Garjola Dindi has a delightful blog entry on how he leverages Emacs to enjoy his music. Dindi was nostalgic for the days when listening to music meant putting a vinyl disk on the record player. Back then, the friction of listening to recorded music meant you put on an album and listened to whole thing. These days, of course, Dindi’s music is digitized and lives in his computer.
Part of that means that now it’s possible to listen to a single track from one album and then switch to another track on some other album but Dindi wanted to experience the whole-album experience again. He uses EMMS to listen to his music so it was pretty easy to do what he wanted. He simply brought up an EMMS buffer with a list of his albums, used the random function to choose a line number, and goto-line to go to that album and then played it. He also logged it to an Org file so he would know what albums he had listened to.
All you Emacsers out there are jumping up and down and screaming, “Automate it. Automate it.” Of course, that’s exactly what he did. It turned out to be really easy: he basically just wrote some Elisp to call the same commands he was using to do it manually. He also added some code to make the log entry.
The code is simple but the point, as Dindi points out, is that with Emacs it’s possible to combine different applications that weren’t designed to work together to solve whatever problem you’re having.