This morning, Tam disclosed the 15 tracks most played on her iPod. I noted thereupon that I couldn’t follow suit — at the time, 890 (!) tracks in iTunes were tied for Most Played with 29 plays each — so I decided to write down the first 15 out of the Randomator (my semi-trick auto playlist). Number One was punched in manually, and the others duly followed:

1. “A Wednesday in Your Garden,” the Guess Who
2. “Deborah,” Dave Edmunds
3. “Two Buffalos,” Rolf Harris
4. “Jelly Jungle (of Orange Marmalade),” the Lemon Pipers
5. “Holdin’ On to Yesterday,” Ambrosia
6. “Let’s Live for Today,” the Grass Roots
7. “Mr. Businessman,” Ray Stevens
8. “Miracle,” Nonpoint
9. “Breakdown,” Seether
10. “Going in Circles,” the Friends of Distinction
11. “She Bop,” Cyndi Lauper
12. “Cinnamon Girl,” Neil Young with Crazy Horse
13. “In Too Deep,” Genesis
14. “All I Want,” A Day to Rememmber
15. “Lips Like Morphine,” Kill Hannah

If anyone cares, this (un)set was followed immediately by Neil Sedaka’s original “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”

(Total tracks available: 6,492.)

The ongoing iTunes Shuffle continues, and at some point yesterday it reached “Primeday,” an inspired (well, I thought so anyway) “Friday” parody. Like the original, it begins with “7 a.m., wakin’ up in the morning.”

The next track up was deadly serious: Harry Chapin’s “Sniper.” And this time I choked just a little on this verse:

He reached the catwalk, he put down his burden
The four-sided clock began to chime
7 a.m., the day is beginning
So much to do and so little time

I think I’ve just come up with a justification for sleeping until noon.

Relief efforts in Japan began even before the first horrible pictures came back, and they are of course continuing. It was just a matter of time before charity albums appeared, but the first one I’ve seen happens to be a gem:

In what stands as a major global music relief effort to benefit those affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, over 30 of the biggest names in contemporary music have joined together for the worldwide release of “Songs for Japan,” an unprecedented compilation of 38 chart-topping hits and classic tracks, available worldwide on the iTunes Store for $9.99.

How unprecedented? John Lennon is on it (“Imagine,” of course). How much of that $9.99 is actually going to support disaster relief?

Proceeds from “Songs for Japan” will be directed to the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) to support its disaster relief efforts. The society will use the funds for the ongoing provision of immediate relief and for eventual recovery support to the affected population. The artists participating on “Songs for Japan,” the music labels and music publishers have waived their royalties and proceeds from the worldwide sales of the album to ensure that the JRCS receives as much support as possible from this global initiative. iTunes will also donate its proceeds from the album’s worldwide sales to the benefit of the JRCS, and has prominently featured the project throughout its stores worldwide.

Some of these I already had, and some of these I might not have admitted to having if I had them — yes, there’s a Justin Bieber track — but hey, it’s ten bucks for thirty-eight tracks. I’m in.

A weird triple-play in the iTunes playlist this morning:

Gordon and Mary, alas, are no longer with us.

The play-count function in iTunes is sort of useful to me. My default Smart Playlist extracts the 500 tracks (of 6,001) that haven’t come up lately, and I impose a ceiling on play count (currently 25) so the numbers eventually create the illusion of evening out.

For Lileks? Not so much:

I know if I’ve listened to the songs. It is not important if the program knows it. This is the sort of anal-retentive nonsense computers force on us, a clear violation of what we know to be true and what the machine knows. Right? I mean, why is it important for the machine to validate what I know to be a fact? Does it matter that I know I’ve listened to Eddie Cochran’s “Sittin’ in the Balcony” at least three times in my life, but the machine — its memory and experiences born anew when I did a clean install and a fresh import of the songs — stubbornly believes the tune has never once been summoned? Who the hell is this computer to tell me I’ve never listened to “Oliver’s Army” by Elvis Costello?

My current count on “Oliver’s Army”: twenty-four. You can score that as anal-retentive nonsense.

Just for the hell of it, here are eight tracks — not to be confused with 8-tracks — that as of this morning had never been played on this box:

• Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”
• Alex Band, “Without You”
• Arcade Fire, “Modern Man”
• Lee DeWyze, “Sweet Serendipity”
• Fierce Bad Rabbit, “All I Have Is You”
• Finger Eleven, “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me”
• Ingrid Michaelson, “Soldier”
• Train, “Marry Me”

As Eddie Cochran never said, there ain’t no cure for the shuffle-track blues.

