Counting Down my iTunes Play Count (VANITY) -- Day #2 of 50

I recently purchased a new computer, and over the last few weeks I've been transferring files from the old one to the new one. While doing this I've been combing through some of these files and checking to ensure that they will work with new versions of various applications I commonly use.

One of the things that caught my eye was the "Play Count" number for each of the MP3 and MP4 files I am moving from one computer to the other. As I went through these tracks on iTunes, I decided to rank them in the order of their play frequency to see if there were any interesting patterns in the number of times I've played them over the years. Then I figured -- based on some of the great conversations I've had over the years with Freepers who are music buffs -- I'd take the Top 50 songs on this list and present them here on a series of FR threads. I'll post them here on a new thread that compiles the growing list one day at a time over the next couple of months. I'll probably only post them on weekdays and may miss a day or two here and there, so it will take at least ten weeks to do this.

One of the things I noticed is that these songs do not necessarily show up in an accurate order of preference for me. Sometimes a song ranks high on the list just because I downloaded it a long time ago, and it's been played more times than others that were downloaded more recently. Other songs have been played more frequently because they’re on multiple playlists I've set up over the years -- Iconic Classic Rock, Hits for the Highway, Country Classics, Best of the 80s, etc. Over a period of years it's also possible that longer songs are less likely to appear higher on the list because they're more likely to get cut off before it plays completely -- when I'm playing them in my vehicle and stopping on a road trip, for example -- and therefore not registering as an additional "Play" in iTunes.

Any insight and commentary would be welcome! Feel free to post items from your own "Favorite Songs" list on these threads. You don't even have to post about your favorite song of all time right now. We have fifty days to go -- so take your time and consider posting one from your digital music collection that roughly corresponds to the list I post here. What's ranked #49 in your list of most frequently played songs on your app with iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc.? #45? #40? What is it about that song that makes it stand out to you over many years? This could be an interesting series of threads, for sure.

Have fun with this, folks -- and don't forget to make your contribution for the FR quarterly fundraiser!

You had a good idea. I like it.

I love electronic storage and playback of music. Of all the technology related things I have fallen in love with, then fell out of, electronically handled music is still a wonderful unspoiled thing for me.

I am just old enough to have had the experience of going over to a house sometimes, and seeing a gramophone, usually a piece of furniture more than a musical implement. We had one in our family attic, a nearly black, dust-covered mahogany piece, with everything from the hinged enclosed top that exposed the bell and a horn that swung up at the top of the unit, to the ornate clawfoot legs on the bottom of the cabinet in which all the discs were stored.

It always was covered with dust, but when you wiped it off, it was an extremely shiny black surface. It wasn’t lacquered or painted but it was stained so deeply black and polished. Very nice.

Every once in a while, when I was bored, I would take one of the discs and play it. It felt so weird, with the hard metal needle (if I recall that correctly) that seemed as if would scratch the surface instead of play it. But I would swing up the horn, place a disc on the platter, give the crank on the side a few turns, then lowered the stylus.

They were all classical, and I hadn’t really started appreciating that yet (beyond what I had hear in cartoons!) and it did have a tinny sound. Then, I would raise the stylus, put the record back into this brown, crumbly parchment type of sleeve, lower the horn, and shut the top.

It never occurred to me as I walked away, that thing was going to sit there untouched for years, until bored at an older age, I would wander by as I retrieved some article of clothing or old reading lamp, and end up poking at it in exactly the same way I did when I was younger.

After I had gone away and served a tour in the US Navy, I came home and moved into my old room in the attic where my parents were happy to have me while I commuted to college. One day I was digging around to find some old brass ashtrays fabricated from 6” cruiser shells my career Navy dad had picked up in his travels, I stopped and saw that the old gramophone was gone.

I didn’t give it much thought, but next time I was in that part of the attic for something, I saw the empty place it used to be, and thought about it again. Next time I saw my older brother, I asked him what had happened to it.

He said my younger brother (who was the baby of the family and was in High School while I was in the Navy) had borrowed it to have on stage for a school play, and it had never been brought home.

That made me kind of sad. There was something absolutely beautiful about it, but at the same time, it seemed a grim survivor of an early Industrial Age technology, where people were striving to achieve sound fidelity and that was their best shot at the time.

I don’t have a house now that is big enough for an object like that, it is too...un-utilitarian and ornamental. But in all these years, I think of that gramophone, and how much fun it would be today to hear sound come out of it once again.

I do enjoy analog things now, simply because they are analog. I have a 43 year old Rolex I bought from the ship’s store as a young sailor over in the Med. It cost $150, and I didn’t have the money to spare, but I had to have one.

It was the basic, stainless steel model with the bubble on the crystal for the day of the month indicator.

I had to have it because it was exactly like the one my dad wore in my early years. I loved the look of it when it peeked out from under the cuff-linked starched white shirt that extended just beyond the dark blue sleeve of his dress blues that ended with the star and three gold embroidered stripes.

On the other end of the sleeve was his hand with his big college class ring and almost always, a filterless Pall Mall between the fingers.

But it was the shiny, hard, simple stainless steel watch he wore, along with all those things on either side of it (including the man himself) made him seem somehow incredibly strong and invulnerable to me. I suppose in my kid brain, I thought that if someone ever shot at him, he was going to throw up his wrist and deflect that bullet...or something like that!

And then my dad stopped wearing it. I used to poke through his dresser drawer out of morbid curiosity about this silent man, and look at all the things in that top drawer. It was a dark, mysterious place for the mind of a dad-worshiping young boy.

Anyway, I saw his steel Rolex in there. When I asked him why he didn’t wear it anymore, he said it was broken.

Well. I had the mind of a seven year old boy who has concluded that if he can take something apart, anything, he can see what is wrong with it, and fix it.

So, one day I took that watch out of his drawer, and sneaked past my mom into the basement. I went to my dad’s tool bench and there, secured that smooth, shiny steel watch in the steel serrated jaws of my Dad’s vise.

Then, after examining it for a long time, and making a few unsuccessful attempts at prying the back of the watch off with a screwdriver, I determined it must screw off, so I tried a few different methods with no success. I decided a screwdriver, powered by a claw hammer, could slowly unscrew the back.

To my surprise, with diligent effort using the hammer and corner of the screwdriver blade in the watch back, I did get it off.

But I still couldn’t see what was wrong, so I got more improvised tools and got the guts of the watch out. I STILL couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and as I pondered the next steps, I realized some...er...things had come apart, and with a panic, realized I wouldn’t be able to reassemble the watch and put it back in my Dad’s dresser drawer!

Worse, as I comprehended this, my eyes fell on the scarred and mangled back plate that had borne the sharp edge of that screwdriver/hammer combination, and at the same time, saw the full damage to the watch case that over tightened vise had wrought on it.

Remember...I was seven years old, and a particularly dim-witted one with very little common sense!

I was terrified, I would not only get bawled out for breaking the watch, I would probably get the class ring in the back of the occipital portion of my skull for going into his private dresser drawers.

I gathered up everything in a panic and threw it all into the trash, everything.

As the years went by, I would hear my Dad mutter (as he looked at the long ash of his Pall Mall in his hand) “I wonder whatever happened to that watch.”

My whole life, I could never bring myself to tell him, and he passed on before we could have a laugh about it

Anyway, when I saw that watch in the USS JFK Ship’s Store, I had to have one. And I still have it.

Every morning, I sit on the side of my bed and wind that watch. 11 1/2 turns.

I love that analog watch. To me, I imagine the motion inside the watch telling me time. Not a damn battery wired to some board! It is MECHANICAL!

I like that...:)

But I like my electronic music just as much.

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