Friday, September 9, 2011

Friday Funday - Shufflin' Stars and Bars

My friend and coworker Lauren just recently posted and interesting piece regarding iTunes Star Rankings and the dreaded Shuffle over on her personal blog.  It got me thinking and checking up on a few things regarding iTunes.  First a bit of background, I was very slow coming to iTunes and Apple products in general having a budget no-name MP3 player for many years and being quite happy with it was one reason.
Not my exact one, but very similar
Lately however (like Lauren) I purchased an iPhone and unlike Lauren I went for the big one deciding I am going to put a bunch of my music on it, thus I have been using iTunes much more then I have ever have in the past.  Unfortunately my laptop can't keep up (it is full) so the vast books and stacks of CD's are still waiting to get uploaded into the phone...   

However I never use the star system in the slightest and that may be weird considering I use a Rating System for all of my reviews that I write.  There is actually only 1 song that has a rating out of the 2873 currently on my phone and that is The Hold Steady's "Stevie Nix", which has 5 stars.

While I love that tune, it certainly isn't my all time favorite, and I am guessing I clicked the stars by accident, but it is odd that I never once used them, I could say that I just have way too many to rank, but I am not sure that is a valid excuse because I am sure people have more and use the ranking system.

I like Lauren's proposed system for ranking, "Gym", "Party" etc, but my brain is so warped with music that I would probably end up limiting myself.  I used to love to work out to the Grateful Dead, (especially a good "Dark Star" for cardio) and I can just as easily party with Sepultura

as I can with  Jorge Ben and those are just two Brazilian groups that popped into my head.


Also as anyone can attest to the "Late Night" ranking for me would just be The Band's Last Waltz...over and over...god I want to hear/watch it right now!


The shuffle embarrassment aspect is another interesting concept.  Personally I rarely/if ever use shuffle, I am 99% an album person and proud of it.  For some reason Shuffle has never appealed to me, I love to be in the mood for the artist and hear their thoughts over the course of a full release, always have, never went for singles at all and it is one of the main things I hate about iTunes; making the single a viable commodity again where artists put out one good song and 8 filler tracks.  Then again I shouldn't be too old man grumpy about this as it has given Weird Al a career re-birth, and that is always a fun thing... 

(Pretty sure Jack loves this...and kinda surprised he never covered it...)

How do you feel about Stars and Shuffle?  Do you use them at all?  Think they are a nuisance?  Thanks again to Lauren for getting me thinking about this.  Feel free to comment and enjoy your weekend...

No comments:

Post a Comment