Sunday, October 9, 2011

You will never love me

I have had an iTunes library for about ten years. I had a G3 back in the day (Flower Power -- I kid you not, but we're not going there today.) iTunes was a different animal then -- you had pretty limited disc space and you had to type in all the track information (which is why I have songs like "You don't brinh me flowerd" on my ipod.) Do you remember the crazy graphics that came up when you played a song on iTunes? It was a simpler time.

Every time I transfer my library, it clears the playlist. I'm also not sure if it counts the plays on my ipods, but whatever the case, I have a lot of songs that have had zero plays on this computer. So, today, I am on shuffle and only listening to the songs that I haven't listened to, according to the computer. I have my list sorted by number of plays and I feel weirdly happy every time I "promote" one of these songs to the "1+" part of the playlist.

The truth is that I *have* listened to most of these songs. However, when I got this computer, everything was reset to zero. I'm also not sure how the count is affected by the ipods that get plugged into the system. (Yes, ipods. There are four that share this system. This modern world is complicated.) If the plays on the ipods are counting, I am assuming anything with zero plays, I haven't listened to in a year and a half. It surprises me what's on that list. Right now Sam and Dave are crooning "When Something is Wrong with my Baby" and I find it hard to believe that it's been so long since I've listened to this. This is unacceptable behavior.

I have over 9000 songs in my library. A lot of these zero songs are from free downloads, so I excuse myself from those. Others are songs I used to listen to more often, so I figure they had their day in the sun. I'm sure I'll rediscover them again, and overplay them. I justify it all and say that maybe those zero plays are at zero for a reason. But then I hear Jill Sobule sadly sing, "You will never love me," and I know I have to keep listening to those songs I sometimes forget.