and acceptable bitrates.

When Smart Playlists were introduced later that year, I didn’t want songs that I hadn’t checked going into my rotation. With the Date Added for all 7500 songs (my library size at the time) set to 1/3/02, I was easily able to exclude those songs that were pending evaluation. After evaluation, I re-imported my songs with the appropriate Date Added and they were automatically re-included in the master list. Today, about 200 rather obscure songs remain that I haven’t had the wherewithal to track down, so excluded they sit.

Date Added is a powerful tool for segmenting your library based on time period. You can set it to before, after or between dates to isolate just those songs, like a “Songs of Summer 2005” playlist (Date Added is in the range 6/1/05 and 9/1/05).

My Rating is not 1 Star

Rating a song 1 star is my arbitrary way of taking a song out of circulation. If I notice a song has glitches or that its tags have errors, I’ll mark it as 1 star until such time as I can fix it.

Podcast is false

Keeps podcasts out.

Playlist is not SpokenAudio

I have several playlists of just spoken audio that isn’t an iTunes Audiobook: iTunes U courses, comedy albums and other spoken word pieces. These playlists are kept in a sidebar folder called “SpokenAudio,” which iTunes treats as a single unified playlist for the purposes of Smart selecting.

You can create some complex hierarchies and conditional listening schemes using nested folders and playlists.

Kind does not contain video

Keeps all video content off the list. Movies, TV shows and video podcasts are not welcome here.

Playlist is not Audiobooks

Keeps files from iTunes’ Audiobooks sidebar from mixing with music. iTunes offers similar selectors for Movies and TV Shows as another way to exclude video content.

Genre is not Podcast

Another method to exclude podcasts from everyday listening.

Playlist is not xmas

I have a playlist dedicated to Christmas and other holiday tunes. This selector keeps it out of the way for ~330 days of the year. I remove it on or around Thanksgiving and replace at after New Year’s.

Now that we’ve cordoned off our healthy files, we can slice and sub-slice it to fit as many different listening schemes as we have whims. This is a relatively recent playlist I’ve been using to handle new music.

Newest Tunes

Some music falls through the cracks around here. Some albums get overshadowed and as time marches on, they don’t get the attention they deserve, receiving only cursory glances before being supplanted by newer music. This playlist is meant to allow all new acquisitions to have an full opportunity for listening.

It takes 4 parts:

Playlist is master list

The master list ensures that only “safe” music is eligible for inclusion.

Play Count is less than 4

I generally feel that 3 plays per song is enough to consider a new album adequately vetted. You can adjust it to suit your tastes.

Limit to 150 songs selected by Most Recently Added

This limiter means that the 150 most recently added songs that have been played 0-3 times (and are on the master list) will be included in the playlist. When one song on the list reaches 4 plays, it disappears from the list and is replaced by an older song that meets the criteria. When new songs are added to the library, they automatically appear on this playlist, pushing off older songs.

Since I implemented this playlist, I’ve been able to keep a handle on the inflow of new music into my library. Enjoy.

iPod: Sort Your Albums by Year of Release

daft punk sorted by album title
The iPod’s default behavior is to sort alphabetically.
Here’s Daft Punk’s albums:
Discovery (2001), Homework (1997) and Human After All (2005).

Not that long ago, I was asked by a commenter if I had any suggestions for getting the iPod to sort albums chronologically. By default, the iPod’s behavior is to sort albums alphabetically by title. In iTunes, there’s the option to sort “Album By Year” but the iPod features no such function.

At the time, I didn’t have much of an answer for him other than to put the albums in a playlist and just listen to the songs in chronological order. But in an interesting twist, the pixels in that reply were barely dry before Apple released version 1.3 of the firmware for 5G iPods. After some further discussion, this trick was discovered:

The most noticeable change in firmware 1.3 is the application of iTunes’ “smart sorting” (ignoring “a” “an” and “the”), including recognition of iTunes’ custom “Sort Fields” (Sort Album, Sort Composer), for Album and Composer. The Sort fields allow you to enter any text that you want and iTunes/iPod will use that to order the list of items, while displaying the text from the actual field.

