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December 17, 2008
On "Christmas Songs"
Dawnise likes Christmas music, and over the years we've reached the agreement that she can start filling the house with the "sounds of the season" on the 1st of December. As an attempt at self-preservation, I've bought her a bunch of christmas albums over the years, trying to add some variety to our musical diet for the month of December.
All this music has been ripped, and lives on our network in it's own directory, so it was pretty easy to determine that we've got 436 songs in the Christmas collection.
A bit of cheesy analysis
Not satisfied to stop there, a bit more cheezy analysis reveals that the distribution is far from uniform:
14 copies of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
13 copies of White Christmas
12 of The Christmas Song
11 of Winter Wonderland
10 I'll Be Home For Christmas'
9 Jingle Bells
7 Silent Nights, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, and Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer
6 Sleigh Ride, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Oh Holy Night
5 Santa Baby, Christmas Time is Here
Another 10 songs weigh in at 4 copies, 13 songs are triply represented, 26 songs are duplicated, and the remaining 183 songs have only a single instance in the set.
It's no wonder some songs seem to come up in the random shuffle all the bloody time.
The cheesy analysis technique was roughly as follows - all the songs are stored as artist/album/## - title.mp3 (all lower case). To collapse them, I trimmed off the track number and the file extension, squeezed the whitespace and a handful of punctuation characters (-!,'), removed any parentheticals - i.e. (feat. some artist), sorted the results, and ran it through uniq -c.
Posted by dberger at December 17, 2008 1:08 PM