Twenty-Four Hours: How To Use These Discs And Playlists

1) Create a place for the whole mess to live on your hard drive. I suggest creating a new directory, and calling the directory something that you like, such as "geekmp3s" or something. It shouldn't matter what you call it.

2) Copy the entire contents of CD1 into your directory.

3) Copy the entire contents of CD2 into your directory.

4) Copy the entire contents of CD3 into your directory.

5) Choose a playlist and run it using your favorite .mp3 player! enjoy!


May I make the following suggestion:
I have listened to the majority of these tracks by now, and I want to say one thing out front: This is a hackneyed, stuffed up, wonderful, bizarre collection. It is calm and crazy, staid and antic, common and rare, leaded and unleaded. It is here and there, July and January, comforting and upsetting, pageboy and Gayle... ok.
If you were to load up the entire mess and play the tracks randomly, you would find that what I say is true. This is a good thing. I recommend it highly. It's better than aliens.
I would however like to bring to your collective attentions the fact that each of us did hit our heads against the wall to one degree or another in attempting to glean, if not The Perfect Hour, at least some semblance of A Collection. We cut the marble while we cut the cheese ("It was a trumpeter swan!") in order to make A BLOCK into DAVID and come up with Our Hour. Each of us is the guest DJ for a small college-town radio station, and although slotted for three A.M. on a Tuesday morning when there would be only twenty three listeners out there, still we gave that setlist our all and thanks for calling in but with all respect we won't be taking requests this morning. Maybe next week.
This is not to say that each collection is a paragon of consistency or a homogenous, creamy blend. Indeed, I'll be so bold as to suggest that some of our individual collections exhibit all of the adjective in the first paragraph.
I mean to say that, in my opinion, it behooves the each of us to give the individual setlists their own personal spaces of listening time, at least at first pass. May I make the following suggestion, which you are of course free to ignore entirely:

1) Listen to the individuals' complete hours first: each individual's tracklist in the sequential order in which it was submitted.

2) THEN after all that, go ahead and use or create a fully random list and have at it.

You could start with Carol and run on through to Yertle (it's an alphabetical thing), or you could start with any geek and hop around. My suggestion is only that if your next Hour to listen to is Falcon, that you listen to falcon01.mp3, followed by falcon02.mp3, and then falcon03.mp3, etc.


Playlists

I've created playlists to make this easier. A playlist is a small file that serves as a simple index of Songs To Play. The playlist is readable by most players dedicated to .mp3 playback, whether that player be Winamp (for example) for your personal computer, or the firmware inside your little handheld personal music device, like a Nomad or a Rio or an iPod or even the more recent PDAs and cellular phones. These programs and devices read the playlist and play the explicit list of songs in the programmed order, and nothing else. So if I have a directory full of 350 .mp3s, and I only want to hear "I Want You To Want Me" and "In My Room" and "Like A Virgin", I could create a playlist to play these three tracks and none of the other 347.
Along these lines, I've created playlists for each of us participants. Each of these playlists contains only the tracks, in the submitted numerical order, for the participant indicated by the playlist's file name (for instance, "snozer.m3u").
So, if you want to listen to Nightfall's hour, load up the nightfall.m3u or nightfall.pls playlist.

Why two playlist file formats?

Alas, there is not one totally standard file format for playlists. I queried our local audio guru (Falcon!) about Which file format would be most widely recognizable (I was worried about unix and windows and macintosh and all the various personal music devices). He suggested the .pls format. Meanwhile, the .m3u format was the one I was used to. As an experiment, I burned a data CD with mp3s and two playlists for the mp3s: one in .m3u format and one in .pls format. I put the disc into my mp3 cd player, and it only recognized the .m3u list. 
Hedging my bets, I created two separate playlist files for every playlist on this collection: one in .m3u format, and the other in .pls format.
Use whichever works.
If none work, let me know and I can experiment with one other format that was available to me from Winamp, the product I used to create the lists.

QUESTION, MISTER POGO! Why do we need playlists for the individual geeks' hours if we already have filenames that spell this out clearly! Why label my tracks pogo01 through pogo17 only to have a playlist that indexes exactly the same logical order? what up?

