The Classical Music Randomizer

[Beorn]

Hm. I wonder what the best way would be to listen to a different piece of classical music every night without repeats for a whole year. I suppose the I Ching or dice could be consulted and used in conjunction with a classical music reference.

Of course time is a factor as well. If the random result is a whole opera, there is no way I could listen to that (unless it's an operetta) in the amount of time I put aside each night (around an hour when possible).

Or what if the piece is shorter than an hour! Oh, my...

[Daverz]

Hm. I wonder what the best way would be to listen to a different piece of classical music every night without repeats for a whole year. I suppose the I Ching or dice could be consulted and used in conjunction with a classical music reference.

Of course time is a factor as well. If the random result is a whole opera, there is no way I could listen to that (unless it's an operetta) in the amount of time I put aside each night (around an hour when possible).

Or what if the piece is shorter than an hour! Oh, my...

If you use a music server (I use a Squeezebox Touch), you can use random play for albums.

For opera, you could tag each act as one "album", so you get at most 1 act at random.

Still it's not ideal for classical music as you'd get a whole chunk of Vivaldi concertos or whatever you have tagged as albums.  Some people tag each work as a single album, but I prefer not to do that.

EDIT: experimented a bit with this, and as each album is added to the playlist randomly, I can go in and pare down the playlist.  Not ideal, as it still requires nursing.  Usually if I just want background music, though, I'll use the 128kbps KUSC feed.

[Beorn]

Thanks, Daverz. Something to consider. Lord knows I have more than enough albums to choose from. Those plus Spotify which is endless...

[bigshot]

My iTunes library is set to random shuffle by work and it has over 70 days worth of music on it. It runs 24/7 streaming throughout my house.

[Beorn]

My iTunes library is set to random shuffle by work and it has over 70 days worth of music on it. It runs 24/7 streaming throughout my house.

Shuffle by work. Yeah, I have to learn how to do that. Sounds like a lot of tagging. 

[Beorn]

What I could do is shuffle by genre (Classical) (however you do that) and then use whatever comes up as a prompt to hear the whole work/album.

[mahler10th]

My iTunes library is set to random shuffle by work and it has over 70 days worth of music on it. It runs 24/7 streaming throughout my house.

Excellent, someone with the same sentiment - it is inconcievable these days that Classical Music is not playing at any time all the time wherever I may be in the hoose!   It is my elixir!   

[bigshot]

When I rip, I always join tracks to put all the movements together into one file. Operas I rip by the act. Then I can shuffle by "song" because each "song" is a complete work. It works great. It's only a pain when a Mahler symphony is continued on a second disk. Then I have to rip to AIFF, merge the files using Quicktime Pro and then convert to AAC. Thankfully, that is rare.