How do you choose what to listen to - CD vs Server

quote:

Originally posted by Graeme Hutton:
My 1000 or so CD's are all organised alphabetically and can be viewed all at once. I find I choose what I fancy listening to in a very unstructured and organic way; pull out a CD, see cover, change mind, spot something else on shelf below, decide on that....or not, and then choose something I'd forgotten and not played in a while.

This takes a matter of seconds usually, and it's only one example of interacting with the actuality of a music collection.

How do those with 'virtual' collections on a server choose.....?

Thoughts?

Graeme

scroll iphone through nas index of artists then select. access of 2000 cds in seconds its a joy

Scroll through using either "album" or "artist" and usually pick a whole album. One really nice thing about using "album" as the sort field is that the subsequent record is totally unrelated (follows in alphabetical order) to the one just played. I often stumble across "forgotten gems" this way.

But if something specific comes to mind, a few keystrokes in the search box finds what I want in milliseconds.

Losing the CD-case clutter from the coffee table is a MAJOR plus.

Mostly by scrolling through the album cover list on iPod touch. Perhaps starting an album, changing my mind, pick a new one etc - much as you describe.

Occasionlly by letting the computer randomly choose tracks. The latter method can be refined by restricting to artist, genre, rating, popularity etc. Finally the perhaps most impressing way of doing random playback is by using so-called accoustic fingerprinting. This is akin to Pandora, and will give you random playback, but only of similar music. I often stop random playback when an interesting album pop up.

However, if you imply that the physical entities are helpful in bringing out recollections that may be of use in this process, I tend to agree that they are more effective at this than a virtual library. This is highly personal though.

Download a random number generate App to your iphone/touch or computer, generate a number and what ever it is play that disc or LP.
thats what I do