In recent weeks I've found my listening habits growing stagnant as my artist and label discographies are slowly exhausted. The challenge for users with large media libraries is the task of finding yet-unexplored territories and developing strategies to facilitate the charting of those new waters.
One of the caveats of my otherwise-stellar media server software is that there is no way to browse by genre. I realized this evening that queuing a chronology of albums from a given genre would be a wonderful way to explore new sounds within my library so I went to work straight away and by nightfall the project was a success.
A few initial discoveries - classics of soul jazz
Using the genre text cloud feature in gmusicbrowser I constructed .m3u playlists of several intriguing but unfamiliar genres within my collection. Each list contained 10,000 to 17,000 of the tracks best-representative of the genre based upon RYM data and discographic libraries from the genre's most prominent artists and composers.
I ended up splitting the Jazz list into two subsets - early jazz recordings from 1924-1958 and modern jazz recordings from 1959-1979. This will help make the listening experience more uniform and will be an easier load on my mobile devices when spooling the lists.
With the task completed, I'm now ready to queue up thousands of hours of quality content from an array of genres I'd only explored superficially when I first acquired the recordings. I'm looking forward to new discoveries and to the wonderful soundtrack it will provide for my days at the office!
The first batch of playlists are as follows:
- Hot on the One - A Funk Odyssey
- Ambient Worlds
- Anatomy of a Murder: Film Noir Soundtracks
- Beatless Space - Pure Drone
- Beautiful Noise - 90s Dream Pop
- Friday Nights - Intelligent Drum & Bass
- 30 Years of Music from the Hearts of Space
- Ninja Tune - The First 150 Albums
- Psybient Dreams
- Cinematic Soundscapes - Music for Films
- The Chill Out Room - Downtempo Classics
- The Imaginarium - Early Gypsy Jazz
- The World of Jazz (1924-1958)
- The World of Jazz (1959-1979)
Time to start listening!