Oleg's Blog

I don't know how about you, but "work" and "music" for me is not only some kind of synonym, the one unit, but it's something like the synergy. If I could select the music that will be the exact reflection of my current mood or the project I'm working about — I bet the 90% of my work is already done

As far as my mood could be very different I need to keep a large music library at my workstation. Now it counts 17 409 songs. It is equivalent to approximately 55 days of non-stop listening and takes 105 Gb on my hard drive.

To organize such amount of songs I'm using Apple iTunes. It looks like Apple developers engineering that program had the same problems that I had before choosing iTunes What could I say about it — Apple is Apple No any other media player can boast such a level of intuitivity, usibility, simplicity, sound quality and performance at one time.

With the help of the Media Browser you can choose, for example, only one or more genres to play from. The same could be done with artists and albums. You can choose albums you want to play right now even if it would be from different artists and in different genres.

That's so handy — only a few clicks and it's done! You can quick search whole library and play songs from the search result or filter them even more till you get what you want to listen to.

iTunes can even keep your music folder organized. Just after adding files to the library iTunes creates a folder with the name of the artist, then the folder with the album name in it and copying all the song files into if. That's all. You don't need to search your hard drive to find your song file. Btw you can just drag that file from your iTunes window to any folder or other program (instant messanger for example) if the recipient supports drag'n'drop.

If you don't know what to "feed to" your current mood — iTunes could help you to figure that out. You can use it's feature called "Party shuffle". It mix (shuffle) all the music in your library via some interesting algorythm and you getting a list of the songs from different genres and different artists (and albums of course )

And at the end — you can toggle iTunes to the Mini Player mode and back that is very cute


So, enough about iTunes right now. If you want to dip into the work you need the music that would be all the time at the background. That's why I'm prefer not to listen to the songs (and genres) that too often (or always) founded at the foreground at work.

Well, here's some of my favourite music I like to listen to when I'm working:

• Nino Katamadze & Insight (Jazz)
  
• Morphine [all albums] (Indie Rock) /* must listen */
  
• Rob Dougan - Furious Angels (Electronica & Instrumental with incomparable vocal)
  
• Robert Miles & Trilok Gurtu (Acid Jazz)
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004 Soundtracks (mix of almost every modern music genres without vocals)
  
• Therion - Vovin (Symphonic metal)
  
• Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out of Season (Folk)
  
• Marcus Miller - M2 (Jazz with great bass guitar)
  
• Fourplay - Heartfelt (Jazz)
  
• The Cranberries [all albums] (Rock)
  
• Arch Enemy - Doomsday Machine (Metal) /* when i need to get awaken */
  

The list isn't top-to-bottom. Some genres may be assigned not correctly but... You may get the idea about it at least

EDIT:

Adding next item to the top of the list! Favourite one!

• Pink Martini (Latin Jazz)