The "PH Scale" 2.0
Sunday, May 07, 2006
I haven't made many waves in regards to music recently (aside from updating my "Recently Played Albums" quite a bit!), so I thought I'd let you know how my organisation of albums is going.
Last time I identified that six categories had grown to 10 and needed better organising: this time I've got 13 plus Comedy, Compilations and Soundtracks. I'm still trying to follow that most people's music tastes can be bunched to adjacent groupings.
The breakthrough came thanks to iTunes. You see, iTunes' song info has separate sections for Genre and Grouping. Instead of focusing on genre, I tried to group similar artists (allowing easy pillaging of my collection) and not paying too much attention to the genre that it supposedly is. This ended up being my judgment of how heavy (or perhaps you could say "listenable") and matching it with albums I got from the same person (so Jiggy's might be 4.5, Will's about a 5.5, Brodie's roughly a 10.5).
I also realised that my favourite grouping, 07 Rock Pop, is right in the middle...making it PH Neutral. Woo for chemistry.
If you want heaps more detail of the sort of albums I've got, some program I found made my Albums directory into a JPEG. musicfolders.jpg (913 KB).
Note: it's so long, you'll want to view it in your browser and make sure it's zoomed to 100% (not scaled like it is by default in Firefox - hover over the tiny dots on the left side and click when the magnifying glass comes up)
I also pre-emptively apologise for applying the term Prog so liberally.
7 comments to this post
Your use of the word 'Prog', and the artists which you have designated it to is utterly offensive! Queens of the Stone Age!!? WTF? only like 4 of the artists you have name Prog actually are.
And whats the difference between Pop Rock, and Rock Pop. I think you would be better splitting Prog Rock and Prog Metal... or even Speed Prog.
I like your segregations, Pat... and am considering using this system for my own collection.
However, I agree with Nick that pop-rock and rock-pop are too similar to warrant separate categories. Prog rock and prog metal are more deserving (and will be separated in my collection) :P
I'll explain it this way: an ideal system would take my collection and divide it into 13 evenly sized folders (approx 16 artists in each), with a grouping to keep some form of relevance.
If I was to have pop-rock and rock-pop combined, it'd be a 32+ artist folder. Conversely, a real prog folder would only have 4 artists and not be worth isolating. So view it as "it's more this genre than my other stuff".
I still consider it sacrilege
How about Queens of the Stone Age moves to Rock, and Prog is renamed "Slow Metal"?
I think my music collection is pretty diverse, and I think coming up with a PH level of 4.5 for my music seems to be based purely on what you've heard from my collection (which is fair enough). Give a spin to something by Captain Beefheart from my share next time you're at work, and you'll see an example of something from my collection where the PH is _much_ higher (almost UN-listenable in some cases ;-)
Fair enough, and my apologies. It's even harsher to categorise people than music!
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