The Power of Playlists

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, even before the complaints started about the iPhone having only 8 gigs of disk space.
There are some people that seem to have the impression that they need to load their digital music device with as much of their entire music collection as possible. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve guilty of this in the past. “I like Talib Kweli, I’ll just load all his albums onto my iPod…”
There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, but if you’re like me, and you have your device set to SHUFFLE ALL, you notice that you spend a lot of time clicking the Forward button over and over and over until you hit a track you want.
A better route to take is to create playlists in iTunes. It might be a little time consuming, but it will be well worth your while in the long run. As much as you love the Led Zeppelin II album, you know damn well you were through with Stairway to Heaven by junior year in high school ….so why are carrying that track around on your iPod?
A first stab at creating Playlists is obviously ‘old favorites’. This is a good start and will work for some people.
Another good list that I like to make is New Albums. This takes the old mentality of ‘dumping’ albums on your device, but in this case, it’s just to sift out the tracks you like and don’t like. Once I realized what tracks I liked from The White Stripes new album, Icky Thump, I just kept those and deleted the rest.
One of the most helpful techniques for getting solid listening experience from your iPod is deleting the tracks you don’t like. Tell me if this has ever happened to you (over and over): when your iPod is set on shuffle, it seems to like to shuffle the same songs every time, and they’re the songs you always don’t want to hear.
Well, the first step to happiness is removing those tracks from your iPod. The shuffling might begin to find great tracks, or it might find more crappy ones. Just repeat the above process until you’ve chipped away the all the unwanted tracks.
ALthough this is essential to owners of iPhones and other players with smaller capacity, it’s equally powerful for 60 gig iPod owners too.
It’s about quality people, not quantity.