as you may recall, I listen to music on vinyl during my workday, and I track my listening with a spreadsheet. this is the data for February! (January can be seen by checking the #avril tunes '23 tag!)

an incredibly auspicious things happened this month. you may have noticed that the table I use to pick what music to listen to has 20 rows — that means I roll 2d20 to pick what to listen to. well, I obviously populated the lowest row with nothing but absolute bangers that I want to listen to all the time, so anytime I roll a 20 I'm guaranteed to listen to something great. I decided early on that if I ever rolled two 20s, I'd listen to every single banger in a row, and that happened starting with Fleetwood Mac's self-titled album on February 8 (which, I just noticed, happens to be row 69. nice)

by weird coincidence, the last entry on the bangers was Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, which was also the last thing I listened to before rolling the double 20s. so that really all worked out nicely. I then retired a bunch of the bangers; they're still on the sheet, but they appear slightly less and have been replaced by new bangers. the bangers go to row 18, so there's a few you can't see on that chart. over time, I'll probably retire individual bangers here and there when it seems appropriate, and I'll do a big reset of most of the sheet whenever I roll 2d20.

speaking of big resets of most of the sheet, after I finished with that, I did a thing I've been meaning to do for awhile now: I reduced the number of spots each album gets on the sheet by a bit and also made the sheet a little more granular by adding a secondary sheet that has about twice as many albums on it as it has slots on the main sheet. that means that I can have albums that effectively take up half a slot and albums that take up, for example, one and a half slots. this means I have a lot more space before I reach a full 400 albums on the sheet, and it also provides a nice model for creating even more granularity in the future if that proves necessary.

there's also a bundle of new albums I listened to starting on February 21 — one of those is a new album I ordered online, and a bunch of them are from a used bookstore that also dabbles in just about every other kind of art. I will continue to acquire new music!! there'll be some new music next month!!!

something I might do is have a "haven't listened to that much lately" sheet for when I want to listen to a particular album I haven't heard in awhile; that would take up a certain number of spots on the main sheet similar to how the secondary sheet works right now, and I'd populate it with, say, 3 instances each of a few albums I'd like to hear more of (and maybe more than 3 in the case of new music that I just haven't heard much period). as soon as I roll a particular cell on that sheet, I delete that entry, so I only listen to that one a set number of times.

another thing I'd like to do that theoretically shouldn't be too hard is get more info over time about stats on an artist and time level. I'd like, for example, to be able to have a portion of the spreadsheet showing how many hours I spent listening to a particular album or how many times I've listened to a particular artist. of course, I can manually figure all that out now, but it would be nice to have an automated system that sees the name of an album and pairs it with some metadata somewhere else on the spreadsheet and tabulates some stats.

anyway, that's all!!! I had a great time listening to a while bunch of music this month.


You must log in to comment.
Pinned Tags