Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Top 25 Most Played
A recent minor computer disaster caused by RAM gone bad caused about a third of the songs in my iTunes library to disappear. That's about 4,000 songs. Thankfully the files were not lost; it was just the iTunes library file that was damaged. It took a few hours to drag and drop all the missing tracks back into iTunes, but that was infinitely easier than re-ripping them all from CD.
Thanks to a nifty $12.99 program called iPod Access, I was able to restore my Playlists, all of which were also lost in The Great iTunes Disaster Of '05. So in the end, the only data of any consequence I ended up losing were the play counts.
Play counts are one of the nerdiest aspects of iTunes, a sort of listening diary the machine keeps for you, documenting your every auditory move. It chronicles exactly how many times you played a track, as long as you let it play through to the end. You also see when it was last played. Glenn McDonald took the capability for dorkiness and customization inherent in iTunes to its inevitable nth degree, but as he quickly noted, he was mostly kidding.
I've only had my iPod for about eight months, so none of the play counts were ridiculously high, and nearly 7,000 of the 11,000 songs on my Pod had never once been played on the Pod or the computer desktop. (They have all been played on CD before being ripped into the Library.)
Since I've lost all my play counts and it's (just like) starting over, I might as well document what the 25 most played tracks were over these eight months. I wish the list were more interesting. I stand by the Pitty Sing record as one of my absolute faves of the year, but a few months from now, I don't think they'd dominate this list quite so much. But whatever.
1. Radio - PITTY SING
2. We're On Drugs - PITTY SING
3. The Mattachine Society - THE ALUMINUM GROUP
4. Keep It Warm - FLO & EDDIE
5. We Feel Good (Future's Looking Fine) - ENDGAMES
6. Cold Hands (Warm Heart) - BRENDAN BENSON
7. New Song - HOWARD JONES
8. Bleeding Hearts - PITTY SING
9. Anyway - PITTY SING
10. Telephone - PITTY SING
11. Happy Talk - CAPTAIN SENSIBLE
12. Cinnamon Park - JILL SOBULE
13. Siren Song - CRAYON ROSARY
14. Dreadlock Holiday - 10cc
15. Blasphemous Rumours - DEPECHE MODE
16. Gotta Stay High - NEW RADICALS
17. Hanging On Me - PITTY SING
18. CTWYL - PITTY SING
19. Love And War (11/11/46) - RILO KILEY
20. Hate It Or Love It (G-Unit Remix) -
THE GAME FEATURING 50 CENT, TONY YAYO, YOUNG BUCK & LLOYD BANKS
21. Tangled Up In Blue - BOB DYLAN
22. I'm On Fire - BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
23. This Is What I Do - RHETT MILLER
24. You Get What You Give - NEW RADICALS
25. The Trouble With Normal - BRUCE COCKBURN
So there.
In other iTunes news, I just downloaded version 4.9 with built-in podcast support, which gives me a convenient excuse to psyche you all up for the return of my Hoboken Rock City podcast. As I've mentioned, I'm re-launching it as a monthly program. With any luck, the July show will be here and available for your downloading pleasure next week.
On another iTunes note, you gotta love Shuffle play, which will teach you that The Doobies' "Long Train Runnin'" has the same rhythm as Morrissey's "Interesting Drug."
