How do you all make your music lists?

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FrankLotion
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How do you all make your music lists?

Post by FrankLotion »

Help!

I'm still really struggling to finish my All-Time songs list, I know part of that is having less time than I used to but I also figured that there are probably much more efficient ways to do it.

What do y'all use to make your lists and organize data? Do you have any particular programs you like to use or any techniques that have made it easier to put these types of lists together? Is there any method you have to actually deciding the order of songs/albums that doesn't take forever?

I'd appreciate any tips you can give! Hopefully next time around I'll be better equipped to putting these lists together rather than struggling through it all and then cursing my feeble inadequate planning. :angry-cussingblack:
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Live in Phoenix »

For songs, once I had around 1,000, I'd rank it in clumps of 100: What is sort of my top 100; ok, now rank those; ok, what is sort of my top 101-200, ok, now rank those... This method doesn't help if you're starting off with thousands of songs, which seems to be a problem with some people... I'd recommend being kind of stingy. (And this method might not help you, regardless, but it helped me a lot.)

Albums, I had to make note of my 5-star and 4-star albums. I act like I don't have 4 1/2 star albums, but there's a gray area where they show up, so that makes for 3 clumps of albums. These are easier to deal with, because I don't have thousands of albums that I love. But so, if I have a clump of about a hundred 5-star albums, I might say, which goes on top of the heap? Which goes on the bottom? After that's settled, well NOW which goes on top? Well NOW which goes on bottom? This at least creates a rough draft that can be reviewed up and down.
Last edited by Live in Phoenix on Sat Sep 25, 2021 5:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by BleuPanda »

I do something similar to Live in Phoenix, but I tend to go from the bottom up. For most of my lists, I am updating an already existing list, which is easier.

The last time I did a fresh list, I started with every song I was considering for the project and set them all at the same level. Then, I comb through the list and bump everything up a tier (I rate songs out of ten and each .1 increment is essentially a tier). I keep each tier even; everything in the 9.0 range has exactly 100 songs, 8.0-8.9 200 songs, and then the 7.0-7.9 range is simply the remaining songs that did not make my top 3000 split evenly.

So, for my first time making the list, everything was set to 7.0 and I bumped everything up simply based on the gut feeling of whether it feels like a 7.1 or higher. Once I get the exact amount of 7.0s remaining, I move on to the next tier. So, it becomes a game of what songs I feel comfortable leaving behind. I don't really begin to rank within the tiers until I hit the top 1000. At least for me, this process reduces the urge to directly compare everything, especially when I sort by artist or year - I probably went into that project with songs from each year already ranked, so it was easy to find a cutoff point where I could safely bump everything above the line up a tier.

When I update the list, I bump everything down a few tiers and then do the same process - this reduces the need to separate the previous 9.0+ songs from the much lower crop. I also like going from the bottom up because it gives more room for a new favorite to climb the ranks. On the other end, there is a lower limit of how much a song can bottom out - if I bump everything down three tiers, nothing in my previous top 1000 can fall more than ~300 spots (though I can obviously bump something more if I feel the need, but it's rare for my opinion on a song to sour that much in a single year).

To summarize, I suggest considering songs in clusters instead of trying to tackle one song at a time. Don't try to make it an exact science outside of your absolute top favorites.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Fred »

Having songs in maps: 1-100, 201-300 to 901-1000. Usually enter a song (prospect) in the 500-600 or 900-1000 maps and then I let the songs use the elevator. Then time decide what is good or not. MGMT - In The Afternoon was way up but out now. Just an example.

Latest song was Kaja Draksler Octet - Away!for the 900-1000 map. Might rise a good bit.

Thinking about adding Chico Buarque - Mambembe and maybe Frank Wright - Your Prayer.

Nowadays the 1-500 songs are divided into groups of 20. Neurotic, I know. The word-list is a close friend.

A good tip might be to skip rating songs close to each other in order. And settle for if they are in the right 100 map etc. For the first 100 or so it might be otherwise though.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by spiritualized »

I use something a bit different.

There's a website called allourideas.org

I enter my top 1000 and it proposes match-ups. It's rather long to obtain a relevant result, but not boring at all, much better than looking at a spreadsheet
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by bonnielaurel »

I start with my list of favorite artists. On a spreadsheet I select the best songs by artist, with question marks for the uncertainties. Artists higher on the start list get more songs.

