* More accurately, guest Hot Diggity Dog
Despite the lack of promised updates, the alphabetical listening project is still going strong. On my commute home today I hit a milestone that I'd been dreading...the Intros! iTunes says there are 174 of them...which means that my ears are treated to 174 straight tracks composed mostly of useless dialogue over throwaway beats. I probably won't hear an actual song again until Friday. Thankfully most intros are short...but it's still going to be rough.
Here are the stats:
6,093 tracks listened to / 14,146 tracks total (43.1%)
291 days elapsed / 383 days remaining (estimated)
Estimated completion date: 9/2/11
Inspired by a friend of mine, I've spent the last few months listening to my mp3's in alphabetical order. This is not a minor undertaking, seeing as my collection holds 13,641 songs as of this writing. It is, however, the ultimate shuffle/random mode. I've found shuffle on my various players (Zune right now, iPod previously) tended to revisit the same artists over and over...but this listening method results in a truly random order of artists/albums/genres. The only issues I've run into are songs appearing on multiple albums, or also having instrumental versions. In such cases, I'll listen to the second version, unless I truly can't stand the song.
Of course, I haven't stopped buying new music, and a new album can only sit around for so long before I need to listen to it. My compromise has been to listen to any new music I acquire once in its entirety, and then resume the alphabetical project.
The final problem is that sometimes I just want to listen to music normally...picking out a specific album, something I know and love, and playing it the whole way through. There's not really a solution to this...I just have to try and keep it to a minimum in favor of the larger project.
Anyway, here are the sobering stats thus far:
A - 563 songs - 26 days (10/29/09 - 11/24/09)
B - 978 songs - 52 days (11/26/09 - 1/17/10)
C (in progress) - 193 songs - 13 days (1/18/10 - )
That's a total of 1,734 songs listening to in 94 days. Assuming that I listen to the remaining 11,907 songs at about the same rate, it'll take me 645 more days to get through everything.
645 days from today is... November 7th, 2011.
It'll be interesting to see how close to that date it actually ends up being. I'll post some updates on this alphabetical listening project as it slowly marches forward.