The iTunes screen is prepared to show you a hell of a lot of information that won’t fit unless you have a display worthy of Norad: “Album” is okay, and so is “Year,” but there are several dozen items in between, only a few of which I bother to look at.

Still, curiosity wins out, and there’s a database item called “Skips,” which indicates the number of times you said “Oh, crap, I don’t want to hear that now” and punched the button for the next song. What have I skipped most often? These:

I suppose the oddity here is the pair of adjacent Nirvana references near the top of the list, but here’s the catch: if I bothered to use the iTunes star-rating system, which I don’t, every one of these would get at least three stars, maybe more. So it’s not due to any particular animus: it’s just “Oh, crap, I don’t want to hear that now.”

For comparison: The largest number of plays accumulated by any track is twenty-four.

Another one of those odd juxtapositions that occasionally turn up on my sort-of-randomized playlist:

Somewhere out there, one assumes, is the female equivalent of Cee Lo Green.

My experiments with the iTunes Genius gizmo have been, if not unfailingly positive, at least interesting. (One actual Genius Mix is posted here.)

The recommendations, on the other hand, have been, um, somewhat less useful, or, as Sonic Charmer says, “dumb as hell”:

I’m just left scratching my head. It’s not that I necessarily don’t or wouldn’t like the suggestion (in most cases I do, as it happens), it’s that I don’t understand how it follows from the ‘you liked…’ part so the suggestion may as well be out of the clear blue sky. And it’s not that the ‘you liked…’ and ‘you might like…’ bands are often worlds apart as such — I mean, usually, you could imagine them both being part of the play cycle of the same radio station — it’s just that (unless we’re talking about obvious cases like [Band] -> Lead Singer of [Band]‘s First Solo Album, or [Band] -> Later Supergroup With Former Members of [Band]) they’re so seldom in anything that I would think of as the same niche that the suggestion becomes useless.

Which sort of makes me wonder if they’re actually using Genius to program radio stations these days: boot up, run up a 150-song playlist, let it fly, come back next week, add two more songs, repeat until everyone’s sick of the whole thing.

About a year and a half ago, I noted with some amusement that the Kelly Clarkson single of the moment was listed in the iTunes Store as “My Life Would S**k Without You.”

Since then, other people have noticed this s**ky Apple practice. WFMU’s Benjamen Walker does a podcast called Too Much Information; one episode title, derived from a passage in Acts 9, was rendered in iTunes as “Kicking Against the P***ks.”

Similarly, WNYC’s Radiolab series, which looks into scientific phenomena, got into Asterisk City when they did a show about s***m, which when I was younger were referred to as “s***matozoa.”

Since neither of these is particularly offensive to normal people, by which I mean “people who don’t work for Steve Jobs,” I conclude that Apple is simply being p***llanimous.

A song by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs showed up in the iTunes shuffle, and for some reason the stuff immediately above it in the list struck me as weird:

Then again, I suspect any dozen songs picked from the list (current count is 5227, this is from a selection of 500) in any sort order will probably look, in aggregate, just about as strange.

What does iTunes recommend for singer Deborah Gibson? Something she already has:

[iTunes] just recommended I buy my own album based on my other musical choices? Funnnny!

Hmmm. I’d be tempted to experiment here, except that of the 52 Debsongs iTunes has to offer, I already own 48 on CD (plus the occasional 12-inch vinyl single) already. And Colored Lights: The Broadway Album, the one album of hers I haven’t bought yet, they don’t have.

The iTunes shuffle just served up one of Eric Carmen’s Rachmaninoff rewrites, “All By Myself,” and then tried to follow it with a Raspberries hit, “Tonight,” on which Carmen sings lead. Fearing what might come next, I aborted the sequence. (Substitution: George Benson’s “Breezin’,” followed by “Leave It Alone” by Moist. I may have been better off with Raspberries.)

Yours truly, a few days ago, contemplating the new iTunes Genius Mix function:

What I really want to see, I think, is what the Genius deems appropriate to go with, say, Tim Curry’s “I Do the Rock.”

This is precisely what the Genius horked up for me:

Tim Curry, “I Do the Rock”
The Flying Lizards, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The Jim Carroll Band, “People Who Died”
Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind”
Dave Edmunds, “Slipping Away”
Wall of Voodoo, “Mexican Radio”
Devo, “Working in the Coal Mine”
The Waitresses, “I Know What Boys Like”
Thomas Dolby, “Hyperactive”
Bob Welch, “Ebony Eyes”
Nick Lowe, “So It Goes”
Loudon Wainwright III, “Dead Skunk”
Talk Talk, “Talk Talk”
Reunion, “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)”
John Stewart, “Gold”
Fun Boy Three, “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Trio, “Da Da Da”
Timbuk3, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”
Devo, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Melanie, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”
Warren Zevon, “Excitable Boy”
Was (Not Was), “Walk the Dinosaur”
Nick Lowe, “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass”
Dada, “Dizz Knee Land”
Adam Ant, “Goody Two Shoes”

This actually flows pretty well, but two Devo tracks? And three Nick Lowe tracks, none of which is “Marie Provost”?

