myTunes at a glance

I'm generally not a big fan of blog memes, but The Omniscient Mussel has come up with one of the best I've seen - I've already spent much too much time generating my own iTunes typopictograph. Her idea is to export an iTunes library as a text file and then send it through the amazing Wordle. This I have done - more than once. There are obviously some odd little quirks - Britten shows up more than might be expected here because I once used an iTunes giftcard to splurge on a big Britten-conducts-Britten opera set. That's a lot of tracks that list him as composer and performer - in fact, I cheated a little and dropped a few Brittens. Otherwise, I decided to avoid cheating and just let the words fall where they may. There's a lot of music I own on CD that hasn't yet made it into iTunes, so Beethoven, for example, is a bit underrepresented. Obviously, operas, cantatas, and passions tend to feature well because they have so many tracks per minute.

I made myself stop at two. You can click on each of the images to see the results in larger size. Back to grading...



By the way, if you're interested, a quick way to avoid having to trim lots of annoying text tags is to open iTunes to the main music library window, eliminate all headings except for name/ album/ artist/ composer; then, select all the text in the window and copy it to your text editor - or right into Wordle.

[UPDATE: See the new MMmusing Wordle.]

[UPDATE 2: and another one.]

[UPDATE 3: and one more.]

[UPDATE 4: I originally used the phrase "Miss Mussel" above instead of "The Omniscient Mussel," but since at least one person seems to have assumed that Miss Mussel is MM (and thus, credited me with this meme), I wanted to clarify that it's all her fault.]