Germanprof, I was having the same issue with my smart paylist rotations. Whatever I fiddled with, it seemed my list of new music wasn't getting into the rotation how I expected it to do.
I started with a dumb playlist a while back. It's triggered off a smart playlist of "all unplayed" where playcount is less than one. Really simple smart playlist.
Then I go to that "all unplayed" list and drag stuff to the dumb playlist named "unlistened" and put the "unlistened" on my ipod.
After I sync my ipod, I go into the "unlistened" and delete stuff that now has a playcount, which is easy to see with most of the tracks still being blank in that column.
Then add some new stuff and re-sync.
I'm still on iTunes 10 because I'm not sure 11 will let me do that easily. Also the cover flow view, I like that a lot.
P.S. Lots of smart playlists can really slow down iTunes. At least that was true through several years of older versions (5,6,7,8) and I'm guessing it still holds true today.
Katrina, I can't tell from your description what functionality you're gaining, unless you are cherrypicking for your dumb playlist? Otherwise the work you describe seems precisely why smart playlists exist in the first place. Avoiding smart playlists to keep performance up is a separate idea, maybe worth thinking about (I have a lot and certainly suffer unpredictable delays - it's worth thinking about paring down!).
ETA: One predictable annoying delay is when iTunes is playing and switches tracks - the UI becomes unresponsive for 10-11 seconds, and indeed, it's plausible it's doing lots of smart playlist updating then. I'll investigate if cleaning up improves that over time.
@Katrina, I've been using a nested cluster of smart playlists with a combination of genre, rating, and playcount - so for instance one of them is everything rated four stars in any genre (except Christmas, which is only tolerated two weeks a year) and played less than three times. Another is anything jazz that is not on ECM and has not been played in the last few months. And so on. I use a combination of these to build the ipod library. Thanks to a couple of years of diligent use of these I have virtually nothing in my library (only a few purchases from the last week or two) that has not been played at least twice. The main issue is needing some way of getting stuff I currently like to rotate faster than the bulk of the library - I have had some mechanisms for that but they are starting to break down under weight of numbers.
But your strategy of using a smart list to thin the library and then transferring to the dumb one might have something to it. Certainly maintaining at least one dumb list is going to be the only way I can get the library to get it through its thick head what I feel like listening to this week :-).
Gp, seems you're using rating to key off of frequency desires - but if you're really using 5* to track "permanently on hand" (that just means "always sync", right?), you might be wasting it - a static playlist of same will serve just as well. Then you would gain a free * to finetune your frequency constraints better.
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When we introduced a vastly expanded library of music in 2009, the experience on the site changed. Our catalog became more a reflection of mainstream trends than a true discovery experience rooted in music from emerging artists and labels. We moved away from our core values as a business and diluted what made the eMusic experience special.
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ETA, OK, even if ECM were to be gone (and they are not a major really) there were only three things on my SFL that if they disappeared I would not shrug and wait for a deal elsewhere. They are downloading now.
I actually don't use eMu dollars on ECM stuff, because the money goes farther elsewhere. I get the occasional iTunes gift card, and use those for ECM.
Columbia (Dylan, Miles, etc) still there for the moment.
eta, I am betting ECM does go, because they are certainly priced like a major, and I suspect pricing is behind this. Certainly hoping not to lose any of the other active mainstream jazz labels...your Sunnysides, Motemas, etc.
My best guess is that they're fed up with major-label collusion on digital-download pricing, they know they can't compete at the bottom-end with the streaming-only services, and they figure their existing subscriber base (and remaining indie-label roster) will allow them to compete with Bandcamp and similar operations. If the major-indies come back in force, dropping any majors who won't play ball (i.e., all of them) will probably end up being a good move.
Besides, U2's fancy vaporware format is going to save the music business starting in about 18 months, right? So hey, we're saved!
Interesting news. It seems that it's a time of high experiment
when it comes to feeding the tunes to the market (both small
and large) 'cause nobody really knows what flies best - maybe
all of these ideas do in small degrees. I read a couple days ago
that Thom Yorke's latest is being released through BitTorrent.
I am betting ECM does go, because they are certainly priced like a major, and I suspect pricing is behind this.
