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Evan Pratten 66528d6284 Revert "The great migration" 
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---
title: A brief walk through my all-time favorite songs
description: ..and crashing spotify clients in the process
date: 2022-11-10
tags: music
draft: true
extra:
auto_center_images: true
excerpt: null
aliases:
- /blog/mega-playlists
---
Music is a core part of my daily life. For about 13 hours straight each day, I have all kinds of tracks playing while I work on things. Having a constant stream of music playing is a habit I have held for years, it keeps some rhythm in my day, and at the same time gives me plenty of chances to find new tracks and artists to listen to.
My methods of listening to music have changed over the years a bit. As far as I can remember, I started listening to music on my own via YouTube sometime in elementary school. I could have the first two entries in the following list mixed up, but this should be the general order of how I have listened to songs over time:
- YouTube
- [Stingray Music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_Music)
- iTunes
- SoundCloud
- YouTube ... again
- Curated mixes via [Call of the Wild](https://www.monstercat.com/call-of-the-wild)
- I listened to every single weekly release from episode **1** through roughly **285** and found many of my favorite artists here
- ~~Youtube~~ [NewPipe](https://newpipe.net/)
- Spotify
It was sometime during my "NewPipe era" that I decided it might be a good idea to make a playlist of songs I liked, instead of just trying to remember and search them every time I wanted to listen to something I knew.
It was with this decision that I spawned my project to track every one of my favorite songs over time.
## The mega playlist
Sometime in early 2020, after switching to use Spotify as my streaming service of choice, I started what I called the "mega playlist". This started by copying over my old NewPipe playlist, and reorganizing things a bit. During this time, I came up with a set of rules for this music collection:
- Only the best of the best shall enter this playlist
- Songs may be slightly out of order, but must generally fall in the order I listened to them
- All songs must cleanly cross-fade with each other so I don't notice jarring switches when the track changes
This last point came in to place because I was playing this mix while doing school work, and didn't like being interrupted by a sudden musical mood or tempo change.
After a year or so of collecting songs for this project, the "mega playlist" was renamed to "Journey" (a journey through songs I like if you will), and I also [published it](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3KoQ6Wqo6GexHLsRkEJB9u?si=ec9e54abfc70443d) on my Spotify page.
I also realized it would be reasonably easy to extend the playlist *before* 2019 to include every song I remember liking. As it turns out, Spotify gets very unhappy if your playlists start pushing the 24 hour mark. Scrolling, searching, and moving songs will crash the mobile app at that point. So, I ended up creating a second pre-journey playlist, which I called [Intro](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DknNpYMzmfJdiwRWklJlK?si=675a811e35654090).
## The highlights
With the context out of the way, why not share some of the highlights of this project. As of the time of writing, I have a total of 38 hours of music in *Intro* and *Journey*.. Thats 646 songs! Last year I decided to test myself and listen to them all in order to see what I remembered. Surprisingly, I could hum the melody of every single one of them despite not listening to some for a few years. The power of a good song I guess :man_shrugging:
### Where it *almost* all began
Skipping some earlier rock music that I can't remember enough of to add to a playlist, the first electronic song I distinctly remember obsessing over was ***Top of the World*** by [Stephen Walking](https://open.spotify.com/artist/0FvgCHaMG7KL6M83yJuhmL).
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/23MJSTyBjJBnthv83gmnEy?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
This track then led me to discover *[012: Aftermath](https://open.spotify.com/album/4iom89zyZI8s7ZgDmthiFx?si=LMnVVnC4QSa0usGLYuFczQ)*, probably my most listened to [Monstercat](https://www.monstercat.com/) album, which contained two songs that stuck in my head for years:
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/7yW5kmVbaWVT3zKYFGcU2L?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
<br>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/2XsbGteXQCFYERLww9cwq7?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
Another notable mention is one of the weirdest music videos I have ever seen, which was produced for Stephen Walking's [Short Shorts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JNDliFODF4).
### Exploring the electronic sub-genres
After listening to a fair bit of dubstep, and dubstep-ish tracks, I eventually came to find some lighter tracks. My favorite of which was *Turbo Penguin*
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/3cKpKxz7JOZsCf4C2rRB5K?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
I also discovered an artist by the name of [San Holo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Holo), who pioneered the [Future Bass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_bass) genre which I came to love. I played his *Victory* EP on repeat for a long time.
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4RxpFCkTTBNALA3njzCe4Y?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="180" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
Continuing on the trend of finding artists I liked, ,I also discovered [Tokyo Machine](https://open.spotify.com/artist/3bwENxqj9nhaAI3fsAwmv9?si=04zUDzfXTgyHsK5J1ZqkXg) and was quite fascinated by his take on chiptune with a bass house twist.
### Going heavy again
I have found that no matter the genres and artists I find myself listening to, my general musical mood flip-flops between bouncy, light tracks, and excessively heavy, bassy tracks.
Keeping with the semi-chronology of this post, I went on to listen to heavier, more rave-fit tracks like *Gorilla Glue* by [Dirty Audio](https://open.spotify.com/artist/1WGex9YdmT4TZjmmMirZA8), *BAMF* by the [Pegboard Nerds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegboard_Nerds), *Panic* by [Dion Timmer](https://open.spotify.com/artist/06VibSJEr3GLxLBBZhRums) and *many many more* (tracks 104 to 187 of [Intro](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4DknNpYMzmfJdiwRWklJlK?si=675a811e35654090)).
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/1VyXn3bJyGczirLLCAywmD?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
<br>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/73nWSc3002fGRPrnFDev8x?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
<br>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/68RuKZzcIp8X3p7PgG6mbU?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="80" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture"></iframe>
A brief intermission of vocal-filled melodic tracks was induced after this period due to the release of [Instinct](https://open.spotify.com/album/7qzURREdjo1w2mKBGGcDkZ?si=4hKGb9YAR1iFP3UBWzNsDg), another great Monstercat album.
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