Incidentally, I the motivation for this post was that I rented Stop Making Sense on Blu-ray this weekend — it is a great, great movie on DVD or Blu-ray.  In fact, it was the first DVD that I ever bought.

To make my collection useful I make heavy use of the library management tools built into iTunes, primarily Smart Playlists.  My basic goal is to separate stuff that I listen to regularly (my music), from stuff that I might listen to rarely or not at all (everything else).  Here are the basics of my methodology:

1. Encode everything! Don’t waste your time trying to edit your collection as you encode your CDs.  Hard drive space is cheap, and it is much easier to filter a track out of your library than to go back and encode it later should you want to.
2. Take the time to organize, rate, and categorize everything.  It takes time, but you don’t have to do it all at once.  I keep a couple of Smart Playlists with tracks that have not been rated or categorized into genres.  I also have some manual playlists with stuff that needs my attention (such as duplicates).  I find it useful to keep the album artwork up to date too (more on that later).
3. I have two playlists of music that I want to exclude from my music library.  There is manual playlist (Manual Exclude) that contains stuff like my wife’s music (most of it, anyway), my kids’ music, spoken word content and so on.  There is also a Smart Playlist (Exclude) that includes the Manual Exclude playlist, plus a few categories that I don’t want to bother with: video, podcasts, tracks with fewer than three stars and so on.
4. My Music is a Smart Playlist that includes everything that is not in my Exclude playlist.
5. Most of my other “core” playlists are Smart Playlists built on My Music (the first condition in the Smart Playlist is “playlist is My Music”):  Most Played, Least Played, Not Recently Played, Top Rated, Favorites (Most Played + Top Rated), and so on.  I then build smaller playlists from these core lists.
6. The only time I really use manual playlists (other than in my initial setup) is when I create an On The Go playlists from some tracks or albums that may be on my mind as I’m listening my iPod.
7. I sync everything over to my primary iPod (classic), and stick with my  core playlists and their derivatives, unless I’m just in the mood for a particular album, artist or genre.  For the Shuffle (treadmill or lawn work), I just take a sample of one my core playlists.
8. Multiple Libraries:  iTunes supports multiple libraries and I make use of them.  I have a second library that I maintain for my wife.  She has her own playlists, play counts, ratings and so on.
9. Finally, this may sound a little silly, but I also make use of the album artwork screen saver on my computer.  You would be surprised how often I see something pop up on the screen that just happens to strike my fancy that day.  It is a good way to uncover stuff that might get lost or neglected in a large library.

I hope someone finds this useful.  Let me know if you have any other tips.

If you haven’t had you hands on a Kindle, let me just say that the display is jaw-dropping.  When I showed it around many of my friends and colleagues could hardly believe they were looking at an electronic display.  The text and images are crystal clear.  This makes reading with the Kindle very easy on the eyes — no eyestrain or headaches like you might have with reading a lot of text on backlit LCD devices (I’m looking in your direction, iPhone).  The larger form-factor of the DX is also nice — the smaller Kindle is a little dinky in my opinion.

Another minor flaw is the noticeable 1/8 second hiccup as you turn the page in a document.  This is a little distracting, especially if you have your hands  on a real page-turner (like Dylan’s book, by the way).  Again, this is something that seems like it could be improved in future releases.

I also should also point out that the native PDF support is hit-or-miss.  Since PDF is a page layout standard, the Kindle does not give you any way to reformat the document (font size, paging and so on).  So  some PDFs look great, and others are completely unreadable.  This is disappointing because I envisioned myself downloading a lot of technical documentation which is freely available in PDF.  Some of those sources look fine, but it depends on how the original document is formatted.  However, my primary intention with PDF is to convert plain text documents  (such as Gutenberg texts) into PDF .  This works just fine and gives me a virtually unlimited source of free literature.

