or, Minuscule Mind Misses Mark, Mixing Music Movies More, Must Ameliorate Material Maintenance
I must rescind my previous note that I had listened to 110K iTunes items, as I have discovered methodological problems which can no longer go unchallenged. I found the problems — or rather, found the problems to be intractable — whilst preparing my analysis of the most recent 10,000 songs/tracks/files/whathaveyou for posting on this site.
Put simply, the problem was this: Heretofore, I had maintained a so-called ‘Smart Playlist’ consisting of all items which had been experienced which I named “Already Played”. I also had the contrasting playlist, called “Never Played”. These two lists guided my apprehension of how many iTunes tracks I had heard. Malhéreusement, when I originally created these playlists many years ago, I simply selected “all media” as the domain upon which the rules were to be laid in returning the data. However, the disparity between ‘Music’ and other items in my iTunes has caused some difficulties, with the specific problem that I cannot in good conscience claim to have listened to (or “experienced” in the case of some items such as videos or movies) every single item within the “Already Played” playlist. This fact necessitates a change to the underlying methodology used to count how many tracks I’ve actually heard.
The specific problem stems from the fact that others in my household have listened to podcasts which, for reasons I shall not enter into, I have not heard. Though in the past I have tried to cull these items from my database — going so far as to delete these from my database along with the underlying files — I realized when perusing the full set of data that there would seem always to be a dozen or so podcasts which ended up in my “Already Played” playlist in spite of my efforts.
There were further problems with the old system. The inclusion of “all media” meant that every soi-disant ‘Digital Booklet’ which accompanied any iTunes Store album purchase would forever haunt my “Never Played” list. The various video files which I had watched sometimes (often, in the case of TV shows) had duplicates which somehow made their way into my system, with one item in 720p and the other in 1080p — both of which I was loath to delete given the fact that digital files once bought might not actually be available for later download in the future. And finally, the sheer size the video files tend to overwhelm the data size figures which have been a staple of my reports heretofore. Indeed, the 369 items in the new Smart Playlist I constructed consisting of the “Already Played not Music” files measure a hefty 121 GB — too great a proportion of the ~820 GB of all files I have ‘already played’ to ignore.
I therefore announce that from this point forward I shall only be considering those files classed as ‘Music’ within iTunes for my “Already Played” statistics, and its converse, those tracks not yet heard. Though only 15 podcasts which I know of a certainty I have not heard exist in the old version of the “Already Played” playlist, that number is too high, and the ongoing data scrubbing required too onerous, to justify using the former methodology. This means, of course, that earlier data will not be analogous to the numbers I use henceforth. I leave the question to some other data nerd, perhaps with a PhD in Economics and a devotion to ninth derivatives, to determine the weighting needed to conform the earlier statistics with those I shall promulge from this point.
I crave your forgiveness.
Diagram of Data Processing
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