Thought I’d ask for some ideas from you guys and see what others do to help me out.
In the past I would often look through my albums and CDs to choose what to listen to. Flicking through discs I would have a ‘haven’t heard this for a while’ or a ‘yes I fancy that’ moment.
I could choose based on a visual prompt when my powers of recall failed.
Now though in the world of streaming I don’t have those prompts. Yes I have my playlists and prompts from tidal and Spotify, but these don’t cover everything and I so often hear a track on the radio or tv soundtrack etc and realise that I used to have that, or what a good listen that is.
So - here’s lies my question.
Do you have a system, notepad, spreadsheet, cardex, or similar as a tool you use to replace the visual prompts us streamers have lost without sleeves and cases etc?
If I was clever enough I’d have some form of database on my iPad to search by genre, age, artist etc.
I’m aware that Tidal etc can do this to a degree but I think it would so useful to have something that I could reference to and add to at will.
Would be something that I can see as being a worthy addition to the Naim apps. If it is already there and I haven’t noticed it, then could someone please tell app illiterates like me how to find it.
No. Sometimes I know what I fancy, or at least what type of music or what artist, but otger times I browse until something catches my eye. To browse I select sorted either by artist or by album, then flick through. I use an iPad, my default appearance having 15 visible on the screen. In album view, about 80% show the album image, which is great - instant recognition. The remainder for a variety of reasons don’t, requiring me to read the name, but though slower it isn’t a problem. Artist view is odd, presenting images again I guess about 80%, but a rather more a mixed bag of images. Some are images of the artist(s), others are album images, though what directs the choice of a particular album I don’t know, however displaying one of the albums I have to depict the artist is fine as I will recognise.
Whilst images of album front covers (usually “folder.jpg”) are in my locally stored music library alongside the individual tracks, that is not the case with the artists, which is presumably why an album image appears under artist view. But otherwise it must be the software finding for itself - which is not necessarily good: When I last trialled Roon I was struck with it often using what I assume was the most up-to-date image of an artist available: so if I picked something by a band from, say, the 1970s, images of whom in my head are the images of the time, to be presented with an image of one member of the band, or even the whole band, photographed in perhaps 2016 and completely unrecognisable to me because I haven’t followed their lives through to the present day was quite a negative experience as to me it did not even make me think of the band.
While true in some aspects (though Valance is not Allmusic), even just having Allmusic connected to my personal library and playing right from there beats looking it up elsewhere. In addition simply clicking on composers, musicians, engineers, etc., in the credits of an album takes me on my own journeys without any algorithm.
And it gives you options for tagging and otherwise marking albums that are far more flexible than the Naim app or the native apps of the streaming services, providing what the OP asked about, “Do you have a system, notepad, spreadsheet, cardex, or similar as a tool you use to replace the visual prompts us streamers have lost without sleeves and cases etc?”
So, not sure why you have to sigh, it was mentioned because it fits.
