tunequest

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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Note: The behaviors described below are from Mac OS X 10.4.10. Previous versions of the OS might not behave as described. YMMV. Keyboard shortcuts are the life-blood of the power user. Casual users know of the basic ones: Command-Q to quit, Command-W to close a window, Command-F to find, etc, but the power users have them all memorized for every program they use. For them, actions that ...

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I've spent the past couple days playing around with Alex King's iTunes Stats program. It's written in PHP/MYSQL and requires a web server to run. With the MAMP one-click server running on my PowerBook, I had little trouble installing the program (though I did have to substantially increase the PHP timeout setting so it could handle my large library). iTunes Stats reads XML files, one can load ...

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