my ipod loves it some sonic youth. and beck. and pearl jam.

one of the recurring subplots here at tunequest has been the tracking the seemingly non-randomness of the selections my ipod chooses to play and lately it’s starting to draw my aggravation. you see, part of my goals for  tunequest is to get to know some of the vast swaths of under-appreciated tunes resting in my library. so i made it a policy that my most listened to artists wouldn’t be eligible for play.

it’s july; there are six months left in the year. filtering my top five artists, in terms of total playcount, should help ensure that those lonely souls get the attention they deserve. this is a recent change however. for a while, i just excluding the blanket top 10 from my profile at last.fm.

But I eventually realized that i’d eventually get to the point where i’d have left nothing but those top artists and i’m pretty sure that i’d get sick of listening to the same things for a couple weeks toward the end of the year. so i adopted a new method. using both last.fm and super analyzer (at least until the iTunesregistry is functional once again), i’ve put stitched together a new list of exclusions. the result being that a lot of formerly mothballed titles were now available for play, including a bunch from sonic youth, beck and pearl jam. (radiohead was available, but quickly earned its way back into the exclusion list).

and this turn of events apparently pleased my ipod to no end, because all of the sudden, it’s been one those three bands played every other album, usually as the first or second random selection. i’m not really complaining about it. i do, of course, enjoy the music. it’s just that i’d rather not have it all crammed together.

at any time, the tunequest pod holds about 300 separately tagged albums. in aggregate, including singles,
live shows, albums proper, etc, those 3 have had about a 10% chance of being randomly selected as the next album played and i’m telling you it certainly feels like they’ve been getting more they’re 10% lately.

of course, each time one of those heavy-hitter does get played, their chances for future play drops.

here’s to a more diverse listening experience.