For the past few weeks, a bunch of us from the #ukmg chatroom have been running a group on Audioscrobbler. For the uninitiated, this site collects data from your computer’s media player (be it iTunes, Winamp or whatever) to create the sort of statistical output that is probably only exciting to teenage boys or thirty-something men with the minds of teenage boys. Ahem.
Anyway, the stats for the ukmg group are starting to show a few clear trends, as are the stats for individual members. Looking at my page [2010 edit: sorry, no longer in use] it’s clear that I like Frank Zappa, but surprising that I listen to so much of his music. Remember, this doesn’t include CDs that I play; this is just the output of iTunes, which I almost always set to random mode. But then, a cursory glance at my iTunes library shows that, of 3051 songs, 779 are by Zappa. This corresponds almost exactly to the percentage of Zappa tracks among the total songs recorded by Audioscrobbler.
However, with a shiny new LaCie 250GB Firewire drive sitting atop my G4, I’ve now been able to reorganise my hard drive space. The #2 internal drive can now be dedicated to audio recording and samples, while all other types of media (mp3, photos, video) will be able to stretch out and relax on the big Firewire drive. I can now add lots more CDs to the iTunes library, so Uncle Frank’s domination of my playlist is about to be severely reduced…