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Archive for May, 2005

iPod Crusade

Kenneth Hynek • 28th May 2005 • The Sciences, Computers, Family, Personal • , , , , ,

[image:358:l:s=1:l=x]A while ago, I bought myself an iPod Photo.  It’s a great little device, which I call Son of Smalloclees(being that I named my first , a Generation 1 I bought some two years previous, Smalloclees).  The sound quality is exceptional, it’s small and portable, and best of all: it stores and displays in sharp resolution and colour the over 2000 photos I have taken with my digital camera thus far.

One common criticism I hear from people concerning iPods in particular, and most portable audio players in general, is that they hold so much (let’s face it, 40 gigabytes of hard drive can hold a lot of 5 megabyte .mp3s, and even more 4.5 megabyte equivalent s – that’s the file extension for Apple’s new audio codec, which tends to undercut the memory usage of by up to a megabyte) that it would be impossible, or at least highly improbable, that an iPod owner would ever listen to all the songs they have stored on their device.

CRUSADE-DATE #3: At the end of the day for June 8, 2005, the crusade has progressed thus far:

  • Total number of yet unplayed music tracks: 2226
  • Total play duration of unplayed music tracks: approximately 6.2 days

Finally broke through the 7-day mark! There’s less than a week of music left in the music. And of course, I keep finding songs I love, so my list of 5- and 4-star songs continues to grow!

In a certain sense, this is true – we all have songs we prefer, and we’re likely to listen to those tunes more often than other tunes we’re maybe not so keen on.  At the same time, randomizer functions on any media player, whether CD or .mp3, tend to favour certain songs and track numbers more than others – that’s just the nature of pseudo-random generators, and a consequence of the fact that, as yet, it is impossible for any digital system to generate a truly random number that cannot, in some way, be predicted.

But I’m never one to let my critics have the last word.  They raise a valid point, and so this iPod owner has set out on a crusade to prove that not only is it possible for an iPod owner to listen to his entire media library, but that it has been done and documented!

Here’s the statistics on what is on the iPod right now:

  • Total number of media tracks on the iPod: 5263 (includes a mix of music tracks and audio books)
  • Total number of audio book tracks on the iPod: 420 (most of the first four books, segmented by chapter or part thereof)
  • Total number of music tracks on the iPod:4843
  • Total play duration of all music tracks: approximately 13.5 days

For the purpose of this crusade, only the music tracks will be considered for play.  The Harry Potter s are kind of a special case, and not really the sort of thing this iPod user would listen to in casual daily iPod use.  Now, we also have to consider some other bits of information.  For example, there are songs on the iPod that I have listened to already.  So another quick search, this time based on play-count for music tracks, reveals:

  • Total number of yet unplayed music tracks: 2958 (courtesy of a raid of a friend’s laptop that boosted my library by some 3000 tracks)
  • Total play duration of unplayed music tracks: approximately 8.2 days
So there you have it – the scope of the crusade.  A little over a week’s worth of music to listen through.  Fortunately, my 8.5-hour workdays are at ATCO Pipelines, and my employers permit employees to listen to music in their cubicles, so this shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks to finish.  I will post periodic updates as I get closer to my goal.

CRUSADE-DATE #1: At the end of the day for May 27, 2005, the crusade has progressed thus far:

  • Total number of yet unplayed music tracks: 2854
  • Total play duration of unplayed music tracks: approximately 7.9 days

CRUSADE-DATE #2: At the end of the day for June 1, 2005, the crusade has progressed thus far:

  • Total number of yet unplayed music tracks: 2653
  • Total play duration of unplayed music tracks: approximately 7.4 days

Interestingly enough, this has been a somewhat profitable crusade. As I listen to the music, I will use a built-in feature of the iPod interface to assign a rating to songs I like, either 4 or 5 stars (I don’t bother, at this time, with going less than that). When I undertook this crusade, my count of songs (there’s a playlist) with a 4 or 5 star rating was 802. It’s now up to 834. I’m happy to report, then, that I’ve discovered some tracks on the iPod that previously I would not have been aware of as awesome.

The crusade offers up spoils of victory!