General Unclassifiable

It's been a while since I've written about my digital music system, but it still gets comments from guests who come over to the house and haven't seen anything like it before. The music is stored on my computer, which talks wirelessly to a little server that plugs into my receiver. I control the music by a somewhat cumbersome remote control with a menu that lets me sort through the library by artist, album, or genre. It works pretty reliably, with only the occasional restart required.

The system doesn't have a "shuffle" function but does have what it calls "Smart Playlists," which are automatically generated song lists based on certain attributes. For example, songs recently added, or songs most frequently played. There's a "smart playlist" for songs rarely played, which we call "Least Favorite Songs" and which seems to approximate the shuffle function, bringing up all sorts of random songs from albums we'd forgotten we own. Mostly, when I don't want to hear anything in particular, I opt for the Least Favorite Songs playlist function.

Today I explored the Genre function, and discovered that it seems to have infinite potential. I'd ignored it because I thought it would be nothing more than five to ten categories, like "Rock", "Classical," "Country," "Jazz," etc. Clearly a failure of my imagination. Consider the first few genre choices: , Acoustic Blues, African, Alt-Folk, Alternative, Alternative Country, Art Rock, Baroque, Bluegrass, Blues Rock, Bop, Brit Pop, Caribbean, Chamber Music..... Fiddle Learning? Foreign Rap? These genres are somehow generated by the music system. When you upload a CD it recognizes it, and automatically enters all the identifying information about album and song titles and artist, and, apparently, genre. I don't know what "Bop" is, or "Caribbean," or "Art Rock" so this makes for a kind of fun way to choose music. I am currently listening to the genre "General Unclassifiable." It turns out to be these guys. I should have known.