Mix Making History Pt. 4

Continued from the A Side / B Side Facebook group. 

My mix history Pt. 4 is my retirement years and the mega mix. I've been retired now for about four and a half years and that time has allowed me to reacquaint myself with my music collection. That opportunity was increased even more with the pandemic. I was consistently being reminded about songs and artists that I had possibly overlooked over the years. I also participated in a few Facebook group activities such as posting influential albums etc and I posted a lot of what I called Kitchen Listening. I also did some random album listening recently where have albums listed alphabetically in iTunes and then pick one to hear. Then I let it go for a few hours playing whatever comes up next which was some interesting listening and a way to explore my collection. Most of the nearly 15,000 albums I've collected over the past 50 or so years have been scanned onto my hard drive (1.52TB of music). 

This led me to making more mixes of music I've overlooked over the years. There were also times when I didn't want to be getting up and choosing albums throughout the day and the eight hour plus mega mix was born. I previously described making the mega mixes here. This began a new phase in my mix making history. As of this time I have 93 mega mixes.

Most of the mega mixes were put together using existing mixes strung together and tweaked for flow. I also always want to make sure the mix works well on shuffle.

There are some technical issues to resolve when using different media players to listen to these mixes. I discovered some players want to play songs in alphabetical order rather than the track number. To solve that problem after I copied the song files to a special directory I renamed each file starting with a numbered prefix such as 001 song title, 002 song title, etc. all the way to the end... e.g. 120 song title. That has worked although a little time consuming but I've been on retirement / pandemic time. I use the program MP3Gain to equalize the sound volume throughout the mix. 

I have an app that takes my mixes from iTunes and ports them over to Spotify in minutes. Very handy. So now I'm back to making mixes and playing with my music collection.