Tracks or albums?

[Audio_ELF]

Okay folks ... A simple question: do you generally listen to individual tracks or whole albums? Has this changed since moving to computer source?

 

For me, I tend to listen to whole albums when listening for enjoyment though when it's just background I often start the iTunes DJ and let him choose tracks for me. Often a track will them prompt me to listen to the album from the beginning or make me think of other albums to listen to.

 

Eloise

 

[audiozorro]

Classical and jazz almost always whole albums. Popular music (R&B, Reggae, Soul, Rock, Hip-Hop, World, etc.) often individual tracks.

 

One of the reasons that individual tracks are favored is that with popular music so much of entire albums is poor. An album like Thriller where every song is a hit is a rarity. For many albums you're lucky if there are 2 or 3 good songs instead of filler material. One of the benefits of computer audio is that you can limit your purchases to the individual tracks that you like or you can delete the tracks from your playlist or music library that you don't want to hear again.

 

With classical music and jazz it is rare for me to find an album where I only like 2 or 3 tracks and I hate the rest of the album, instead of not liking the entire album. With popular music is almost the opposite, I find 2 or 3 tracks that I like and the rest I could throw away.

 

[Egon]

Itunes and the Apple Touch have changed my listening style. I still prefer to buy entire CD albums and familiarize myself with them after purchase, but most days I pick a song/artist I want to hear with my Touch (controlling the main system), get 2/3 of the way through the song and skip to another song on the same album with a similar mood (slow, fast, etc.) and then after a few songs I'll scroll for another artist with similar music for my mood and switch to that album.

 

My latest method is to put my entire song list on "Shuffle Songs", and I just keep hitting Next until I come to one that I want to hear. This has helped me to rediscover tracks I haven't heard in a long time, then I find myself listening to other songs from that album.

 

[bottlerocket]

I started out with albums, went to tracks when iTunes came out and now am back to albums. I enjoy hearing an artists's full compilation. I am not above deleting a bad track here and there, but by and large I enjoy the full album. That being said, once in while it's fun to create a killer new mix.

 

[got tinnitus]

Even now with i-tunes, I still sit down to an entire album.

 

If I'm on cooking duty then I may put a Genre on shuffle.

 

[PeterSt]

If you really want to know : half albums. But then this is related to the work I do, and perceiving as much different recordings (qualities) and styles an evening between stop-work and dinner (3-4 hours) can carry. Oh, I cook the dinner half of the times.

 

If I had to switch and look for CDs I would have gone mad by now.

 

As the other poster said, listening to one (half :-) album makes me think of a next I want to hear.

I guess I forgot how to listen to music as such, and only am able to listen to qualities (like : that double bass sounds nicely leight weighted, but do I still hear the veils of toms ?).

 

Peter

 

 

[BobH]

...unless I'm in the car!

 

I very much like the 'whole body of work' thing, let myself get drawn into the feel of an album. However, I find this 'feel the mood' thing to be undesirable when I'm in the car - I hit things! Missing things being generally thought of as better, I let that little fella in the iPod shuffle stuff around. But overall I'm a 'whole album' chap.

 

Having said that though, I am quite mercenary with the skip button! One of my biggest gripes, since the dawn of the digital era, has always been that the 'previously unreleased' stuff, that used to end up on the cutting room floor, now ends up on the album just because there's room for it!

 

[wgb113]

My first listen to every CD is straight through. Sometimes I'll give it three runs through before turning to individual tracks. I agree that it is genre-dependent.

 

Having said that, our AppleTV w/ iTunes DJ has changed the way I listen to music. I find myself mid-song being reminded of another song, and cueing it up to play next. The convenience of having my entire library at my fingertips is POWERFUL.

 

Bill