Some devices and programs eschew filenames altogether and gather all the information that the program wants from the .id3 tags. Each .id3 tag (embedded in each .mp3 file) describes the track's artist and trackname, and more. But NOT the physical filename as it sits on your harddrive. Some players look only at this tag (and NOT the physical filename) when ordering and playing back songs (when no playlist is available).
This is the case, for example, with my NomadIII portable personal music device. There's no way to command the machine to play just cerise01.mp3 through cerise14.mp3, because the physical file information is not shown or even considered. What IS considered is the trackname as embedded in the .id3 tag (within the .mp3 file)
So if my NomadIII has 79 tracks on it, the default playback will be in alphanumeric order by the Trackname given in the .id3 tags. So I'll always hear "A Bitchen' Tale" followed by "A Is for Apple" followed by "Another Pint" followed by "Biznatches Are Us" followed by...
The filename format that I specified (geek01.mp3, etc) provided me with a way to readily organize and find the files as I put this demon collection together, and it also maintained a way to keep the mess spoiler-free at least at the initial level. If the filenames had shown up on our hard drives like "Tatu - My Love Is Marked.mp3" we'd have been all kinda like "dang! I really didn't want that spoiler!", I'm sure of it. 


The Discs and the Files On Them

Each Disc shall have eight (8) geeks' entries on it, including all of the .mp3 files, any submitted text files (with .txt extensions, ascii, not much formatting) and Playlist files as follows:

Two playlists (different formats) for EACH geek on that particular disc. (hoche.m3u and hoche.pls... ...pogo.m3u and pogo.pls)
Two playlist to play all tracks on THAT DISC in geek order (i.e. hoche01.mp3, hoche02.mp3... ...pogo16.mp3, pogo17.mp3) called "playlist_ordered_disc2.m3u" and "playlist_ordered_disc2.pls", etc.
And two playlists each for randomized selections of .mp3s FOR THAT DISC. These will be listed as for example "playlist_disc1_random1.m3u" and "playlist_disc1_random2.m3u".

The reason for having geeks' coherent lists and the discs' random lists on a per-disc basis is for those of us who have .mp3 CD players: we can just pop in the CDROMs as they are and still have playlists to work with.
The exception is disc1 of 3. Disc 1 will have all of the above^ plus _ordered and _randomized lists over ALL selections (playlists for all discs' worth of STUF) and in addition holds all the HTML files that make up this document. The HTML includes geek-by-geek tracklists and their selection notes, and some tables that allow you to look up a geek by the track name.
Again, just copy all three CDROMS to one hard drive directory, and it'll all be there for you. I named the webpage that you should start with with an underscore "_" so that it will appear alphanumerically early in the file folder. (_Geeks2003.html)


Example for a Personal Digital Music Device Person:

Let's say that I have an old RIO with about 128mb memory, and I want to dump a single geek's hour onto it to bring to work for the day. Just copy that user's .mp3 files (geek01.mp3...geek15.mp3) over, and also copy the two playlists for that user (the two formats), geek.m3u and geek.pls. Figure out how your device makes use of playlists (my RioVOLT finds them when I press the PROG button), and go to.

Then cross your fingers and hope to kiss a pig. As I'm doing right now. Well, as I will be doing in half sec. I can't cross fingers and type yet. ok now.

Many extra super kudos to all y'all reading this, who not only managed to get through this document, but also sweated grey matter to come up with your lists, get them encoded (very VERY nicely encoded I must say! clean stuf, y'all) and get them to me by horse or hellwind.


These discs were tested to be readable on Windows XP, FreeBSD, and some kinda Apple machine. Am still crossing fingers. ...Now!

P.S. Apologies if I changed the layout of your selection notes to your dismay.  Mostly I tried to keep flow-text all a-flowing, and paragraphs all a-paragraphing, while maintaining a consistent (simple) document style (with tables all a-tabling).

P.S. MORE  If you can't read your CD-ROMS, or can't play the MP3's or can't read the SONGLISTS, or find AUDIO GLITCHES or want to TALK ABOUT AGASSI AND THE FRENCH OPEN or anything else, ping me at smith@grok.com

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