Using the Sort Album field, you can easily put albums in whatever order you like. For example, you could put the Halo number of Nine Inch Nails releases in the Sort Album field to have all items, including singles and remix albums, displayed in the order they were released.

~~For basic chronological sorting, just put the year in the Sort Album field and voila, the iPod will show the album title, but they will be ordered by the year.~~

UPDATE: The previous version of this post recommended putting the year of the album in the Sort Album field. This, however, effectively changes the name of the album within iTunes’ logic, making it group all albums of the same year together.

The revised method is to simply prepend the year to the album name in the Sort Album field. This way, each album gets a unique identifier that still sorts by year.

Additional caveat: this tip has the potential (there have been mixed reports) to reorder the listings of the “Album” browser, as the Sort Album field may be applied to it. So if you ever use the iPod’s Album View, keep this in mind. See the discussion in the comments for effects and solutions.

For this demonstration, I’ve selected Daft Punk’s three studio albums:

Homework (1997)
Discovery (2001)
Human After All (2005)

As you can see in the image at top, the default behavior is to display the albums in alphabetical order, with Discovery as the first. How do we fix that?

click to enlarge

In iTunes, get info on the first song of the album.
Click the Sorting tab.
Enter the year of the album then the album name into Sort Album field
Click OK.
Select all the songs on the album
Right-click/Control-click and select Apply Sort Field > Same Album
Repeat for as many albums as you care to customize

When you next update your iPod, the new data will take effect and the albums will be sorted by release date.

daft punk sorted by year
Daft Punk albums sorted chronologically.

This process works for any 5G iPod that has been updated to firmware version 1.3 (and I assume iPods/iPhones released subsequently) So if you haven’t updated yours, hop to it and then get customizing.

UPDATE 2: As mentioned in the comments, if you have an artist who released two or more albums in the same year, there are two options you can use to sort them appropriately:

If you know the more specific album release date, you can prepend that to the album name.
Example: If one album was released in March and another in October, use 2008-03 and 2008-10 .
If you don’t know the date, you can order them with a number.
Ex: 2008-1 , 2008-2 and so on.

Impact report update

My original High Impact formula had a fundamental flaw, which I think I may have fixed.

I spent the last post talking about the albums that made the biggest “impact” on me during 2007, but what exactly does that mean? Over the summer, I came up with the general concept, which basically defined impact as the average number of times any particular song from an album or artist in my iTunes library had been played, showing who has received the most attention relative to their presence in my library. Add together the play counts of all songs by an artist or on an album, then divide by the number of songs. There’s the impact score.

While this method produced some interesting results, it suffers from a substantial deficiency: it grossly inflates the relative impact of artists and albums that have a low number of songs. Artists or albums with a lot of songs have to be played a lot more in order to keep up. I noted this in my original post on the subject:

In cases where an artist has a low number of songs, each play count is “worth more” in relation to other artists. A single play by an artist with only one song nets that artist a full “point,” whereas as single play by an artist with 20 songs would only gain .05 points.

The solution I devised at the time was to set a threshold for inclusion, eg. artists must have more than 5 songs in my library to be ranked.

I never really liked that workaround because the threshold was arbitrary and it excluded artists who should really have been able to be ranked. So I spent a bit time recently tweaking the formula and I think found something that works to my satisfaction:

Total Play Counts [squared] divided by the number of songs.

This is essentially the same as the original formula, except that the total play counts an artist or album has received is multiplied by itself. The effect of this is to give the impact of a single play more weight as the number of songs increases. My thinking goes like this: albums with a lot of songs should rightly have a larger impact vs those which have fewer, even when the average play count is the same.

Suppose we have an album with 10 songs on it and an EP that has 4. Each song on both albums has been played twice.

Using the original formula:

Album: total play count (10 * 2) / number of songs (10) = 2 EP: total play count (4 * 2) / number of songs (4) = 2

Eight (8) plays gives the EP the same impact as the album that has received twenty (20).

