The iPod Plays Favorites

You know, gadgets develop personalities. They do. You get used to the little quirks that your computer, dvd player, TV, or iPod tends to do, and you just say "that's the way it is." Not only are there quirks, sometimes, but at least with my iPod, there are songs it likes to play and songs that it doesn't. This little phenomenon was firmly established and proven in my James Bond song list.

I'm an avid James Bond fan, and as such, I have the title music for every movie (right up to the current one) as well as some extra tunes from the movies loaded into a playlist of about 30 songs that I play when I drive to work. The Queen just prefers it over anything else I could play. So when I first created the list, I just played it on full shuffle, and it picked whatever song out of the 30 it wanted to play, and played it. After awhile, I noticed that some songs got more airplay than others, and we got to the point where there were tunes, such as Nobody Does It Better, that had racked up over twenty plays while others had barely gotten over ten.

My response to this was to even the odds and set up a second smart playlist that sorted the songs into a 30 minute list that took the least often played songs and played them. This snagged all the low play songs and played them first, and on that setting, we never heard the 20+ play songs. Well, I was getting weary of hearing the same songs over and over every morning, so I cleared the play counts on that entire playlist, and set it to play the least recently played songs, and since we were back to zero for them all, this will keep them all fairly even. After all, my drive to work is about 30 minutes, so it generally played the whole list minus one or two.

Well, over the last few days, I noticed there is a song that my iPod doesn't like. It seems to have an aversion to From Russia With Love. Why do I believe something from an inanimate object? Because since late last week, that song has been in the 30 minute drive list, but it always plays dead last. This means it kicks off as I'm arriving at work or doesn't play at all. It's been passed up for probably every other song in the master list because my iPod continually places it last in the list. Weird, huh?

This isn't the only list it does this with either. I have a ton of playlists setup, and I'd gone to restricting many of them down because my iPod has overplayed one particular song when they run. For instance, in my 80's list, Addicted To Love comes up almost every time unless I use the least played list. A review of play counts on my iPod (if you discount the obvious multiple plays of single albums) shows several songs with inordinately large play counts from when I would shuffle everything. My iPod just pulls them in more often, I guess, because it likes those songs.

Now, I can't look into least plays on anything because of the way I'm running my iPod at this point. I am currently running a playlist to play every song that hasn't been played in 2009. I've listened to about 800 out of the 6000+ songs so far, and I'm running them by album so I can hear all (or most of) an album that I might not have listened to in awhile. I know there are several songs that haven't played since last May, so I'm just trying to get a listen to everything on my iPod coming into the new year. I figure it'll take me a few months to do it, but hey, I put the music on there, I probably like it.

Right now, I'm running the Beatles' album Help! Been a little while since I've heard it.