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The serendipitous digital audio player

I like to listen to albums, and I like to listen to them all the way through, from beginning to end.

I own a digital audio player, a kind of modern iPod. I have fitted it with a 256 GB microSDXC card for storage, which is enough for over 500 losslessly-compressed albums.

However, this leaves me with a couple of problems:

1. Between ripped CDs I own (which is a lot, because they are very cheap these days) and downloads from Bandcamp, I already have more music than that.
2. There’s no good way to navigate that number of albums on a tiny screen.

I could solve the first problem with lossy compression, and at my age, at reasonably high quality levels I probably wouldn’t even notice.

I could solve the second problem if I just listened on shuffle the whole time, but I like to listen to a whole album. I’m not sure if my player has an album shuffle feature, but even then, I still want more control, to be able to pick something appropriate to my mood.

My solution is to put 40 randomly-selected albums on the player each week. This is enough variety for a range of moods, not so many as to to be overwhelming, and few enough that I end up listening to albums I haven’t heard in a while.

Here’s my script. It picks albums and symlinks them into a new timestamped directory, which is then synced to the player using rsync:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

DEST = "/media/paul/R1 Music/Albums/"
SUBSET_COUNT = 40

require "fileutils"
include FileUtils

subset_dir = Time.now.strftime("Subset-%Y-%m-%d")

mkdir_p subset_dir
cd subset_dir do
  albums = Dir["../Processed/*"]
  subset = albums.sample(SUBSET_COUNT)
  subset.each do |album|
    ln_s album, "./"
  end
end

sh %{rsync -av --delete --copy-dirlinks "#{subset_dir}/" "#{DEST}"}

The --copy-dirlinks option is needed to turn the symlinks into actual directories on the destination.

There are a few assumptions in this script that mean it won’t work for anyone else who just copies it:

• The script is being run from the ~/Music directory.
• There is a directory full of albums (one directory per album, no artist hierarchy) in ~/Music/Processed.
• It won’t be run more than once per day.

The rsync at the end is potentially dangerous, because --delete means that it will replace everything in that directory. Be careful. Make sure your carefully-ripped collection is backed up – but please do that anyway!

I didn’t bother removing old subset directories because it’s interesting to see past selections, and automated deletion is risky (see previous paragraph).