2006MIX - Official Rules & Details

The 2006MIX Experiment

Participants:
Caralee (aka: CL, CL Smooth, Caralina, Wifey)
Matt (aka: Metfigga, Matthew, MK)

Explanation:
CL has always felt that I have more music than I need and could ever even listen to. As my 40Gig iPod was about to hit full capacity she decided that we should conduct an experiment – listen to every song on the iPod in alphabetical order by song title from A – Z (or from ' to ( ) to … to 1 to A - Z, as you’ll see).

Rationale For Agreeing:
1. We hope to learn a lot - what songs suck and need to go (space is at a premium), how long will this experiment take, what are our favorite albums, how do our tastes differ, etc.
2. We’re idiots and have no clue how painful and taxing this is going to be.

Rules:
1. Must listen to each song*
2. Must listen to the songs together
3. Must rank each song
4. *Are each allowed to skip 4 songs per day**
5. **Are each allowed to veto one song skip per day
6. No songs will be deleted/added from the iPod until the 2006 Mix Experiment is completed

Logistics:
You’re probably just as curious as we are about how long this thing is going to take. We’ve got 10,408 songs on our fully loaded 40Gig iPod. A very simplified estimation says that an album is one hour long, times about 1,000 albums, equals 1,000 hours. So if we only manage to average two hours of listening time a day this is going to take 500 days. We’d like to finish this experiment by Thanksgiving 2006 (326 days away) and to do that we’ll need to average just over 3 hours of listening each day.

If we both worked from home that would not be difficult, but we’re not so lucky. We will have to make up the bulk of the listening time on the weekends. Each weekday will begin with music playing throughout the house. We typically take the train to work. It’s a 5-minute drive from our house to the train station. A dual headphone jack for our iPod allows us to both listen while on the train, about a 20-minute commute. From the train station we walk together to our respective offices and will continue listening together during this time, another 20-minutes. On days when we drive into work we’ll listen to the iPod in the car. We’ll repeat the process after work and upon returning home we’ll have the music going while we cook dinner and whatnot. It’s safe to say that we may only average two hours of listening per weekday. Each song must be heard in its’ entirety and by both of us simultaneously. It would seem that we’ll need to log about 5+ hours of listening on both Saturday and Sunday to ensure we complete the project by Turkey Day.