My wife just asked me if I was thinking of another woman.
Huh?
Seems I was playing “She’s always a woman to me” by Billy Joel for the third or fourth time in a row on the stereo, and she was looking for a meaning to it. Actually, I was testing my new Airport Express that I’d connected to the living room stereo and using my iTunes to send the music stream to it. Each time I tested, I just clicked on one of the first tracks in my list, and that happened to be just that track.
How is that list sorted? Well, it turns out it’s sorted on “Last Played” date and time. There’s also a column with “Play Count”. I very rarely play tracks on my iTunes, preferring to use the iPod, but those counts are updated from the iPod to the iTunes every time I connect the two.
So, where am I going with all this? The music we play, especially if we have large and diverse collections, are often a reflection of the mood we’re in. Since everything we play is registered, that means our mood is registered in a fairly direct way.
From my play counts and dates, it would be very easy to see if I’ve been doing excercise, since I use particular tracks for that with a good rhythm (Country & Western, Nathalie Imbruglia, Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton’s rock numbers), or been programming (psychedelic & trance). If I’m down, the selection is different, etc. (If you would have an affair with another woman, I doubt you would have the iPod on, but that’s beside the point.) Now all this gets registered.
PS: my wife just asked “are you?”, so it’s time to stop now.