Patti gets some mileage out of that new feature of iTunes 9:

Listening to some Genius mixes on iTunes as I sit here at the Laughing Goat in Boulder, soaking up the lattés and the free bandwidth. This is a perfect way to re-discover all of those songs and tracks that you have loved but haven’t listened to in a while.

A folky sort of Genius mix just brought forth “Early Mornin’ Rain” from Peter, Paul & Mary’s 10 (Ten) Years Together album. This is an album that I first got in high school, back in those early, early days when the idea of a group of musicians managing to stay together for ten whole years was astounding to me, a feat of endurance which should probably hit the record books any day now. Of course, I played it often, and had most of the songs memorized, especially during that time when I was also learning how to play the guitar.

I had no facility for the guitar myself, but I bought this same PP&M album way back when, and wound up with several others, including the infamous Album 1700. And “Early Mornin’ Rain,” a staple of the Gordon Lightfoot catalog, is always welcome: I recently picked up a cover by Richard Hawley that approaches Lightfoot’s world-weariness.

But now I’m curious as to what Genius might concoct as a mix for me. Since Apple introduced Genius, I’ve kept it toggled off and out of sight, but the new Genius Mix feature looks almost intriguing. The PC World guy didn’t seem thrilled, though:

My tunes are largely a mix of alternative rock with some electronic thrown in. Genius created several alternative mixes, each combining different groups of artists, but it didn’t create a single electronic playlist. My guess is that I don’t have enough of that particular genre for Genius to make anything of it. The differences between my Genius Mixes, style-wise, are so slight that it defeats the purpose to some extent, too; it should work better if you listen to a wide array of music.

My big iTunes install is on the work box: 4,870 tracks. But I haven’t installed iTunes 9 there yet. (I probably wouldn’t have installed it at home, either, but I took an update to QuickTime — 7.6.4, I think — and iTunes followed it home like a lost puppy.) What I really want to see, I think, is what the Genius deems appropriate to go with, say, Tim Curry’s “I Do the Rock.”

Today’s odd juxtaposition of tunes, courtesy of the iTunes shuffle:

• They Might Be Giants, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”
• Franz Ferdinand, “Lucid Dreams,” which contains the line “But I’m flyin’ to Istanbul / Oh, so why don’t you meet me there?”

(Previous odd sequences noted. Current track count: 4,861.)

Some folks see monopolies that aren’t really there, argues Megan McArdle:

Apple has a monopoly over [iTunes, iPhone, iPod] only in the trivial sense that P&G has a monopoly over Charmin, and I have a monopoly over the chocolate cake I baked last night. Neither “monopoly” is withholding a critical good from people, or forcing them to pay an extortionate price for same. If you don’t want to buy your music from iTunes, you can trot right over and buy MP3s from Amazon. And they’ll play just as well on a Zune.

But, you say, you’d like to buy music from iTunes and play it on a Zune? Well, I’d like to get takeout from Ray’s Pizza and enjoy it in the stunning ambience of Cafe des Artistes. If the waiter refuses to let me do so, is that a monopoly?

It is no trick to convert iTunes’ current de-DRMed inventory to MP3 files, which will play on a Zune or on my MP3 Walkman or any number of other players — for that matter, current Zunes will play Apple’s unprotected AAC files (.m4a extension) without conversion — but there’s no good reason why Apple should be forced to provide, say, an open API for every other machine on the planet so long as it remains no trick. And come to think of it, you don’t see anyone demanding WMA support in iTunes.

Meanwhile, my next pizza will likely be consumed in the stunning ambience of my kitchen.

John Cage’s piano piece (well, technically, anyway) 4’33″ gets mentioned here pretty much any chance I get.

And this week the first movement, Tacet, is a free download at the iTunes Store:

John Cage was a modernist composer with a playful sense of humor. In 1952 he wrote this short piano piece, which instructs the soloist not to play any notes at all — the only sound you hear being provided by audience and their surroundings. The ensuing argument over whether this counts as music quickly made 4’33″ the most famous and controversial composition of Cage’s career. Today, the work is most widely understood as a challenge to the concept of silence — even when there’s apparently nothing present to make a sound, you can always hear something if you listen hard enough.

