Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

at some point later today, i will have finally finished playing through my entire iTunes library once, with no repeats. this was an exercise partly to give me a continuously varied soundtrack while i work, and partly as a means of discovering the music i already own, but never gets played.

to do so, i’ve set up a “playcount zero” smart playlist thusly:

• play count is 0.
• no audio books or podcasts.
• no Christmas music. (i have a late November-December 26 playlist just for those)
• live updating (so, once a song is played, it’s removed from the list)

then i reset the playcounts on all my music to zero.

i’ve been listening to this playlist continuously while i work for the last several months now, watching it dwindle from 57 days down to a few hours. i’ve discovered quite a few things along the way.

• i have a lot of duplicates, unlabeled or mislabeled tracks. i’ve been weeding out most of those as they come up.
• my wife’s music collection, which i added into mine when we moved in together, isn’t too different from my own. with the exception of all the a capella she has in there.
• there’s a lot of crap in there that neither i nor my wife will claim. seriously, Ashlee Simpson? where the hell did i get that from?
• a lot of tracks have several minutes’ silence in the middle, followed by a “hidden” track at the end. very annoying. anybody have a suggestion of how to separate those tracks automatically?