I won’t say that I have the largest library around. I do have, however, more music in my library that I have not heard than I have. This is true due to the austin music festival South By Southwest. Each year they put a song or two from nearly every artist that is going to be playing on their website for public download/preview. I’ve downloaded every such song from the past three years. I’ve also downloaded the entire music library on OCRemix, a site dedicated to remixing game music. There are a few gems in there, especially for inducing nostalgia. So when I put my music player on “Random”, I get exactly what I ask for. Most of the time I have never heard the currently playing song before.
Now, this presents a kind of problem. With so many songs, there are quite a few out there that I’ll have no interest in hearing again. Some songs don’t even get to play all the way through. Others I’ll love, but I’ve got no chance of remembering which ones those are. Since I’m playing these on the Ipod, the only way I have to sort through these songs as they play is the five star ranking for each song.
After some debate, this is the system I’ve come down to:
0 star – have yet to get playtime, or I didn’t think enough of them to rank them. Every now and then I will up-rank the unstared but played songs to be 2 star ranked.
1 star – never play again. Incomplete songs, songs I didn’t like, or for other reasons.
2 star – Ok songs. Don’t mind them on random, but I probably won’t seek them out either.
3 star – Good songs. I like these enough that I will probably put them all on big playlist someday for when I want to listen to what I like without the drudge of songs I don’t care for.
4 star – Personal favorites. Songs that I can play over and over without getting tired of them. Songs I do seek out to listen to every now and then. I’d recommend these to people with music tastes like mine.
5 star – Songs that I would recommend to anyone. Best in class by me.
My goal is to really start figuring out what music I really like. A song can (and will) get moved around a good bit in these ranks. One thought I’ve had is squish rank 4 and 5 together for a time and use 5 star to be songs that I think are interesting on one listen, but need to hear more before really making an opinion. This would be good for all the artists that I’ve not heard before, as it might mean I go out and listen to/buy more of their music.