Then again, to me anyway, the really amazing aspect of 4’33″ is that someone was once accused of plagiarizing it.

(No, I’m not putting up an MP3, wiseguy.)

I am always on the alert for unexpected juxtapositions in the iTunes shuffle, and this one shook me: “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” an unreleased Frank Sinatra session from 1959 that made it to The Capitol Years box set, followed by Gene Pitney’s “It Hurts to Be In Love.” And why does it hurt? Yep.

Current track count: 4,344.

From last summer:

The iTunes installation on the work box, set to shuffle through 3,236 tracks, managed to put these two together:

• P. J. Proby’s “Niki Hoeky,” from 1967, cowritten by Pat and Lolly Vegas.
• Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” from 1974, written and sung by Pat and Lolly Vegas.

As the phrase goes: “What are the chances?”

Doing the actual math is left as an exercise for the student. But clearly this phenomenon isn’t exactly unheard-of; almost daily iTunes surprises me with an unexpected but utterly spiffy juxtaposition of two, sometimes even three tunes.

And it’s not just me, either. From Rich Appel’s Hz So Good newsletter (3/09):

I’d be lying if I said I understood how “shuffle” works on the iPod. I’ve been using it for weeks, and I’m convinced there’s a miniature Lee Abrams in there. Why else would 50s and early ’60s cuts almost always play together (such as, the other day, The Volumes’ “I Love You” followed by Don & Juan’s “What’s Your Name”)? Why would Kelly Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” come after Beyonce’s “Halo”? Or Tommy Roe’s “Sweet Pea” go into The Osmonds’ “Yo-Yo”? Sure, there’s the occasional train wreck — Sinead O’Connor’s “Mandinka” was paired with Steve Lawrence’s “Poor Little Rich Girl” the other morning, and just yesterday Beyonce’s “Video Phone” was followed by Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” — but most of the time, with a 4,600-and-still-growing playlist, my ‘Pod sounds like nothing more than a very good oldies station (with the occasional “Future Gold”).

About 4240 here, but the same general results.

That’s one key point about [Portable Digital Music Players]: if yours doesn’t sound like the best oldies station you’ve ever heard — music-wise, that is — you’re either doing something wrong or you’ve programmed all new music (and if you’re doing that, I take off my hat to you: we need more folks like you). I might be hitting some musical extremes on mine — nowhere near what several of my friends have going on theirs, trust me — but for most users, I have to think that even a 500-song playlist on shuffle would sound like a ballsy AAA, Urban AC or Hot AC.

Get up to 1500 or so and you’re already ahead of Jack and Bob and all those other FMs with Christian names and snark from elsewhere.

Trini and I have been experimenting with the shuffle, or at least with trying to see if we can outguess it. As applied to my current automated playlist (the 320 tracks least often played, your mileage may vary), it has some predictable tendencies: it tends to jump to a track by an artist whose name begins with the same letter, or to a track with the same playcount — or, most remarkable of all, to a track with a combination of both characteristics. With this in mind, and Andy Kim’s remake of “Baby I Love You” (the Ronettes song) playing, we recorded our predictions for the next track to be shuffled in. I picked “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo; she went for “Lips Like Morphine” by Kill Hannah. These tracks were exactly two apart, when the list is sorted by artist, and the one iTunes eventually served up was the one in between: Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.”

This also precipitated a discussion of whether Kid Rock should be filed under Kid or under Rock. I pointed out that despite his name, Kid Rock is not a kid, nor does he rock, but this observation did not result in a re-sort.

Attila Girl, thinking she might be an “electronic glutton,” asks: “[W]hat if I have too many songs on iTunes?”

Which, of course, invites a further question: at what point does iTunes have too many songs?

My work-box install has 4200-odd, which hasn’t created any issues; Trini has about twice as many and has reported no problems; I know of people with upward of 10,000 tracks in their libraries.

In search of answers, I stumbled across this thread, which contains the following:

My client had an iMac that was accessing a PC formatted hard drive that was connected to a wireless network and when he got it up to 300GB with over 100,000 songs, it began to bog down and crash. The reason it was crashing and bogging down had nothing to do with limits of iTunes. It had everything to do with the following factors:

• Hard Drive Format.
• Wireless communication.
• Permissions.
• Corruption.

In short: Macs can talk to PC-formatted drives, but for optimum speed and security, they prefer something of their own kind, and wireless speeds are still markedly slower than what you can get with actual wire.

Still, 100,000 songs sounds like something to shoot for. I’m adding around 60 new tracks every month, so I should hit 100k right around my 190th birthday, at which time you should be able to fit an iMac into something the size of an early-21st-century Bluetooth headset.