When I worked in the music industry, my boss had every release across every format – 7″ & 12″ singles, 7″, 10″ & 12″ EPs, LPs, cassettes, CDs, cassingles, minidiscs, didImissany? – to come out in Australia between 1969 and 1995, and since that was the year I was working for him, I’m guessing he has since accumulated plenty more.  With everything filed away in a special room around the size of most people’s houses, carefully archived and everything easily found, all that was missing was a robot to fetch the desired item.  To describe him as anally retentive about who could enter that room would be vastly understating the facts.

I’m also a little anal retentive about my iTunes collection.  The one that requires its own external HDD to manage so that our resource heavy software like Final Cut and CS4 don’t get tooooo upset.  The one that sees me allocate songs to their correct source albums or singles (including tracking down accompanying artwork), even if I’ve acquired the tracks via compilation.  The one that I make sure sorts correctly by manually updating any ‘auto’ sort-field ‘errors’.  Ok, so I’m a lot anal-retentive about this.

Over at Christy’s blog, she was doing a meme thingamy, and since one of my songs was in her list (!), I thought I’d do the same meme thingamy here, not realising one of my songs would also appear in my own list…

I’ve also put some extra explanation stuff in there, because some of the categorisations are a little too constricting for me.  And I’m awesome so I can do that sort of thing.

Here we go!

iTunes Statistical Randomness

Number of Songs = 19,683
Number of Albums = 4,699
Most Recently Played Song = His Glory Appears – Hillsong Live : Faith + Hope + Love
Most Played Song = um…Your Clothes – David Goodwin; 32 plays. When I recorded this, I listened to it on my iPod all the time to check every detail. And I like it too. So there.
Most Recently Added Album = Hillsong Live : Faith + Hope + Love
First Song Alphabetically = A-Punk – Vampire Weekend
Last Song Alphabetically = Zulu Khayalami – Imbizo
Smallest Song Numerically = 0.000890569 – Aphex Twin
Largest Song Numerically = 6161 – Max Tundra
Shortest Song = Suite Outro – En Vogue, 4 seconds.   I’ve got over 200 tracks under 1 minute long, so I’ve taken this as shortest track rather than song…
Longest Song = Ascension, Edition II – John Coltrane, 40 min 41 sec.  Free-style jazz FTW!
First Album Alphabetically = A.O. Mod. TV. Vers – V.Spy V.Spy
Last Album Alphabetically = Zooropa – U2
Smallest Album Numerically = #1 Record – Big Star
Largest Album Numerically = 90125 – Yes
First 5 Songs That Come Up In Shuffle =
…You’re Not The Kind – Sarah Vaughan
…Amazing – George Michael
…You’re Just Too Hip, Baby – Dave Graney ‘n’ the Coral Snakes
…Central Reservation (Ben Watt Remix) – Beth Orton
…Fly Too High – Janis Ian

I was kinda embarrassed that in 5 songs, there’s nothing that reflects my proclaimed passion for worship music. Then I did the stats. I’ve got nearly 20,000 tracks, and around 2,500 of them can be classified as Christian (mainly overtly Christian). So 1 track in 8 should be Christian. Meaning there’s still 3 more tracks I have to redeem myself. Phew.

There’s not much electronica in that shuffle either (the Beth Orton remix barely qualifies) … and according to the stats 1 in 7 should be electronica.  So we’re OK.  Just.

Other Semi-Interesting Tid-Bits

Albums Titles Which Are Neither Alphabetical or Numerical = ( ) – Sigur Ros
Song Titles Which Are (Kinda) Neither Alphabetical or Numerical = Þversögn – Sigur Ros, and also ” µ-Ziq Theme ” – µ-Ziq