tunequest

site-related news

New Tunequest Feature: Song of the Day

I probably should have thought of this sooner, but I didn’t have this nifty new WordPress plugin that let’s me easily embed audio files into my posts until the other day. Of course, the primary premise of Tunequest is that I’m spending the year listening to all 14,000+ songs in my iTunes library. Until recently, I didn’t really have a way to share some of that music.

So, starting today I will be including a song from each day’s playlist in a post to the site. There’s 73 days left in the year, so expect about 73 songs (though probably fewer; there are some days where I don’t get the chance to listen to anything).

The debut song is Kind Hearted Woman Blues by Robert Johnson.

[audio:061018kindhearted-woman-blues.mp3]

I’m not much of a blues fan. Nothing against it; in fact I respect the blues and blues musicians a great deal. I just can’t listen to much of it at a time the exception being blues bars. Live blues is something to behold.

It’s probably fitting then, that I’ve gone to the source with Johnson’s Complete Recordings. It’s undeniably classic and quite moving. And come to think of it, I probably don’t need any other blues records. It’s all right here.

Find it on

T-graph

Another depressing graph. Basically the blue line needs to be in the green area. It’s not. Boo.

tunequest graph 061009

Woohoo to 5 digits, another milestone

With all my excitement surrounding the symphony, I completely over looked the fact that I broke the five digit mark on the tunequest. That’s right, since the first day of the year, I’ve listened to more than 10,000 individual songs.

Hooray for me.

However, things still look a little grim for reaching my admittedly arbitrary goal listening to my entire iTunes library by the end of the year. The graph has consistently shown me performing at a deficit in this regard.

Here’s another way of looking at it: At the time of this writing, I have 4,187 more songs to listen to. It took me 98 days to listen to the previous 4,187 and there are only 87 days left in the year. So if I listen at the same rate, I’ll conclude this project 11 days into 2007.

And if that’s not mind-numbing enough for you here’s one more way to think about it: If I take the actual time of music into account, I’ve run an average of 3 hours of listening per day in the past 98 days. To make it through the rest, I need to average 3.3 hours per day during the next 87.

This is all assuming, of course, that my library’s net size stays basically the same.

a new week, a new graph

tunequest graph sept 3, 2006

a new ‘best week ever’ for the tunequest: 439 songs worth 25 hours of music. to celebrate, here’s a graph! the trendline still shows me being off target at the end of the year, but if i keep up the same pace, i’ll finish early.

huzzah, progress!

just a note to say that i crossed the half way threshold for song count this afternoon. the lucky song was nine inch nails‘ ‘terrible lie’ from all that could have been (halo 17).

of course, as i add and remove songs from the library, that metric will change. but for now, let’s all congratulate our winner.

this midway island earth

halfway kang and kodos

I reached another tunequest milestone today at 7:48 pm, officially crossing the halfway point of this journey. Pictured above are screenshots of the playlists i use to keep track of my progress. even though the song count is off by 364, you can see that the total time for the played group is slightly higher than the songs remaining. Unless I end up adding significantly more music to my library in the coming months, it should be all down hill from here.

To which I say: Hooray.

and just in case you’re curious, the song that took me over the hump was Alf Clausen’s Kang and Kodos theme from The Simpsons’ Treehouse of horror series.

The tunequest half way point

So today, July 22, marks the half way point of tunequest in terms of calendar days. And while I’m a little behind overall, it doesn’t look as bad as I was projecting a couple weeks ago. The count shows a deficit of roughly 500 songs, which seems like a lot. However, the time count shows about a 10 hour deficit.

Some quick math tells me that the average song length will be 5% less on the back end of the project, which should help accelerate the number count.

In any case, it’s been a great five and a half months getting to know the songs in my library more fully. And I can quantify that progress. From the about page:

After 3.5 Years of itunes statistics, 9597 songs (65%) had never been played or only played once. Further analysis revealed that 10% of the songs were responsible for 49% of the play counts.

As of today, which includes 4 years of stat collecting, I can say that 7622 songs have a playcount of 0 or 1. That’s now 54% of my total library, a 11% improvement. Also, the top 10% of my songs are now responsible for 42% of the my total plays. It’s still a large disparity, but there’s been a marked improvement.

And honestly, given the rules of the tunequest, I may listen to every song in my library, but that will still leave about 5700 songs with a count of 1, so the lowest that first indicator will get is 40%.

As for the top 10%, the lowest they’ll go is 35%.

But hey, I’m really having too much fun with this project to worry that much about the numbers. So here’s to more another 5 and a half months of great music listening.