It's funny as I have hit solidly middle age, when you figure things about yourself that have always been there – but you have just noted it. I can list quite a few things – both positive and negative. But what the one I have just simply noticed is music.

This should be a surprise when I talk about managing a mount of music but cognitively it didn't hit then. It started when I told people about it and said "I imported in about 5k MP3's with it" and their eyes get wide. I guess people delete MP3's? is that a thing? Well it's not for me.

I think music has always been there. I mean, old hymns in church bring back a lot of nostalgia for me. And my kids are constantly amazed how I can sing along songs on the radio. Or on my 5K collection that I put in the car (which of the big triumphs of my nerd career). I generally can pick out a song I know within the first few seconds of it starting. I have less success with some songs but most of the time I can pick out at least the artist. I don't need music on all the time (though I do prefer working some playing on my headphones).

I'm not sure why I'm wired this way. I didn't come from a musical family. I can't sing very well (doesn't stop me from singing along) and I played instruments in grade and high school but haven't kept it up. But there is something about music playing that soothes me.

And some random notes about this subject:

• I don't have a favorite song, or a favorite genre. I like about everything – jazz, country, heavy metal, pop….
• That said, I think Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Life is probably one of the greatest albums ever recorded.
• In my post I linked to above, I said I use Nightingale to play music. Well, Nightingale hasn't been updated in a long while and Mojave said it may not work in new versions of MacOS. So I moved to (and purchased) Swinsian and haven't regretted it. I don't use most of it's power but, at it's core, it's like iTunes before iTunes sucked.
• This old Lifehacker article was my guide for putting together Smart Playlists to keep things fresh and manageable. They do it with iTunes but the same functionality exists in Swinsian