Music Hall of Fame updated:

All the clerical work is done.  I've given all my songs their new, proper ratings, adjusted the points scores of all my hall of fame composers/singers, and uploaded the new information to my permapost.  The permapost then has another link within it that displays the data behind all 5500 songs chosen for my collection.  You can get as many details as you want there.

Through a steady accumulation of errors my old folder containing my hall of fame music had bloated to 5555 songs, when it should have only contained 5500.  So I replaced the old folder with a new, accurate folder of all my songs.  Unfortunately when you move files around like that you lose the itunes data on them, so now I have to go back and adjust the start time, end time, and volume of all 5500 songs again.  (I had just finished adjusting these things too, sigh.)  But as a long term investment it's worth it to have a folder with all my hall of fame music, and only my hall of fame music, on a solid state drive that itunes can load quickly.  I still have a long life ahead so I may as well put the work in now and reap more benefits overall.

Hundreds of songs flipped their ratings this time.  15 songs were flipped from 4-star to 5-star and vice versa.  47 songs(!) were flipped from 2-star to 1-star.  It was like this across the board.  The new music hall of fame is completely different from the old.  21 songs were eliminated entirely and replaced with new truly great music.  Technically I haven't listened to the new songs their required 100 times, but I'll reach that goal soon enough and I know even without listening to the songs to that extent that they've got the right stuff.

Largely the newly promoted 5-star songs were emotional vocal pieces replacing less moving and memorable instrumentals.  There's nothing like a girl's voice to strike your heart.  For example, Trigun's song 'Sound Life,' 'My Friends' from Macross 7 or 'Priere' from Tales of Phantasia.  It wasn't purely an anime-fest, though.  I also promoted 'Linger' by The Cranberries.  Even with this emphasis the 5-star tier still has 586 instrumentals as compared to 514 vocals, because there are just so many more instrumental songs made than vocal pieces, giving the instrumentals more chances to be among the best.

One important change was the addition of 'Sailing Ship (Broken Ver.)' from Heaven Burns Red.  This allowed Jun Maeda's total points score to surpass Masaharu Iwata's and get him to 7th place of all-time best composers on Earth.  Another way of looking at it is he's first place among non-video-game-soundtrack composers.  Video game soundtrack composers are so prolific no one can compete with their quantity of good music, so it's not a fair fight.

A song's rating is important because my playlist has more copies of a song if it's rated higher.  When you put the playlist on shuffle, if there are more copies of a song, it's more likely to randomly play one of those copies.  So this allows me to listen to all my hall of fame music, but in exact proportion to how much I like the music, so the better music gets more chances to be heard.  The perfect music hall of fame is this weighted version, not just a stale list.  Every rating matters.

Now that there are no 'ditties' left, I started upgrading a lot of the shorter songs from the 1-star tier to 2-star.  In the olden days I had a policy of demoting all short songs to the 1-star tier not based on merit, but purely their shortness.  But now I can correct that.  This time around all the ratings are based purely on merit.  This also gave Unicorn Overlord and Granblue Fantasy's soundtracks a more fair hearing.  A lot of their songs were rated 1-star or 2-star simply because I hadn't freed up room in the higher tiers with demotable songs.  But now that I've listened through every song carefully I had a stockpile of demotable songs from top to bottom, so new songs got a genuine chance to be promoted to their true worth.

In truth there are still a handful of 3-star and 4-star songs I was hoping to promote but couldn't find room for, because there weren't any bad songs left to demote.  Maybe once the music hall of fame is expanded they'll get a chance to go up to fill the new empty slots though.  It will all work out.

Due to the reset volumes of my songs, I'm still going to be doing 'music maintenance' for the rest of the year, but none of it affects the ratings of my songs or rankings of my composers so the outside world doesn't need to know about it.  As far as readers are concerned this decades long project is now done.