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How do you avoid song boredom?

M

Michael CM1

macrumors 603
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
5,682
277
This whole 8GB limit (really 7.2) has been dragging on me for a few weeks, maybe months. I swore myself off buying another iPhone until it hit 32GB at minimum because my previous iPod was the 30GB. I keep trying to shuffle playlists around, but I can never seem to find more than 20 or so tracks that I'm in the mood for. Sometimes it's a little Carlin, at others I want some good scores/soundtracks. Then maybe I want straight-up gangsta, but a few hours later I want something like Fall Out Boy. Then of course comes the inner manly feminine side with Kelly Clarkson, but it's VERY manly.

So what do you peeps do? I have deleted all videos, podcasts, and photos from my iPhone to max out the storage. I have just over 6GB to play with yet a 20GB (and ever-growing) iTunes music library.

For those who will suggest Pandora or something similar, I have an EDGE iPhone. Not the most reliable connection for such an app, plus the building I work in seems to suck the life out of cell signals.
 
I would love to know myself. My problem is that I inadvertently memorize song lyrics after a couple listens and everything becomes repetitive. :eek:

My main way to avoid "song boredom" is to have a good mix of all the genres of music I like. That way I can just switch artists/albums/playlists when I get tired of hearing one type of music.
 
I put most of my favorite songs to fill up the 7gigs, then when i want to listen to something I choose one song i want to hear and then use the genius play list option. that way i get to listen to similar type songs but also listen to songs i might not usually listen to.
 
I've come to the realization that my iPhone can't really be my sole iPod. In addition to my 16 GB iPhone, I have an olde-school 20 GB iPod. Even if I had a 32 GB iPhone, I still wouldn't be able to keep it as my only iPod.
 
You cannot find more than 20 songs on a 7.2GB? ADD maybe? :rolleyes:

Try getting more tunes on your HD. Take up new genres of music beside the crap on the radio. I thank god I joined emusic.com (mostly independents and indie rock) 15 months ago. There are so many great bands/artists that I have been exposed to through them like Belle and Sebastian, Spoon, The National, The Hold Steady, Sigur Ros, Elbow, Josh Ritter, Elliott Smith, Conjure One, Explosions in the Sky, Of Montreal, Brett Dennon and so much more. Their albums cost around $3 give or take via a monthly subscription model. I always have new music every month. :D

What I like about emusic.com is that most of their stuff is encoded at at least 192 VBR using Lame. Everything you download you OWN. You can redownload your music anytime to any computer as long as you are a member and those songs still exist in emusic.com's library via your download history.

Bottom line, get new music somewhere!!!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

A little hard to do as i have 2000+ songs in my iphone. I would altough turn off the music and start listining to music through pandra or open up simplified media where I have a repository of 90,000+ songs...
 
Michael CM1 said:
For those who will suggest Pandora or something similar, I have an EDGE iPhone. Not the most reliable connection for such an app, plus the building I work in seems to suck the life out of cell signals.
Click to expand...

moka said:
I would turn off the music and start listining to music through pandra.
Click to expand...

:D


What I would suggest doing is to split your library up into 5 or 6 playlists of about 4-5 GBs and sync your phone with a different playlist every few days.
 
moka said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

A little hard to do as i have 2000+ songs in my iphone. I would altough turn off the music and start listining to music through pandra...
Click to expand...


Michael CM1 said:
For those who will suggest Pandora or something similar, I have an EDGE iPhone. Not the most reliable connection for such an app, plus the building I work in seems to suck the life out of cell signals.
Click to expand...



Nice

(EDIT) Echo? OllyW beat me to it
 
Like another poster I am a member of emusic.com, so I get new music from here monthly plus I also buy from iTunes

I then have 4 playlists that i transfer to the iPhone, this is based on the 16gig model

10 gig, my top artists that can listen to anytime
1 gig, based upon recently added
1 gig, not listened to in the last 12 months
1 gig, recently played

This always gives me plenty to listen to
 
Michael CM1 said:
This whole 8GB limit (really 7.2) has been dragging on me for a few weeks, maybe months. I swore myself off buying another iPhone until it hit 32GB at minimum because my previous iPod was the 30GB. I keep trying to shuffle playlists around, but I can never seem to find more than 20 or so tracks that I'm in the mood for.
Click to expand...

Check out Jamendo.com, pretty good for Indie stuff and a lot to choose from, might be a change from some of the main stream tunes. Hope this stops the boredom :D
 
Download Slacker Radio or Pandora and listen to music through that. What i always do when im sick of my music.

And if your sick fo your music, delete it and get some more new fresh stuff.
 
