Selecting tracks

Okay, this is dumb I know, but I was trying to think about the process I go through when selecting new material. I started by thinking of how the listening to new stuff is an active process of filtering, and before I thought about it I was sketching a sort of funnel with new tracks going in the top and various filters being placed at the bottom. A track that wasn't filtered out would make it into the collection or Library.

Then I realised that it wasn't so much a matter of a whole bunch of tracks coming in at the same time (although that's not too far from the truth). It really is a consideration of each track in turn -- a serial process. So when I decided to just map it out as a flow chart (above) it looked really straightforward. The diamonds represent decision points. The rest is probably pretty obvious. I guess there is a possibility that the rejected stuff can feed back into the listened stuff, but in practice I don't do this nearly enough. The "category" decision at the bottom is not something I use much, but I'd include here the setting up of playlists, classifying tracks by BPM, recording year, and that sort of thing. All of this is sort of adding categories for easier use.

Anyway now that I have it in this form I can't see any possible reason why someone would want to read it, so I naturally put it straight into my blog!