Col­lect­ing my thoughts here…

So, iron­i­cally, music is becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult for me to lis­ten to. As though wor­ry­ing about an exten­sive gaunt­let of tag­ging pro­ce­dures isn’t enough, I just have too much damn music. Brows­ing alpha­bet­i­cally through upwards of 500 artists is not the best way to go look­ing for some­thing when you have no idea what you want to hear.

I’ve audi­tioned var­i­ous meth­ods of tweak­ing foo­bar to ‘deliver’ music to me more or less auto­mat­i­cally, and I’m close to hav­ing some­thing ideal. The playlist tree com­po­nent allows for dynamic tree struc­tures (which, unfor­tu­nately, can only be rebuilt man­u­ally or every time a new song begins); using the title­for­mat­ting lan­guage, I’ve gen­er­ated five queries whose pur­pose it is to ‘coax’ cer­tain albums to starker vis­i­bil­ity from the fea­ture­less and indif­fer­ent music library, to greater or lesser success.

• Ran­dom 10: Maybe my favorite query. This chooses ten albums at ran­dom and, in a clever twist of which I’m pretty proud, appends a short descrip­tion of the album to the end of the title in the tree, using one adjec­tivial ‘tone’ tag and one nounal ‘style’ tag as taken from all­mu­sic (the hard work pays off!), e.g., “Sprawl­ing Post-Rock/Experimental” for Mogwai’s Ten Rapid. This last bit is help­ful as I don’t even rec­og­nize much of the stuff in my library.
• Never Heard: A given. This chooses ten ran­dom albums on the con­di­tion that they con­tain at least one song that hasn’t been played. Unfor­tu­nately there’s no way to fil­ter for albums that have, say, at least half of their tracks unplayed, or even a fixed num­ber of unplayed tracks for that mat­ter, so the title of this query is a bit mis­lead­ing. And, because I’m even more likely not to be famil­iar with these, descrip­tor phrases are also included in the dis­play of this tree (and in none of the remain­ing trees).
• Recently Added: Fif­teen albums cho­sen for hav­ing a track that has recently been played for the first time. Again, some­what mis­lead­ing, since very old albums that hap­pen to have a recently debuted song will appear on this list, when I’d really like to restrict it to recently added albums. If only foo­bar could keep track of when stuff is added to the library. Help­ful for remind­ing me of new stuff I’ve acquired.
• Recently Lis­tened: Like ‘Recently Added,’ but nar­rowed to albums whose last play is at least a month from their first play (or, more specif­i­cally, whose last play was not in the same month as their first play). This, ide­ally, will dis­play old(ish) albums that I’ve found myself lis­ten­ing to lately. And, like ‘Recently Added,’ use­ful in its results — if I chose to hear it recently, I’m likely to want to hear it again.
• Incom­ing: A live reflec­tion of the con­tents of my incom­ing folder. This would be great ’cause then I wouldn’t have to remem­ber to open Win­dows explorer and drag new stuff into foo­bar to add it to the library, it would all just flow in seam­lessly, even the .zips I down­load (since foo­bar can read archives). Unfor­tu­nately Playlist Tree is still in beta and this fea­ture seems to be bro­ken at the moment. Once it’s resolved, though, the cir­cle will be closed and every­thing will be per­fect and the skies will open up and we will know the face of God.

My only remain­ing frus­tra­tion is that play­count data basi­cally has to be writ­ten to the files, some­thing that cannot be worked around by write-protecting the files as I had pre­vi­ously been led to believe. My antic­i­pated work-around will involve get­ting uTor­rent to copy all down­loads into another direc­tory, one that it’s okay for foo­bar to mess around with, keep­ing seeded tor­rents in some quar­an­tined direc­tory that I never really touch.