Last weekend also marked the end of a two year project to rate each and every one of the songs on my hard drive. It turned out to be around 35,000 songs, so a couple years ago I decided to try to knock it out gradually. I ended up rating about a hundred songs a week, and to take the weekends off. Just like any project this size, it started out fun and ended up feeling like work. So it felt great to finish it up.
There are a lot of benefits to having everything rated. I can do all kinds of things with smart playlists – for example, having the DJ computer choose to play only songs 4 stars or higher that I haven’t heard in the last month in whatever genre I choose. Another benefit was discovering some songs that I had no idea were so good.
My master playlist includes about 5% of the three star songs, just to double check once in a while and see if I missed anything. Probably there is no reason to go back to the one and two star songs… they are essentially dead to me, now. My computer is also set up to automatically choose the next song if the music ends, and sometimes it will dig into the one and two star songs if they were popular and related to the previous song somehow. So I guess those may appear again in the future.
But for now it feels great to press play and have only my favorite songs playing, all the time.