Then I go through my years lists of favorite songs and albums, to select the missing artists who deserve one song in the final list, again with a question mark for the uncertainties. I can go through some other lists as well.

Classical music and instrumental jazz get a separate treatment, but they only get about twenty "songs" each.

That gives me a preselection of about 1100 songs, of which 200 with a question mark. I throw half of those out, until I have 1000 songs left.

Ranking comes in the final phase. I estimate for each song how high it will finish, and put those estimated rankings in a column. Then I put that column in "alphabetical" order. After that I can fine-tune the ranking by letting certain songs jump over others.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Nassim »

Live in Phoenix wrote: Sat Sep 25, 2021 2:34 am For songs, once I had around 1,000, I'd rank it in clumps of 100: What is sort of my top 100; ok, now rank those; ok, what is sort of my top 101-200, ok, now rank those... This method doesn't help if you're starting off with thousands of songs, which seems to be a problem with some people... I'd recommend being kind of stingy. (And this method might not help you, regardless, but it helped me a lot.)

Albums, I had to make note of my 5-star and 4-star albums. I act like I don't have 4 1/2 star albums, but there's a gray area where they show up, so that makes for 3 clumps of albums. These are easier to deal with, because I don't have thousands of albums that I love. But so, if I have a clump of about a hundred 5-star albums, I might say, which goes on top of the heap? Which goes on the bottom? After that's settled, well NOW which goes on top? Well NOW which goes on bottom? This at least creates a rough draft that can be reviewed up and down.
Yeah that's pretty much how I do it. I think it helps that I did the first over 12 years ago when I had less songs to choose from, every list since has been an update/extension of that first one.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Sweepstakes Ron »

For my all-time songs list, I used Moonbeam's album ranker program, and I plan to continue to build on it in perpetuity, after having lost the data from the 2018 version (I've backed this one up in the cloud).

For my 2020 albums list, I actually used this: https://github.com/antialiasis/favorite-picker

I may switch to something else for the next one, or use that again, but not building directly on the previous list.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Sweepstakes Ron »

spiritualized wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:56 am I use something a bit different.

There's a website called allourideas.org

I enter my top 1000 and it proposes match-ups. It's rather long to obtain a relevant result, but not boring at all, much better than looking at a spreadsheet
https://rankingengine.pubmeeple.com/

This is a similar site that I've been using for smaller tanked lists (like the Tournament of Champions) but could definitely be used for larger ones with patience.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Jirin »

I wrote a computer program where I can enter comparisons of smaller numbers of albums ranked best to worst and it compiles them together and gives me back a complete list.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by prosecutorgodot »

I made an Android app called RankList where you can very rudimentarily rank items, comparing three at a time. It's for smaller lists, because it takes a long time, and it erases data overnight (I don't know how to fix this).

Comparing three items at a time is the way I like to rank stuff. And like BleuPanda said, the most important is the top items, the bottom half doesn't matter as much, don't worry too much about these.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by andyd1010 »

I started with a sorted list of all the songs I like by play count and then just manually rearranged it from there when songs seemed out of place. I might check out one of these comparison programs for the next all-time albums list. I've done that 100% manually in the past, one by-one, and whenever I've liked a new album of just put it into the list where it feels appropriate. But then when I don't look at the list for awhile and my tastes change, I see a lot of albums that seem very out of place.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by FrankLotion »

So many great suggestions, thank you!

Unlike my albums lists I only had ranked songs when we had a relevant poll coming up (i.e. 70's, best of Prince, etc.) so I still need to figure out what even my top 100 would look like at this point, especially since I feel like my tastes have changed a lot since the last songs poll in 2018.

Speaking of which, I had a similar problem then when I got overwhelmed and just quickly threw together 250 songs before the deadline. I think as Fred implied, I definitely have the bad habit of getting really obsessive-compulsive and going into the minutiae of where individual songs should rank against each other.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Jirin »

prosecutorgodot wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:05 pm I made an Android app called RankList where you can very rudimentarily rank items, comparing three at a time. It's for smaller lists, because it takes a long time, and it erases data overnight (I don't know how to fix this).

