Jim Willis

Category: Playlists

  • New Releases

    A lot of new releases to check out from the past 2 weeks: The Windham Hill Guitar one isn’t new but I just added it to my library, the rest though, I’m excited to check out. I’ve already been really loving the new Vasen/Hawktail release. Can’t believe the Brand New Heavies album is 30 years…

  • On Listening

    Let’s start by agreeing that there is so much great music out there—old and new—that it’s not possible to listen to all of it. Today, discovering new music now can feel like drinking from an algorithm-fueled firehose, but I can remember before the internet came around where all we had were music magazines, really good…

  • April, 2022 Top Tracks Playlist

    Really late on this. Here’s a playlist of my top tracks from April, 2022 on Last.FM and on Apple Music. Still really enjoying The Cactus Blossoms. Work has been busy and so meeting-filled that I’m barely listening to any music during the day. This has been true for April and May. So, listening habits are…

  • Music from the show High Maintenance

    I’ve watched every season of High Maintenance a few times. We’ve been watching them again lately when we need a short show to watch in the evenings and this time around I’m deeply focussed not the soundtrack for each episode. I’ve always been aware of the music in the show (it’s amazing, here’s some background from…

  • 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…