Another possibility (given that they have said prices are not changing): adding the majors was an attempt to join a larger market, and it failed: either many more people left in protest than joined to get Bieber and Perry a dollar cheaper (very likely) or they canceled out. Adding a la carte I suspect made little impact - when I want an album and do not have emusic credit I comparison shop Amazon, 7digital, Junodownload, Boomkat, Bandcamp, Google Play... I suspect this places me in a very small minority of digital music purchasers, and most folk who would buy a chart album from Amazon or iTunes are looking no further. I am even surprised Google Play is still around, but maybe that's just my web habits. If there is anything to any of that, the issue is they lost a market and failed to add one, erosion continues, and they want the old niche back. This might be the last gasp.
Meanwhile maybe it is having the majors that for instance keeps them from letting you re-download like we used to be able to (remember just before the majors they were announcing that there would be an emusic cloud locker soon? The big music vendors offer this, but who knows what kind of premium they are paying the big four for the privilege; emusic has less muscle.), or maybe the majors want to hike prices again as someone said and emusic see their last advantage evaporating, or maybe they have finally realized that going head to head with Amazon + iTunes is futile. Whichever, what they gave up by adding the majors was being the site that specifically appeals to people who don't care for the majors, and I suspect that ties in with a weakness in their investment in also providing writing about the music - how many casual Amazon shoppers for Taylor Swift would read Wondering Sound anyway?
All of that is to say, if what matters is perception and market niche, then the primary issue may not be price but how to reclaim being perceived as the go-to indie place. After all, it matters little to them whether you buy $6 or $8 albums as long as you are willing to be a member. To achieve this they need to drop those labels *perceived as* major, regardless of their price point, and in particular the big four. We might then still see labels that are perceived as hip and small even if they charge more (ECM).
The question would then become: can they get that market back? When I joined emusic there were a lot of labels whose music was just not readily available anywhere but emusic (and boomkat and MTraks). (I remember citing the ability to buy 12k as a major reason to stay.) Now Amazon has it all. Every obscure release, just about. It is also clear from answers to some of my inquiries on the emusic board that there are small labels that sell on bandcamp that are unwilling to add emusic as an outlet. (On the other hand, bandcamp has become less competitive on price over time).
A lot seems to me to then depend on whether they can recapture any of the sense of exploring within an interesting community that used to be at emusic (and lives on here). They have been tone-deaf and design-blind to this for years, so who knows.
"When we introduced a vastly expanded library of music in 2009, the experience on the site changed. Our catalog became more a reflection of mainstream trends than a true discovery experience rooted in music from emerging artists and labels. We moved away from our core values as a business and diluted what made the eMusic experience special."
Well, it's five years late and it's not an apology, but hey: apology accepted!
Of course my emusic experience remains the same so I suppose I should keep the snark to a minimum... tbh I can't believe that 5 years later I'm still on my grandfathered plans with still the same apparently inexhaustible supply of classical.
Of course my emusic experience remains the same so I suppose I should keep the snark to a minimum
i wouldn't worry about it; given the tone of the emusic message board, i doubt your comment even registered as snark. i'm sure it's worse there now, given emusic's friday-night announcement, but is what i saw there yesterday and this morning basically what those boards are like these days?
The situation in the UK is that we never got the majors but we also lost Beggers , Merge and 4AD.
I am in the situation of thinking about coming out of hold, there are items I would like to buy
and for £17 I usually get about 5 albums a month that I like.
If however they start to lose ECM and other niche labels then the writing is on the wall, if they get back 4AD and Beggers then they will have a fighting chance.
I remember have a chat with the previous regime when they were reaching out to us and told them that they treated the UK market as a cash cow with non of the benefits of the USA, it will be very interesting to see what the new owners will deliver.
Huh. Interesting. As us grandfathered Australians never got the major label stuff any way, I wonder if this will have any effect on what is available for us. Kicking out us non US/Can/UK/EU people was one of the things they did to cosy up to the majors so I wonder if they will change that again? Probably not, I guess.
I might be cynical but I read that were making changes post and assumed the majors had left themselves and they were putting a positive spin on it ....
It actually won't make a great deal of difference to me anyway, as I have not been able to download the majors anyway. Much the same applies to me as Lowlife - I too will need to decide what to do soon as my hold ends fairly soon. I'll probably go back as I have a list from Jonah's Jazz Picks from the time I Have been on hold that will take at least a month and a half of my credits
I almost signed up this weekend, but I couldn't think of enough I wanted. Oh well.
