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Listening to Music

30 August 2020

My Music Library

I have a good bit of music I had acquired and ripped in the late 90s and had purchased from Amazon later. That all lives in a directory on my big computer. I never play anything from there, and it just sits there for safe keeping.

I continued to purchase DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon Music, and I eventually embraced their "free" streaming with Amazon Prime. I could add available music to my collection for free, and then stream it along with the stuff I bought, so it’s nice and blended. This allowed me to easily toss a new album or artist into rotation, and if I really want, I might purchase it to keep.

The Prime streaming service had some limitations with some music I wanted to sample being unavailable, and sometimes, I’d notice some of the free music disappeared from my collection. I decided to pay the little bit for the Unlimited Music plan, and that made almost everything available. I notice very few cases of music becoming unavailable, so now I don’t bother buying downloadable MP3s except in rare cases where I want to be able to use a song on another device outside the Amazon Music client.

Music Discovery

I don’t really use the stations at all on Amazon Music. I don’t feel the need to hear large numbers of new songs all the time, so I have a smaller curated list of podcasts and DJs where I discover new music to add to my collection at Amazon:

Alternatives

I had uploaded all my music to Google Play Music years ago, but there had always been news of the service’s eventual demise. It’s finally migrated recently over to YouTube Music, and they seem to have reintroduced the ability to upload my own music. I’ve paid for YouTube Premium, so I have YouTube Music as well, and this could be a nice alternative. I have a few albums uploaded there which I can’t find on Amazon. I don’t think I can buy music there, though, and I’ve already purchased a good bit of (DRM-free) music on Amazon.

2018-07-24 Podcast List

24 July 2018

LIFO Life

24 February 2016

Information Overload

I’ve heard lots of talk recently about information overload. I even tried to do that whole Infomagical Challenge, and I couldn’t really convince myself it was necessary. I just don’t seem to have that addiction trait.

Social

Our social feeds are in reverse chronological order — dip in, see the latest, scroll a little to see something older, and then move on. Sure I’ll hit reload a couple times when I’m bored to see something new, (but I could totally stop whenever I want). I don’t feel like I need to necessarily click the bait or read everything.

News and Current Events

When I want to keep up with a little news outside of the social networks, Feedly is showing me headlines from newest to oldest. I’m sure I miss some news, since I only scroll through maybe 100 stories at a time, but anything worth knowing will be mentioned a couple times over the days and weeks. I just never see some blips in news, and that’s OK — it probably wasn’t worth the time anyway.

Podcasts

I have BeyondPod configured to do the same thing for my audio listening. Sometimes I have 50 podcasts queued up, and sometimes I run it down to 0. I have 3 priorities into which I categorize each feed, so I can always hear my favorites first, but within each of those priorities, the episodes are still presented in LIFO order, so I don’t fall behind. When I listen my way down to something that’s just out-of-date and low in priority, I can just delete it.

Photo Workflow

The reverse-chronological (or LIFO, last-in-first-out) order works great for my photo workflow too. When I was working chronologically, every photo ended up late — up to a month or 2 at times. Working from the newest stuff back fixed that. The latest party or event could often get posted, while some lower-priority sets of photos could wait a little. When I got super-busy, some photos could end up a month or 2 delayed, but not all of them.

Culling in Reverse

LIFO even saves me time when I’m culling photos, which is the first thing I do after importing photos. We often work a scene and shoot until we’re convinced that we have the shot we want, so I start looking for the keepers from the end of the set and browse my way back to the beginning of the set. When I know I have the keeper, I can more confidently skip all the previous images that led me to the keeper. There was no point in studying those earlier half-baked images when I’ll keep finding better versions as I work forward.

Delete Most the Photos

Once I’ve picked that 10% I’m keeping, I delete everything else, because I still have the end in mind — reasonably backing up all my images. Some probably find that idea backward too.

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