Propose New MediaMonkey Video Tutorial. Crafting Autoplaylists for the Most Fickle Musical Tastes
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2020 2:18 pm
I am a retired software engineer and, over a year on the MediaMonkey learning curve, I have been fascinated with its data structures. So, my first practical effort about 6 months ago was that I used Send To Virtual CD to write about 1000 tracks to a USB flash drive to play on my car stereo.
I found myself in a discipline-fickleness clash. Over my programming career I learned strict software discipline. Nonetheless, while playing on my car stereo, I was shocked with my own restless fickleness. The Seek-next-track button was my favorite button. Rarely did any one track play to completion.
So, I got to thinking about what MediaMonkey features lend themselves to the best possible flexible fickleness. That, in turn, led me to my writing this posting. The idea here is to pick a simple set of my most powerful basic autoplaylists and to refine from there. Perhaps, on reading this, some of you may find my ideas too simple. What’s crucial is to drive a stake somewhere in the ground and to proceed from there. I found no MediaMonkey YouTube tutorial that did so. And, in particular, I am not interested in producing such a video tutorial myself, so I hope that I can interest one of you.
First, Autoplaylists are the most flexible way to play music. Sure, you can create Playlists and Collections, but they’re not as good.
Next, let’s divide track properties into 2 groups, into qualitative and descriptive properties. Let’s drill down on only the qualitative properties and dismiss all the others as simply descriptive.
I believe the following bullets list all of MediaMonkey’s most basic and important qualitative properties.
• The track or title that I choose to buy and save. I buy only what I want and ignore the rest.
• The Genres that I organize, where each of my Genres organize each of my musical tastes. Again, I choose only the
Genres that I like and ignore the rest.
• The Ratings that I give each of my tracks. I can score each track on a scale from 1 to 5 or, if we use half ratings,
e.g. 1.5 or 3.5, then the scale is effectively 1 to 10.
Here are my such autoplaylists, each based on its own Genre:
1. Favorite Choral
2. Favorite Classical
3. Favorite Pops
4. Favorite Rock n Roll
5. Favorite Shows
6. Favorite Vocalist
Each chooses a Genre, and, for me, “favorite” means that any track’s rating must be exactly 5, the maximum. Throw in a random sort, and each playlist-playing is a fresh as the last one.
Even with hundreds of tracks in each Playlist, these lend themselves to a remarkable surgical precision. Namely, each favorite autoplaylist deserves a careful shakeout or test run. Because I have hundreds of tracks in each genre, some of their ratings were years old. If so, stop the track and edit its rating. Continue that way listening and editing track ratings to the end of the playlist’s music.
At this point, if you wish, then you may widen the range of “favorite” to mean rating ranges, say, of 4-5 or 3-5.
Next, even further, you might wander away from my just-qualitative-property tests and to also include tests on descriptive properties. A word of warning. With hundreds of tracks, and for each more refined favorites-test, the greater the risk there is of having strange omissions. Remember each IF test determines both included and excluded tracks. Exclusions on such a scale require very, very careful thought, or otherwise, accidentally, certain tracks will get omitted, and thus never played. Finding how they got there can easily require hours of work. Not fun.
Bottom line. Simplicity is important. It guarantees more fun.
Might someone produce such a tutorial video? It should strengthen our shared affection for MediaMonkey.
I found myself in a discipline-fickleness clash. Over my programming career I learned strict software discipline. Nonetheless, while playing on my car stereo, I was shocked with my own restless fickleness. The Seek-next-track button was my favorite button. Rarely did any one track play to completion.
So, I got to thinking about what MediaMonkey features lend themselves to the best possible flexible fickleness. That, in turn, led me to my writing this posting. The idea here is to pick a simple set of my most powerful basic autoplaylists and to refine from there. Perhaps, on reading this, some of you may find my ideas too simple. What’s crucial is to drive a stake somewhere in the ground and to proceed from there. I found no MediaMonkey YouTube tutorial that did so. And, in particular, I am not interested in producing such a video tutorial myself, so I hope that I can interest one of you.
First, Autoplaylists are the most flexible way to play music. Sure, you can create Playlists and Collections, but they’re not as good.
Next, let’s divide track properties into 2 groups, into qualitative and descriptive properties. Let’s drill down on only the qualitative properties and dismiss all the others as simply descriptive.
I believe the following bullets list all of MediaMonkey’s most basic and important qualitative properties.
• The track or title that I choose to buy and save. I buy only what I want and ignore the rest.
• The Genres that I organize, where each of my Genres organize each of my musical tastes. Again, I choose only the
Genres that I like and ignore the rest.
• The Ratings that I give each of my tracks. I can score each track on a scale from 1 to 5 or, if we use half ratings,
e.g. 1.5 or 3.5, then the scale is effectively 1 to 10.
Here are my such autoplaylists, each based on its own Genre:
1. Favorite Choral
2. Favorite Classical
3. Favorite Pops
4. Favorite Rock n Roll
5. Favorite Shows
6. Favorite Vocalist
Each chooses a Genre, and, for me, “favorite” means that any track’s rating must be exactly 5, the maximum. Throw in a random sort, and each playlist-playing is a fresh as the last one.
Even with hundreds of tracks in each Playlist, these lend themselves to a remarkable surgical precision. Namely, each favorite autoplaylist deserves a careful shakeout or test run. Because I have hundreds of tracks in each genre, some of their ratings were years old. If so, stop the track and edit its rating. Continue that way listening and editing track ratings to the end of the playlist’s music.
At this point, if you wish, then you may widen the range of “favorite” to mean rating ranges, say, of 4-5 or 3-5.
Next, even further, you might wander away from my just-qualitative-property tests and to also include tests on descriptive properties. A word of warning. With hundreds of tracks, and for each more refined favorites-test, the greater the risk there is of having strange omissions. Remember each IF test determines both included and excluded tracks. Exclusions on such a scale require very, very careful thought, or otherwise, accidentally, certain tracks will get omitted, and thus never played. Finding how they got there can easily require hours of work. Not fun.
Bottom line. Simplicity is important. It guarantees more fun.
Might someone produce such a tutorial video? It should strengthen our shared affection for MediaMonkey.