Re; ECM - I think ECM is an independent label distributed by a major in the US (Universal?) and by a minor in the UK. I would expect it to leave in the US; it was never there before the majors. I think Blue Note is similar too. I wonder about the Fantasy family of labels. They were all on emu, then, I think, when the majors came they got taken down and reposted. It would be a shame if they all got pulled. Or Sub Pop? Warner owns a chunk of that.
I have reactivated my account - the hold only had a few days left, and already downloaded a couple of albums. As we already have ECM here, I am hoping it will stay - usually albums are added 3 months or so after release, but not always the case, sometimes much longer.
@Nereffid, I was wondering how you were doing just the other day.might we see any more of the history of classical music? it's been educating me so far.
Re emusic I have to make one concession. After the redesign of the site they destroyed the discovery functions so badly that I stopped trying to use them. Yesterday I decided to play with "infinite" and browse and came up with several additions to my SFL, so maybe the discovery part is not as bad now as it once was. I still miss being able to browse other people's lists who downloaded album though - never understood why they removed that.
Comments
I started with a dumb playlist a while back. It's triggered off a smart playlist of "all unplayed" where playcount is less than one. Really simple smart playlist.
Then I go to that "all unplayed" list and drag stuff to the dumb playlist named "unlistened" and put the "unlistened" on my ipod.
After I sync my ipod, I go into the "unlistened" and delete stuff that now has a playcount, which is easy to see with most of the tracks still being blank in that column.
Then add some new stuff and re-sync.
I'm still on iTunes 10 because I'm not sure 11 will let me do that easily. Also the cover flow view, I like that a lot.
P.S. Lots of smart playlists can really slow down iTunes. At least that was true through several years of older versions (5,6,7,8) and I'm guessing it still holds true today.
ETA: One predictable annoying delay is when iTunes is playing and switches tracks - the UI becomes unresponsive for 10-11 seconds, and indeed, it's plausible it's doing lots of smart playlist updating then. I'll investigate if cleaning up improves that over time.
But your strategy of using a smart list to thin the library and then transferring to the dumb one might have something to it. Certainly maintaining at least one dumb list is going to be the only way I can get the library to get it through its thick head what I feel like listening to this week :-).
Blue Note and ECM are still there at the moment. Those are major labels, right?
Guess I better decide if I want that Psychedelic Furs greatest hits album. Otherwise my S4L is major-free.
- Blue Note and ECM are major but not "Sony, UMG" major - (AFAIK)
ETA, OK, even if ECM were to be gone (and they are not a major really) there were only three things on my SFL that if they disappeared I would not shrug and wait for a deal elsewhere. They are downloading now.
Columbia (Dylan, Miles, etc) still there for the moment.
eta, I am betting ECM does go, because they are certainly priced like a major, and I suspect pricing is behind this. Certainly hoping not to lose any of the other active mainstream jazz labels...your Sunnysides, Motemas, etc.
My best guess is that they're fed up with major-label collusion on digital-download pricing, they know they can't compete at the bottom-end with the streaming-only services, and they figure their existing subscriber base (and remaining indie-label roster) will allow them to compete with Bandcamp and similar operations. If the major-indies come back in force, dropping any majors who won't play ball (i.e., all of them) will probably end up being a good move.
Besides, U2's fancy vaporware format is going to save the music business starting in about 18 months, right? So hey, we're saved!
when it comes to feeding the tunes to the market (both small
and large) 'cause nobody really knows what flies best - maybe
all of these ideas do in small degrees. I read a couple days ago
that Thom Yorke's latest is being released through BitTorrent.
Another possibility (given that they have said prices are not changing): adding the majors was an attempt to join a larger market, and it failed: either many more people left in protest than joined to get Bieber and Perry a dollar cheaper (very likely) or they canceled out. Adding a la carte I suspect made little impact - when I want an album and do not have emusic credit I comparison shop Amazon, 7digital, Junodownload, Boomkat, Bandcamp, Google Play... I suspect this places me in a very small minority of digital music purchasers, and most folk who would buy a chart album from Amazon or iTunes are looking no further. I am even surprised Google Play is still around, but maybe that's just my web habits. If there is anything to any of that, the issue is they lost a market and failed to add one, erosion continues, and they want the old niche back. This might be the last gasp.
