Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Today’s announcement of iTunes 5’s “folders” feature and the relatively small capacity iPod nano reminded me of something that I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time: my iPod management scheme. I’ve long been convinced, you see, that the iPod mini is (now was, sadly) the finest iPod Apple has ever released, yet I’ve got far more music than I could ever fit on mine at one time. Fortunately, I’ve developed a very effective scheme to help me choose what music stays on my iPod while still ensuring a steady diet of fresh content.

There’s definitely some distinguished prior art in the limited size iPod management field, ranging from Bill Bumgarner’s old random sampling method to Willo O’Brien’s more interactive multiple smart playlist method. My own approach is similar in spirit to Willo’s (which involves automatically syncing both a playlist containing checked songs and a playlist containing recently added songs), but it’s based more directly on actual listening patterns. I’ll call it the journaling method.

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a playlist called “iPod sync” (or something to that effect), and set iTunes to automatically sync it to the iPod.
2. As you get new music, add it to the iPod sync playlist manually. Usually I just drag whole albums in there.
3. Every month, compile a “Favorites” playlist containing the 10 or 12 songs you most enjoyed that month. I usually give priority to that month’s new music, although I try to simply make the list reflect whatever songs I really am enjoying. It may help to use On-the-Go Playlists created on your iPod as a sort of listening journal to remind you of what you were listening to at specific times (as you can see in this screenshot, I generate lots of them) and help you compile the final list. Lastly, you may also want to compile a yearly list of overall favorites, based on the results of your various monthly favorites lists.
4. As you create them, add your favorites lists to the list of playlists iTunes automatically syncs to the iPod.
5. As you get tired of old albums or start to run out of room for new albums on your iPod, begin to remove older music from your iPod sync playlist.

The beauty of this scheme, in a nutshell, is that it allows you to cull large swaths of old stuff from your iPod, while still ensuring that your absolute favorite songs stay on. Even though you may remove an entire album from the iPod sync playlist, your favorite songs from it won’t disappear because they’ll be present in the other playlist that get synced to your iPod (the favorites lists). And that’s a comforting thought.

Of course, like the other methodologies I mentioned, this scheme won’t work for everyone. It happens to suit me well because, first, I tend to be song rather than album-oriented (I subscribe–with a big grain of salt, of course–to the Phil Spector definition of most albums as 3 singles and 7 pieces of shit); second, because I’m incredibly fastidious and (as the British say) anorakish when it comes to music listening; and, third, because (like Jason Goldman in his excellent post on the subject) I tend to develop powerful enough associations between songs and times and places that keeping a sort of music journal is attractive to me.

Whatever the case, hopefully at least a few other music nerds out there will find this a helpful solution to their iPod mini or nano woes. I’d be curious to hear about other peoples’ novel solutions to the same problem…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Mac, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.