Jim Willis

Category: Music

  • Find and replace local versions of Apple Music files in a playlist

    I have a bunch of playlists that I’ve crafted over the years and when I moved to Apple Music I was disappointed to see my local library copies of those files replaced with Apple Music’s versions. It seemed to be totally arbitrary and, importantly, the play count, rating, etc. was different on my local library…

  • March, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    My top tracks for March, 2022. You can listen to this playlist on Apple Music or on Last.fm. Last.fm’s is much more comprehensive for some reason. The service has seemed very flakey the past few weeks and I can’t find an alternative method for tracking so have to live with it just being janky I guess.…

  • February, 2022 Top Tracks

    Month 2 of my algorithm-free music discovery. I think my Top 5 songs definitely reflect that. You can listen to this playlist on Apple Music or Last.FM   The Alison is a real gem that I found digging through Bandcamp. I’m withholding judgment a bit on Epic’s takeover of Bandcamp. I hope it doesn’t destroy the product/community…

  • January, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    As promised, I’m trying to get better with tracking my listening and less-algorithmic with my music discovery process. Here’s what I listened to a lot of in January. Maybe next month I’ll figure out some fancy way to make this list streamable? We’ll see. Here’s the playlist on Apple Music. Wet Dream – Wet Leg…

  • Last.fm to Apple Music playlist shortcut

    This is a pretty handy Swiss Army knife-type shortcut for creating Apple Music Playlists from last.fm data. I originally wrote it so that I could create Apple Music playlists based upon the listening history of my last.fm musical neighbors. But as I started poking around on the web, I noticed that last.fm users were looking…

  • Apple Music Library Organization & Marvis

    A few weeks ago I began using an iOS app called Marvis (which, I cannot recommend enough for helping to organize and find albums/playlists in your Apple Music). Using Marvis, I’ve created a few rule/filter sets that help me surface albums I haven’t listened to in a while. However, what I am finding is a…

  • 2021 Year End Music Review

    Started writing this in my journal but figure it’s probably something share-worthy, here’s a quick look at what I listened to in 2021. Planning on using last.fm this year to better track this stuff. Telecaster/Guitar music Earlier this year during lockdown I picked up a very nice used American Telecaster. I love it. It’s the…

  • AirPlay 2 on Shairport

    This is still in its infancy but it’s fantastic to see AirPlay 2 support making its way into Shairport/Linux. I haven’t tested this yet as I’ve been buying old AirPort Express (amazingly, they support AirPlay 2) devices to replace my Raspberry Pi’s but it’ll be fun to pull out a raspberry pi and try to…

  • Apple Lossless Dolby Atmos

    I scored a great deal on a NAD receiver/amplifier (with a phono preamp!) recently and finally had a chance to run it through its paces into my KEF Q150s. I primarily listen to vinyl through this setup but also have an older AirPort Express going into an outboard DAC via optical out so that I…

  • Alan Jacobs – Breaking Bread with the Dead

    Jacobs writes about Personal Density in the context of how our current media consumption via The Feed of social media comes at such volume and pressure that our now is becoming more and more compressed and narrow. What seemed so important to us just last week has already faded from our attention as quickly as…