I made Keith get the iPod craze. I’m always talking about mine and eventually he just caved in and got one. The other week we were shopping at Costco (a big wholesale store here) and we walked past a whole tray of the things. I really didn’t need to persuade him how good a purchase it would be, because I had already done that ad nauseum since buying mine.
I have to say though, now I’m a little jealous of him because mine is only 30 gigabytes and his is 60. I am fast approaching my limit and now I regret settling for the lower model. Nevertheless, I still have more music than I know what to do with and shuffle playing my library is always an adventure.
One of the features of the iPod is the records it keeps of your listening history. Each time you fully play a song, it increments the Play Count of that song. This makes it easy to sort the songs by most played and hear the songs you know you loved and some you don’t want to admit you love so much. Sometimes I am surprised by those that make their way up my list. I try and think back over when I had heard them wondering if there was some mistake. But the iPod never lies.
You can add your own playlists too, I have a Top 10, 40 and 100, plus a list of songs that I haven’t listened to yet. I figure that after a year, if there are still songs in this list I may as well delete them. It’s a great little system and it doesn’t matter whether I listen to the songs on my laptop or iPod because the tally gets synchronized every time I connect the player to my laptop. However this has led to a strange phenomenon: iPod politics.
I find myself intentionally wondering if I should listen to a song all the way through, thinking that somehow it will boost that song’s status to a level I don’t think it deserves. Other times I’ll want to listen to a song by my favorite artist all the way through to award it another addition to the play count, as though I’m rooting for my home team. A short time after Keith bought his, I accidentally reset my play counts and all those months of listening stastistics were lost. So I started fresh and not surprisingly my Top 10 didn’t reflect my true idea of what a Top 10 should be. For example, there was a song called ‘Only You’ by Ashanti which I liked for a short time. It had a nice beat and made me tap my feet on the subway. But it grew annoying quickly. Very quickly. Now it’s up there at #5 and I’m not happy about it. Time will sort that out, I’m sure, but I have the strongest urge to listen to tracks that I like more to push it back down. I could reset that song’s play count, sure, but that would be fixing the statistics.
I’ll just have to live with my past listening habits.
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