So the Kindle is great for most books, but I cannot say the same for newspapers.  Again the problem is in how I am used to reading the paper:  I scan, find an article,  read it, scan some more, skim an article, read part of an article, abandon an uninteresting article, scan and skim some more, and so on.  The Kindle just doesn’t support this style of reading.  I suppose I need to keep at it.  I have about a year’s worth of free 2-week trial subscriptions to get accustomed to it.

iMow: The Shuffle came up with another good mix of mowing tunes:

• “Kaitie’s Been Gone”; The Band
• “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Roll Over Beethoven”; The Beatles
• “Masters of War”; Bob Dylan
• “Young Americans”; David Bowie
• “This Year’s Girl”, Elvis Costello
• “Lost Highway”; Hank Williams
• “What Do You Do/The Glory of Love”; Lyle Lovett and His Large Band
• “Sunny Side of the Mountain”; The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
• “Private Joy”; Prince
• “Enlightenment”; Van Morrison
• “The Kids Are Alright”, The Who

iDrink:  Stovepipe Porter, Otter Creek Brewing

iMac:  I retired my old Dell this week and replaced it with an iMac.

OpenDNS is free and using it is as simple as changing the DNS settings in your computer or your router to use the OpenDNS servers.  They make their money from displaying ads and a search page for failed lookups.  If you sign up for an OpenDNS account and register your IP address, you can take advantage of some extra features such as usage stats and content blocking.

“How can you possibly get all of your music on an iPod that size?”, I asked.

“I don’t rip the CDs that I never listen to, and I don’t rip all of the songs on every CD.”

As he explained further, I began to realize that he basically used his iPod to listen to music in just about the same way that he did before he had an iPod — it was just a different medium for listening to music: he saw it as a replacement for the CD, just as the CD had replaced tape and just as tape had replaced vinyl.

That inspired me to begin to think about how dramatically the iPod and digital music has changed how I enjoy my music collection.  First let’s return to my buddy’s process of culling his music library prior to ripping his CDs.  Had I done that, I would never have rediscovered tons of great music from more than two decades of collecting CDs.  The most outstanding example is Anthology, the greatest hits of Sly & the Family Stone.  I probably hadn’t popped that CD into my player in more than 10 years.  But one day ‘Everyday People’ just happened to show up during a random song shuffle on my iPod, and now Sly shows up just about every week in my play lists.  That just wouldn’t have happened without the iPod.

The iPod has also made it easier for me to sample and buy new music.  For example, the music recommendation engines used by the digital music stores have led me to some terrific music.  As a fan of Elvis Costello and Lyle Lovett, iTunes and Amazon began to recommend the music of John Hiatt.  I downloaded a few songs by Hiatt and quickly got hooked on his stuff.  Again, this is not really possible with traditional music stores.  To a lesser extent I have also pulled into some of my wife’s music into my regular rotation — I probably never would have grabbed one of her CDs, but it was not a big deal to bring in a few Aimee Mann or Annie Lennox tracks into my play lists.

I could go on and on, but I’ll finish up with how the iPod has opened up the world non-musical audio.  I listen to a lot of podcasts — news and tech mostly.  Podcasts, obviously, would not be feasible without the marriage of broadband Internet, RSS, and portable digital audio players.  I also have begun listening to a lot of old time radio on my iPod.  I’m sure that Jack Benny had no idea back in the 1930′s that I would be able to store three decades worth of his programs on a gadget the size of a deck of cards (with room to spare).

So if you are using your iPod the same way that you used the 8-track player in your old Pinto, you’re really missing out.

With much of the EMI and Universal catalogs available, the selection of music is excellent. I bought Sinatra’s classic In the Wee Small Hours (1954) for $8.99 (also available at $0.89 per track). Frank never sounded better — this is the 1998 remastered version, and the MP3s are encoded at 256 VBR.

Is this an iTunes killer? Too soon to say, but this is an awfully impressive debut — the price is better than iTunes and the quality is superb. I still prefer CDs, but if I am in the mood for a quick impulse buy, I now have two viable alternatives.

We are keeping AT&T for our two wireless phones (upgrading to the RAZR), so the numbers will be the same. However, we will be getting a new home number this week.  I will email the new number to our friends and family as soon as it is active.