Comparing three items at a time is the way I like to rank stuff. And like BleuPanda said, the most important is the top items, the bottom half doesn't matter as much, don't worry too much about these.
What are you using to persist data?
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Akhenaten »

I rank the songs in year groups. I find it easier comparing songs from the same year.
I also have a classical group and a Christmas group, and I lump the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s into decade groups.
I also give the songs a banding, basically a score of 5,6,7,8,9 or 10.
Then I have formula in a spreadsheet that spreads the scores out per banding per year. So, e.g. if 1960 had five songs in the 7 banding, they would be given the ratings of 7.8, 7.6, 7.4, 7.2 and 7.0.
So then every song has an individual rating that can rank the whole list of songs spanning years.
The only ones I manually rank cross-year are those in the 10 banding, but there are only about 100 of those.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Edre Depeche Head »

for albums, I use Albumoftheyear.org. They have a rating scale from 0-100 so when I need to make a list I rank them based on my ratings and it already has a sort by rating option.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by prosecutorgodot »

Jirin wrote: Mon Sep 27, 2021 3:16 pm
prosecutorgodot wrote: Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:05 pm I made an Android app called RankList where you can very rudimentarily rank items, comparing three at a time. It's for smaller lists, because it takes a long time, and it erases data overnight (I don't know how to fix this).

Comparing three items at a time is the way I like to rank stuff. And like BleuPanda said, the most important is the top items, the bottom half doesn't matter as much, don't worry too much about these.
What are you using to persist data?
I'm a complete noob to app development - I guess you mean how do I store data. I don't even really know how I'm storing it, I'm just establishing variables, that's it. There's probably a correct way of doing it that I don't know anything about.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Jirin »

If you’re just holding it in app memory it will disappear whenever the app restarts. Try integrating with SQLite which should be available with Android SDKs by default and find some basic online SQL tutorial.

My app I wrote before I knew much about SQL so I just write to a text file. That’s also an option with a lower learning curve but not nearly as robust as SQL databases.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by phil »

Akhenaten wrote: Mon Sep 27, 2021 4:09 pm I rank the songs in year groups. I find it easier comparing songs from the same year.
I did pretty much this to get to my all time songs. Only real difference was that I first joined year groups to decades, and for each decade did a semi-manual sort of top ~100, before combining each of the decades into a list. Then combined the decade lists to all time. (And before combining sets of lists of review the bands to ensure they were calibrated).
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by prosecutorgodot »

Jirin wrote: Mon Sep 27, 2021 8:20 pm If you’re just holding it in app memory it will disappear whenever the app restarts. Try integrating with SQLite which should be available with Android SDKs by default and find some basic online SQL tutorial.

My app I wrote before I knew much about SQL so I just write to a text file. That’s also an option with a lower learning curve but not nearly as robust as SQL databases.
Hmmm ok thanks.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Sweepstakes Ron »

Akhenaten wrote: Mon Sep 27, 2021 4:09 pm I rank the songs in year groups. I find it easier comparing songs from the same year.
I also have a classical group and a Christmas group, and I lump the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s into decade groups.
I also give the songs a banding, basically a score of 5,6,7,8,9 or 10.
Then I have formula in a spreadsheet that spreads the scores out per banding per year. So, e.g. if 1960 had five songs in the 7 banding, they would be given the ratings of 7.8, 7.6, 7.4, 7.2 and 7.0.
So then every song has an individual rating that can rank the whole list of songs spanning years.
The only ones I manually rank cross-year are those in the 10 banding, but there are only about 100 of those.
I'd actually really like to see this in Excel, if you wouldn't mind sharing. Or at least a template version.
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Sweepstakes Ron »

Mind if I bring this thread back now? Because I feel like I need to figure out a new way to put together an album list so I'm not up all night trying to complete it before the deadline next time... unless that's just inevitable when you have actual responsibilities and no longer have a pandemic keeping you from doing anything else?
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Re: How do you all make your music lists?

Post by Nick »

Sweepstakes Ron wrote: Sun Oct 15, 2023 4:00 am Mind if I bring this thread back now? Because I feel like I need to figure out a new way to put together an album list so I'm not up all night trying to complete it before the deadline next time... unless that's just inevitable when you have actual responsibilities and no longer have a pandemic keeping you from doing anything else?
For my recent ballot of 500 albums for the all-time list I made a preliminary list of about 600 contenders (partially sourced from my previous 500 albums ballot). I then put the list in Word and organized it in alphabetical order. Then I simply went down the list and moved each album into position one by one. So if I liked album #2 more than #1 I'd move it above #1, if I liked album #3 less than #2 but more than #1 I'd move it between the two, etc. I ended up with a list that I felt really, really worked.
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