Meanwhile maybe it is having the majors that for instance keeps them from letting you re-download like we used to be able to (remember just before the majors they were announcing that there would be an emusic cloud locker soon? The big music vendors offer this, but who knows what kind of premium they are paying the big four for the privilege; emusic has less muscle.), or maybe the majors want to hike prices again as someone said and emusic see their last advantage evaporating, or maybe they have finally realized that going head to head with Amazon + iTunes is futile. Whichever, what they gave up by adding the majors was being the site that specifically appeals to people who don't care for the majors, and I suspect that ties in with a weakness in their investment in also providing writing about the music - how many casual Amazon shoppers for Taylor Swift would read Wondering Sound anyway?
All of that is to say, if what matters is perception and market niche, then the primary issue may not be price but how to reclaim being perceived as the go-to indie place. After all, it matters little to them whether you buy $6 or $8 albums as long as you are willing to be a member. To achieve this they need to drop those labels *perceived as* major, regardless of their price point, and in particular the big four. We might then still see labels that are perceived as hip and small even if they charge more (ECM).
The question would then become: can they get that market back? When I joined emusic there were a lot of labels whose music was just not readily available anywhere but emusic (and boomkat and MTraks). (I remember citing the ability to buy 12k as a major reason to stay.) Now Amazon has it all. Every obscure release, just about. It is also clear from answers to some of my inquiries on the emusic board that there are small labels that sell on bandcamp that are unwilling to add emusic as an outlet. (On the other hand, bandcamp has become less competitive on price over time).
A lot seems to me to then depend on whether they can recapture any of the sense of exploring within an interesting community that used to be at emusic (and lives on here). They have been tone-deaf and design-blind to this for years, so who knows.
Of course my emusic experience remains the same so I suppose I should keep the snark to a minimum... tbh I can't believe that 5 years later I'm still on my grandfathered plans with still the same apparently inexhaustible supply of classical.
i wouldn't worry about it; given the tone of the emusic message board, i doubt your comment even registered as snark. i'm sure it's worse there now, given emusic's friday-night announcement, but is what i saw there yesterday and this morning basically what those boards are like these days?
I am in the situation of thinking about coming out of hold, there are items I would like to buy
and for £17 I usually get about 5 albums a month that I like.
If however they start to lose ECM and other niche labels then the writing is on the wall, if they get back 4AD and Beggers then they will have a fighting chance.
I remember have a chat with the previous regime when they were reaching out to us and told them that they treated the UK market as a cash cow with non of the benefits of the USA, it will be very interesting to see what the new owners will deliver.
The emu boards have not improved.
Emusers has not deteriorated.
ditto. i actually listen to a lot of albums during long drives, but i don't pay attention to them like i used to. here's a few:
-* teen suicide -- rarities and unreleased materials (album)
-* burial -- rival dealer (ep)
-* girlpool -- jane (single)
-* ragga twins -- ragga twins step out (album)
-* sonic youth -- sister (album)
-* childbirth -- it's a girl! (album)
-* terry callier -- what color is love? (album)
-* washington phillips -- keys to the kingdom (album)
-* the mountain goats -- all hail west texas (album)
-* linval thompson -- ride on dreadlocks (1975 -- 1977) (album)
-* king tuff -- king tuff (album)
-* king tubby -- freedom sounds in dub (album)
-* katy b -- little red (album)
I might be cynical but I read that were making changes post and assumed the majors had left themselves and they were putting a positive spin on it ....
It actually won't make a great deal of difference to me anyway, as I have not been able to download the majors anyway. Much the same applies to me as Lowlife - I too will need to decide what to do soon as my hold ends fairly soon. I'll probably go back as I have a list from Jonah's Jazz Picks from the time I Have been on hold that will take at least a month and a half of my credits
I almost signed up this weekend, but I couldn't think of enough I wanted. Oh well.
Re; ECM - I think ECM is an independent label distributed by a major in the US (Universal?) and by a minor in the UK. I would expect it to leave in the US; it was never there before the majors. I think Blue Note is similar too. I wonder about the Fantasy family of labels. They were all on emu, then, I think, when the majors came they got taken down and reposted. It would be a shame if they all got pulled. Or Sub Pop? Warner owns a chunk of that.
Re emusic I have to make one concession. After the redesign of the site they destroyed the discovery functions so badly that I stopped trying to use them. Yesterday I decided to play with "infinite" and browse and came up with several additions to my SFL, so maybe the discovery part is not as bad now as it once was. I still miss being able to browse other people's lists who downloaded album though - never understood why they removed that.