Exploring My Music Collection

The pandemic has impacted all of our lives in so many ways. I was fortunate in a sense because I've been home from work the past few years enjoying a well earned retirement and one of my joyful activities in this new life was to explore my music collection that I had been accumulating since 1965. Covid has ensured that I spend a good part of every day on this activity even more so than I have since I stopped working.

Now I've always been exploring my music collection because for well over 40 years I've been an avid mixtape maker. One of my favorite pastimes after a day at work was to sit down at the stereo and put together a mix. I started out with taking records and recording songs to a cassette tape and then gradually moved to burning CDs. Eventually it was all about computers, iTunes and the digital world. I'm still making mixes now in the middle of this pandemic. It keeps me sane and... it's what I've always done.

As a family we've always had music on in our house. My kids grew up with an album played every evening at dinner time. Always. It could be music from any genre and any era including rock, jazz, classical, folk, doo-wop, funk, reggae, opera, country, etc. Maybe the only thing I didn't play was show tunes.

So for the past almost year I've been at home all day mostly reading and writing with the stereo playing something. In fact all day long except when I may be watching something on TV there has always been music playing. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and I've always had a set of good speakers up on top of the cabinets.

I've been going upstairs to play vinyl records. There are a few albums that I only have on vinyl. Over the years I've made an effort to either burn my vinyl to CD or download to my computer as an MP3 file but there are a few I've never converted. I've also went through a period where I was grabbing assorted CDs from the 3rd floor and bringing them downstairs to the stereo on rotation. Now, I've always done that to some extent but a few months ago I was systematically trying to listen to many CDs that I'd not heard in some time.

I've also been working on my mixes and reorganizing them into long mega mixes that would play all day. I was originally making the mega mixes for the eight hour drive to Philly from Buffalo. Our new car had a media player that worked with a flash drive so I spent some time migrating mixes to that format. I also liked to put these long mixes on shuffle and really mix it up.

After a few months I've been looking at some creative ways to explore my music collection. I tried to just put iTunes on shuffle for albums. That really didn't work well because I have so many mixes and random songs scattered about the system. I really wanted to listen to albums I hadn't heard very often. Then I came up with a new process.

I called it Random Album Effect. I start out by sorting the iTunes database by album title. Then I pick out an album that I would like to hear. Something I knew I like and maybe haven't heard in awhile. Then I let the it play and the next three or four albums and call it a set. Later I write about the albums I played. I have a series of Random Album Effect sets and each one is distinguished by a word that starts the set. I wrote about the Random Albums earlier in December when I first started doing this.