Music Meme Answers

Here are the answers from last week’s meme post, and the Excel spreadsheet you’ve all been waiting for. First, the songs:

1. Kevin Gilbert, “When You Give Your Love To Me”
2. Jethro Tull, “Ears of Tin”
3. Gorillaz, “Feel Good Inc.”
4. Midnight Oil, “Antarctica”
5. Peter Gabriel, “More Than This”
6. Metallica, “The Memory Remains”
7. Jethro Tull, “Mayhem Maybe”
8. Folk Implosion, “Merry-Go-Down”
9. Led Zeppelin, “Custard Pie”
10. Queensryche, “Real World”
11. Toy Matinee, “We Always Come Home”
12. Bankstatement, “The Border”
13. VAST, “Flames”
14. Genesis, “Heathaze”
15. Depeche Mode, “Halo”
16. Genesis, “The Dividing Line”
17. Midnight Oil, “What Goes On”
18. Smashing Pumpkins, “The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning”
19. BT, “Satellite”
20. Midnight Oil, “Progress”
21. VAST, “Touched”
22. Robert Plant, “Watching You”
23. Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Break This Rhythm”
24. Midnight Oil, “Put Down That Weapon”
25. VAST, “Land Of Shame”
26. Filter, “Take A Picture”
27. Peter Gabriel, “Games Without Frontiers”
28. Phil Collins, “Long Long Way To Go”
29. Jethro Tull, “Lick Your Fingers Clean”
30. Crime & The City Solution, “The Adversary”
31. Robert Plant, “Why”
32. Tin Machine, “Prisoner Of Love”
33. The Space Brothers, “I Still Love You”
34. Toy Matinee, “Last Plane Out”
35. Bjork, “Army Of Me”
36. Midnight Oil, “Return To Sender”
37. Toy Matinee, “Queen Of Misery”
38. Midnight Oil, “Lucky Country”
39. Yes, “Leave It” (It was the a cappella version, if you must know.)
40. Filter, “The Best Things”

So. You’ll notice a lot of Oils tracks, twice as many as there are for VAST, Tull, PG or Toy Matinee. It’s true that I have more of their songs in the “Jukebox” than anyone else, but only by a few tracks. VAST has almost as many songs but half the representation in this “random” playlist. Meanwhile, artists like the Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran are left completely out of the mix. What went wrong?

Right, randomization: I went into it wanting not to fudge things but knowing the a simple “shuffle play” might not work too well knowing Winamp. I chose, then, to load up the media library fresh with the contents of “Jukebox,” and then used the Sort feature to randomize, three times. At that point I started down the list from 1 to… well, more than 40, because of the instrumentals and foreign-language cuts that showed up. Had I filtered those out to start with, would the distribution have worked better? I don’t know. Perhaps, as folks have tried to explain to my feeble brain over the years, “random” is just that, and shouldn’t be counted on to provide a moderately even distribution.

It’d be nice if there was a decent artist-separation plugin for Winamp, by the way. Also? I need to add more songs to my “Jukebox” library. It’s not quite to 4 gigabytes of music yet, after all, so why not fill the Insignia Pilot to capacity…?

If you’re curious enough, I’ve uploaded the Excel spreadsheet that I cobbled together so I could understand the numbers a bit better. Try not to have too much fun at my expense…