David’s at work on The Age of Shuffle, a show on the way the iPod has shuffled us, and how we expect to listen — and watch — in the future.
From you we’re asking: what can you shuffle out of your own iPod, and what does it say about you? We’d like you to record a shuffle — thirty seconds’ worth — and give it to us to dissect, on the show. Here’s how this works:
Record a Shuffle for Us to Play on Open Source
- Set your iPod (or any mp3 player) to “shuffle.”
- Record thirty seconds of you shuffling through your song library. This must be a true shuffle; no fair setting up a playlist with Miles Davis and your favorite Yugoslavian brass and Bedrich Smetana and then pretending it’s just an accidental stroll through your library. Jump as often as you like to the next song (no fair skipping, either); we should hear just enough of each song to recognize it.
- Send your recording, as an mp3, to everyone radioopensource org. Include a paragraph or so about yourself, your shuffle, and what you think it reveals about you.
- We’ll be playing two of these shuffles on Open Source during the show The Age of Shuffle.
Please email us your mp3s by noon on Monday, January 29.
It’ll look like this, only without the arrows on stickies. [Brendan Greeley]
Some tips on recording from an iPod to your computer:
- Download and install Audacity, a free, open-source, well-designed audio editor and recorder. Jeff Towne of transom.org has written a great tutorial on recording and editing with Audacity.
- You’ll need a “mini-to-mini” cord to get the sound from your iPod into your computer. (See the picture, above.) Make sure you run it into the audio in/out jack and not to the headphone jack.
Oh boy. This might get scary!
Sadly, I must recuse myself from this exercise as I do not have access to an iPod…bummer. I’ll have to shuffle using old paradigms.
…or course, a parrot an iPod is an extremely dangerous scenario! I’m looking forward to how others shuffle.
1. Galway Girl – Steve Earl – Sharon Shannon’s Diamond Mountain Sessions
2. I Walk The Line – Joaquin Phoenix – Walk the Line Soundtrack
3. Ring of Fire – Joaquin Phoenix – Walk the Line Soundtrack
4. Fearless Heart – Steve Earl – Ain’t Never Satisfied
5. Wayfaring Stranger – Eva Cassidy – Songbird
6. The Cuckold – Master & Commander Soundtrack
7. Hallelujah – K.D. Lang – 46th Parallel
Dang! I really tried – maybe it’s an easy for somebody whose ever seen digital sound recorded before but I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe I’ll try again later because I sure would love to make a little musical montage for you all. In the spirit of the experiment I just put my iPod on shuffle and wrote down the first 6 songs… well OK 7. I love that K.D. Lang version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah so when it came up next I just had to tack it on. And just so you know what you are missing now it’s Red Elvis’s, Rocket Man. But, back to my initial random selection: it doesn’t seem very well shuffled with 2 Steve Earl songs and 2 Johnny Cash songs not sung by Johnny Cash right in a row. Joaquin Phoenix played Johnny Cash in the movie, Walk the Line, and performed JC’s music; hope that doesn’t seem too sacrilegious to any purists but I really like the covers. Three of my first 6 are from soundtracks so I guess it says I like movies and am a kind of Celtic folky… ah, but now it’s playing No Hay Problema by Pink Martini.
Whoops, That should read…
7. Hallelujah – K.D. Lang – 49th Parallel
The 49th Parallel refers to the fact that this album is by Canadian Artists
About ten years ago, I started a Christmas tradition amongst my set of music geek friends to have a Secret Santa Christmas mixtape party. The rules were pretty simple. Show up with a mixtape, throw it in a bag, get a ticket. At midnight, your ticket allows you to pull someone’s random mixtape from the bag.
Over the years, tapes were replaced with mix CDs, and some of the more enterprising have also brought in zip discs and hard drives encoded with MP3s. You’d also see a fair number of ‘high concept’ mix packages, with more time spent on crafting sleeve covers and cases than on the assembly of the music itself.
But, all throughout, it was and still is, a fascinating annual reflection of whatever year’s zeitgeist passes through my social circle — mostly because it _is_ curated, and there is some effort to shape or mold the listening experience. The problem that I have with this effort of trying to maintain the primacy of the randomness is that it’s not at all reflective of how I really listen to my music collection. I skip stuff all the time. I have my own playlists for specific moods, and I randomize their contents because I still want to be pleasantly surprised, but I don’t trust fate enough to keep me entertained. There still needs to be a moderating hand.