Lately, there’s been a ton of new music¹ to listen to around my abode, but it’s not such a simple matter; listening to unheard albums.

Perhaps the downfall to new album introduction is the passivity of listening. How familiar do we get after just one listen? Even with an active listen, I’d say it’s a very small imprint, and so I’ve devised some tips to deal with audible overload.

Album Selection

Grab 3-5 albums of the bunch, at random works, and plan to listen to the group throughout a single day. This is a good way to eat though mega lists. Also, it is recommended to NOT go by artists alone, just grab albums from different artists, without regard for who made it².

Play-by-Album, Play-by-Track

Use a desktop-based music application and listen to an album from the beginning, with a catch. Put the player on single-track mode (play only one song at a time) so that you have to keep going back to the player and manually click the next song…. naturally, I’m assuming multi-tasking and a passive listen.

This helps with the pacing, so that an album doesn’t woosh fly right by. It isn’t always necessary to listen through an entire album (we know what we enjoy, right?), but listen enough to be able to categorize the album.

Tag and Rename

Meta-data is nice for organization, but I have my quips with auto-tagging (specifically genre). Anyhow, it’s a good idea to manually assign genre and/or style tags to tracks. Genre is great for overall categorization (ie. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Electronic…), but style allows definition of finer attributes, such as j-rock, experimental, fusion, indie, lo-fi or larger genre if the work touches, but doesn’t quite focus on it. For example, a rock album that tends to have jazz influences could be listed as, genre:Rock style:Fusion, Jazz-influence… etc.

Using style could be an entire post itself, but the main concept is organizing while or just after listening. Listening to the music and asking, “what genre/style is this,” makes it slightly more active.

Then rename. I’m sure we all have music organization preferences, but following with the genre-style tag idea, why not use them in the name? Generally, my naming format:

<artist>/(<date>) <album>/<tracknumber>. <track>

But let’s see that with categorizing tags:

<artist>/(<date>) <album> [<genre>,<style>]/<tracknumber>. <track>

The advantage of having genre as part of the album’s folder name is simple, it’s quite difficult to remember every artist/album and their sound. More than likely, the sound will be remembered, but then finding which artist it was will take playing songs from random album folders. With genre-style properly and personally assigned, filtering possible albums becomes a simpler process.

And that about sums the method. Sure it’s heartbreaking to listen to tracks that aren’t the current addiction, but working though many albums efficiently yields a good feeling and help avoid music overload³.

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