Michael CM1 said:
This whole 8GB limit (really 7.2) has been dragging on me for a few weeks, maybe months. I swore myself off buying another iPhone until it hit 32GB at minimum because my previous iPod was the 30GB. I keep trying to shuffle playlists around, but I can never seem to find more than 20 or so tracks that I'm in the mood for. Sometimes it's a little Carlin, at others I want some good scores/soundtracks. Then maybe I want straight-up gangsta, but a few hours later I want something like Fall Out Boy. Then of course comes the inner manly feminine side with Kelly Clarkson, but it's VERY manly.

So what do you peeps do? I have deleted all videos, podcasts, and photos from my iPhone to max out the storage. I have just over 6GB to play with yet a 20GB (and ever-growing) iTunes music library.

For those who will suggest Pandora or something similar, I have an EDGE iPhone. Not the most reliable connection for such an app, plus the building I work in seems to suck the life out of cell signals.
Click to expand...

I feel you're approaching it the wrong way. I have over 60GB of music but obviously that won't all fit on my iPhone. But then, there is no way I will listen to more than 2GB of music in one day, right?

So I sync every night, and get new music on my iPhone almost daily. There is no need for me (or anyone really) to keep their entire collection of music on their portable device, that would defeat the purpose.

Set up some playlists and generate random listings, some of the scripts for iTunes that Doug makes are awesome.

I can't see the point of lugging around every bit of my home furniture with me to just go to the beach if I only need clothing, towels for that day, and those items fit in my car. (that's an analogy if anyone misses that one)
 
paulsalter said:
Like another poster I am a member of emusic.com, so I get new music from here monthly plus I also buy from iTunes

I then have 4 playlists that i transfer to the iPhone, this is based on the 16gig model

10 gig, my top artists that can listen to anytime
1 gig, based upon recently added
1 gig, not listened to in the last 12 months
1 gig, recently played

This always gives me plenty to listen to
Click to expand...

Thats the way to go. I have a combination of smart playlists, and I take a moment to rate songs I like or am getting board of. I can't remember exactly what my playlists are but its something like:

150 tunes rated 3 or above, randomly selected
100 unrated tunes, randomly selected
25 most recently added
plus a manually selected playlist of tunes that never get old
 
I have a playlist of about 800 songs by my favourite artists that always stay on my iPhone. That covers most bases. Then I also sync a bunch of smart and dumb playlists: most played, top rated, recently added, etc.

There's enough space on the iPhone to have a little bit of everything... so you can have your Fall Out Boy, your Kelly Clarkson, and you rap...
 
memesmith said:
Thats the way to go. I have a combination of smart playlists, and I take a moment to rate songs I like or am getting board of. I can't remember exactly what my playlists are but its something like:

150 tunes rated 3 or above, randomly selected
100 unrated tunes, randomly selected
25 most recently added
plus a manually selected playlist of tunes that never get old
Click to expand...

Yep, the way to go. I do one other thing to get a fresh set of random songs. I was frustrated that once I created a smart playlist of X random songs it never changed. So I updated it to NOT include anything played in the last week. This refreshes what I've heard. I keep other playlists for new music, top rated, never heard, etc as well.
 
I have a series of playlists that hold favourite songs (top rated) for genre and a few playlists for rated songs by artist but mainly i listen to more podcasts than songs
 
as people are saying, it's all about the smart playlists. learn em and love em. a few highlights of my playlist selection are:

200ish 4-5 star songs selected by longest ago date that it was last played, then ordered by something like title or track number to random it up a bit

separate lists for 4-5 star songs from each genre i have set up (i manually set all the genres on music i add rather than using whatever itunes defaults to so i have about 10 genres instead of 50)

100 most recently added songs

100 most recently added 4-5 star songs

100 most played, unrated songs ordered by most played to help me get stuff rated.

50 most played, unrated songs from a manual playlist of bands i know i like so i can get them rated quicker

a manual playlist that i fill with all songs by artists who i've got tickets to see live in the future so i can get em in my head ready to rock

a manual playlist of all van halen's albums because, well... just beacause :)

there is soooooooo much you can do with smart playlists, i can't recommend em enough.
 
First of all... Pandora sucks (the quality sounds like garbage)... and when I listen to Pandora, 9 times out of 10 I'm hearing the same songs I already have, but in really low quality.

Second: I invested in a 120GB iPod classic to carry the obscure stuff with me in case I get "Music bordom" and I can listen to something different that maybe I don't listen to all that much.

Third: I have a 16GB iPhone. 16GB provides almost all of my *favorite* music... such as favorite artists/albums/songs that I know I won't skip over if they come on in Shuffle mode. I mainly listen to Shuffle, but from time to time, I'll come to a song I really like and I'll double-tap the album cover and listen to the whole album.

That's how I feel about my music.
 
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