Songs by Year Mega Mixes

Over the years I had made a series of CD mixes based on songs from a particular year. These mixes are not a best of the year or a general sample of a year in music but rather these have been my personal take on a given year. All the music in one of these year mixes are from songs on albums in my personal collection. They always start off as iTunes playlists that I then migrate to CD. Links to the old collections are here.

I've recently decided to combine and expand those mixes into mega mixes for each year. The first one of these year mega mixes is for 1971. Well, because it 50 years now for these albums and songs. 

The first big difference besides the amount of time of the mix is that I'm putting together sets of many artists. Three songs at the most but also a lot of two song sets. There will obviously be a lot of single songs for those many one hit wonders. 

I also wanted to keep the mega mixes at about 8 to 10 hours each. For 1971 I ended up with a little over 24 hours of music on the first pass so I divided up the sets into three volumes.

That will be my template for future years of songs. First I take all the songs from the previous Songs by year mixes and then add to that. Some years I had 8 or more CDs and others I had maybe two or three so some years still needed lots of work.

I usually start off with Wikipedia search of say 1971 in songs. That's a good starting point. I also go through my iTunes by year and look at everything from 1971. Of course not everything has the proper date of release and often times using a re-release date or maybe something is only available on a best of collection from a latter date. It takes some digging around but I want to at least know what I have in my collection for any given year.

I sometimes run into the problem of albums being mislabeled by year which occurs quite frequently because iTunes and other streaming services would often have the album year in their system based on the time it went into the service or if it was a later rerelease, updated or expanded album. I also need to check songs that are on a compilation collection for the proper date of release.

Then because I am using these collections in the car or bluetooth speaker I need to edit the file names to maintain the integrity of the mix flow on these devices. Of course I also balance the volume levels of all the songs after they have been added to a unique directory for year. A lot of work but not for a retired guy.