Creating playlists by year

So a little while back I discovered LaunchCast (yes I know, I'm quite late to the game), which I thought was pretty cool for letting me hear music I liked while also helping me discover new music that I might want to listen to. Unfortunately, at my current workplace, all "streaming media" is blocked by the proxy, and in any case LaunchCast didn't have a good selection of classical music, so I'm left with my own personal mp3 collection.

Normally I listen to music by artist, then album. So, I'll listen to the entire album "White Blood Cells" by The White Stripes, or an entire symphony by Brahms, in track order. I don't normally listen just to individual songs. This makes it a problem when I want a random shuffle of tracks, because you can't really tell a shuffle program to shuffle "albums", they usually shuffle genres or tracks or artists. So I end up being forced to manually create my own playlists featuring blocks of albums back to back. This gets tedious day after day at work, plus part of the joy of random shuffle is that you don't have to pick every single track that you want whereas if you're making your own playlist on an album by album basis then you're definitely picking every single track yourself.

So earlier this week as I was hunting through all different default playlists that Windows Media Player creates, and I saw the "Year" grouping. Because I've been pretty good about making sure that all my albums have the year attribute set, almost all of my albums were sorted by the year they were put out. (Although ironically Windows Media Player won't let you actually SET the year yourself in their advanced tag editor, I set most of these using freeware unix editors) Going through it, I realized I could get a very good mix of music that way. For example, in the year I'm currently listening to, 1960, I get some Coltrane mixed in with some symphonies by Brahms and Tchaikovsky, plus some opera. If I switch to a more current year, like 2002, I'd get Tom Waits, Tori Amos, The White Stripes, Oasis, Eminem, and The Cars. I've got at least 50 playlists to choose from now, and as I add more music they'll keep changing. Seems like a good solution to my problem, at least for now. Give it a try, and let me know what you think!