Now the new formula:

Album: total play count squared (10 * 2)(10 * 2) / 10 = 40 EP: total play count squared (4 * 2)(4 * 2) / 4 = 16

Even though both recordings have been listened to the same number of times, the album’s larger footprint leaves a greater impact score than the EP.

The best analogy I can think of is mass vs speed. More songs equal greater “mass.” More plays equal greater “speed.” Just as lighter objects have to travel faster to hit with the same amount of force as heavier objects, an artist with a lighter presence in my library has to be played more times to have the same impact as an artist with a lot songs. A ping pong ball must travel at higher speeds to equal the same force as a baseball.

This table below shows the formula in action.

Rank	Artist	# of Songs	Plays	AVG	Impact
61	The Cardigans	92	255	2.77	706.794
62	To Rococo Rot	34	155	4.56	706.618
63	Tomoyasu Hotei	1	26	26	676.00
64	Molotov vs Dub Pistols	1	26	26	676.00
65	National Skyline	17	107	6.29	673.47

The two singles by Tomoyasu Hotei and Molotov vs Dub Pistols happen to be in the top 20 most played songs in my library (out of ~16000). That showing places each of them relatively high on the list, but not overwhelmingly so, considering the differences between the various AVG play counts. That’s an equitable result I’m pretty happy with.

TENORI-ON, the Visual Music Composition Instrument

So……….. anyone got ~$1200 to send my way? Why, you ask?

This thing:

TENORI-ON, the new seemingly brilliant and addictively fun musical composition device from Yamaha. TENORI-ON means “sound on your palm” in Japanese. That’s a pretty fitting description of how it works.

While pressing LED buttons on the 16 x 16 grid as the loop indicator scrolls, players can create tones and rhythms, with each layer of music having its own tempo. There are a total of sixteen layers of music and they can be thought of as traditional recording tracks. Any of TENORI-ON’s six modes can be assigned to a layer and all layers can operate concurrently. Those layers are grouped into blocks (which I think is one loop across the device’s face), and blocks can be copied, sequenced and edited for variations on a theme and extended pieces. Combining all those functions, one can create some really complex music.

TENORI-ON can read samples and manipulate outside sounds via SD card, giving it nearly limitless compositional capabilities. It is also MIDI-capable, for interfacing with a second TENORI-ON or outside machine, such as a computer.

The instrument has six modes:

Score Mode
Press a button to play a sound once. Press-and-hold to play that sound on every loop.
Random Performance Mode
Turns the instrument into Pong. Press buttons to have a ball ping between those buttons.
Draw Mode
Make music by drawing lines and curves. Reminds me of playing a harp.
Bounce Mode
Press a button and a ball bounces up from the bottom to the button that was pressed. Lower buttons have more rapid beats. Higher buttons are slower in tempo. I sense some seriously interesting polyrhythmic possibilities here.
Push Mode
For sustained notes.
Solo Mode
Also creates sustained notes, but only when you’re actively pressing the buttons.

Clearly a fascinating device. But really, all the words in the world won’t do it justice, so watch this demonstration video featuring Yu Nishibori, a producer/developer from Yamaha:As part of the device’s launch, Yamaha commissioned three noted electronic musicians to create songs using only on the TENORI-ON–Jim O’Rourke, Atom Heart and Robert Lippock of To Rococo Rot–and is giving them away as downloadable MP3s. O’Rourke turns in an ambient soundscape while Atom Heart seems to noodle with a malfunctioning sonar on a piece that would be a home on the Forbidden Planet soundtrack. Lippock, true to form, crafts a pretty nice piece of IDM. You can listen for yourself at Yamaha’s TENORI-ON site.

Here’s Jim O’Rourke learning how to use the instrument (he’s evidently fluent in Japanese; who knew?), followed by some O’Rourke-ian improvisation:

Jim learns the TENORI-ON

Jim O’rourke Plays the TENORI-ON

Needless to say, I want one. Unfortunately, TENORI-ON is currently only being sold in the UK as a test market–at £599–and apparently, the entire nation is out of stock at the moment. But hey, if you just have to have one now, I spotted a couple on eBay. Otherwise, there’s always the hope that more become available in time for the holiday shopping season.

Specs.