Jazz police are looking through my folders

[venta]

Right, let's see if anyone's daft enough to play this game :)

At work, I listen to music. I almost always listen to my own mp3s (in complete albums), with occasional diversification into various streaming audio sources (last.fm, Xfm, 6Music, launchcast, etc).

However, I reckon now's my chance to get down with the cool kids, and have a random play list. I could just bung Winamp on shuffle, but where's the fun in that ? You're invited to choose my tracks. But, obviously, you don't know what music I have to hand (about 20Gb of mp3s).

So, you are invited to choose a number, of the form x-y-z.

The x chooses the artist, and should be a number between 1 and 262 inclusive, where 1 is the alphabetically first artist in my collection.

The y chooses the album. So, in general, it should be quite a low number, as I often have only one or two albums per artist. Albums are numbered in ripping order. If you choose a number greater than the number of albums I have by the chosen artist, I'll just take that to be the highest numbered album I've got.

The z chooses the track. So, in general, it should be a number between 1 and about 12 or so. I do have albums with over 20 tracks, though. If you choose a number greater than the number of tracks on the chosen album, I'll just play the last track.

So, as an example, 262-1-10 would be Remember Me, which is the tenth track off the first Zutons' album (The Zutons are the alphabetically last artist I own).

I'll do it as a poll to make life easier, but feel free to comment your number instead. Or feel free to tell me to stop being so damn lazy and make my own playlist. If anyone's interested, I'll post the resulting playlist later this afternoon.

[Poll #442090]

Comments

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Well, it would only be a list produced for the purpose of randomly selecting tracks. The directory structure itself would be untouched. With the list Venta could then simply ask "pick a number between 1 and n", and go an look up the track that the chosen number represented.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

I know, but you'd kind of expect there to be some logical connection between track N and track N+1. Which there would be, as long as they're within the same directory (due to find being depth first). But you'd get great discontinuities as you crossed directory boundaries: my machine starts with U2, and then jumps to ABC (thus disproving my chronological theory, anyway).

On the other hand, given that it's the musical style that's important, the jump from "Peter Skellern" to "Suede" and then to "Percy Sledge", whilst being gradual in a lexicographical sense (note, I store them surname first!) is somewhat more disturbing when you actually listen to them.

Which proves that my point is still bobbins :)

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

> you'd kind of expect there to be some logical connection between track N and track N+1

For the purpose of making a random selection from the collection, I don't think you would. You would not be listening to the tracks in the order in the list, rather in the order of randomly-selected entries from that list.