tunequest

The story of how iTunes and Spotify co-exist as a near-perfect music listening environment. So I was recently sent an invitation to join the "exclusive" ranks of American Spotify users. I had been hearing about the free all-you-can-stream music service for quite some time, but never gave it much serious thought. Maybe it was my years being stranded in a slow-Internet hell, but I've never held streaming services is especially ...

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Allow me to share with you one of my favorite apps in all of Apple's App Store: TonePad. You see, I've been intrigued by the elusive (and expensive) "visual music composition device" known as Tenori-on since I first heard about it a couple years. And since I don't really have the time to make the most of a thousand dollar diversionary investment like the Tenori-on, only an intrigue it ...

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Ever wonder what you were listening to three, four, five or even ten years ago? Or maybe you want to look back and wonder "have I really been listening to this album for that long?". Enter The Anniversary Playlist. By setting two simple Date Added parameters in a Smart Playlist, you can make a self-updating playlist of all the music you were listening to a given number of years ago. ...

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This is an iTunes Smart Playlist idea that I came up with last month and I am having so much fun with it I've just got to share it. The basic premise is to relive my entire musical history in rough chronological segments. The goal is to slowly drift and gradually segue through the highlights of the various eras of my musical life so that contemporaneous songs are grouped ...

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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 with an attractive ...

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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 way to give ...

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A rambling, self-indulgent, inconsequential post about habits, statistics, speculations, accumulation and missing data. :: I can't help but be disappointed that I can't see lifetime stats for my music listening habits. In these days of play count-tracking programs like iTunes and websites like Last.fm, it's easy to get caught up in the musical trends of your life. It's especially interesting when you look at the numbers and discover that you perhaps ...

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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 whatever reason, has ...

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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 an easily navigable, ...

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