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Dilly's Albums

In the interest of generating more content for my blog, I’ve decided to start doing random album reviews pulled from my iTunes library.  This series of entries will simply be called Dilly’s Albums and will cycle through my vast collection of tunes.

I’m a big music nerd and this is the best way for me to dust off some of those old albums in my collection and also continue to keep dilly.ca fresh.  I’ve got a few friends that follow this pattern in their blog and it works quite well, so I’m totally going to steal the idea!

The run-down on the process is as follows:

  1. I’ve installed the Play Random Album 2.0 script in my iTunes directory.  (By the way, be sure to check out Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes for many many more handy iTunes scripts)
  2. Every few weeks I’ll fire up this script to grab a random album from my iTunes directory.  No skipping!
  3. Listen to the full album, hopefully in one sitting.  At most, the album must be listened to in two sittings.  This will likely be stretched for multi-disc albums.
  4. Whip up a review and post it here!

For consistency each review will have the following format:

  • Name - The album name.
  • Release - The year the album was released.
  • Wikipedia - The synopsis of the album, copied from it’s Wikipedia article.
  • Discovery - How I happened to come across this particular album.
  • Ranking - How the album ranks in comparisons to the Artist’s other albums.
  • Rating - My rating on a scale of five (more on this below).
  • Favorites - A few of my favorite tracks from the albume
  • And then of course, the actual review.

Once the review is complete each album will receive a personal rating.  The rating scale is as follows:

  • Five Stars - This album is golden and should be purchased/downloaded immediately!
  • Four Stars - Solid album that can easily be listened to more than once.  Might have a few tracks that aren’t the greatest, but all in all a good offering.
  • Three Stars - Average album that likely has some flaws that keep it out of my regular rotation.
  • Two Stars - A few good tracks but mostly unintersting or crappy material.  On the cusp of being removed from iTunes.
  • One Star - Garbage the Cat.  Any album that receives a one star review will promptly be removed from my library!

I’m hoping to tackle an album every two weeks, and with about 30GB of music in my collection right now I don’t expect to run out of material anytime soon.  Of course I’d welcome suggestions on how to improve this review system, so feel free to let me know.

So stay tuned and be sure to check out my next post for the first review in Dilly’s Albums!

Dylan