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What music do you listen to while coding?

phaxmohdem

phaxmohdem

Golden Member
I am just curious to see what kind of music people listen to in the background to stay motivated while coding away on a project. I've even got a separate playlist I bust for late night coding sessions, but I'm looking to broaden my horizons a bit.

Some current music in my programming playlist:
- Trance Anthems mixed by Dave Pearce (Basically 4 hours of... "une cha une cha une cha.." awesomeness
- All of YTCracker's stuff (slightly embarrassing, but I'll own it)
- The Hackers movie soundtrack
- DaRude Sandstorm album
- ATB - Addicted to the Music album
- NIN - With Teeth album
 
I listen to the whir of my Proliant DL380 G3 development server sitting on the desk behind me. I'd like to put it in a rack in our server room, but because most of my programming at this point revolves around Asterisk dialplan coding and extensions to the GUI we're using, I need easy access to both the server and several phones nearby.

Most people who come into my office can't stand it, however the white noise is pretty mellowing to me.
 
I like system fan 1 combined with a light overtone of CPU fan. Every so often it is accented by the clicks of HD1 and the sweet sound of CDROM 1 spinning up something.

Music distracts me too much and I become less productive.
 
I don't always listen to music while coding, but I usually go for electronic. It's energetic yet not distracting; it's like my equivalent of coffee (which has little positive effect on me) when I want that boost of energy. I tend to focus on the music too much if it's too varied.
 
I go with Pandora stations based off of Edguy, Sabaton, Lordi, and Helloween. Power metal especially gives me something to focus some extraneous brain cells on and keeps me from getting distracted.
 
Mostly classical. A few years ago I forced myself to start listening, and now I can say that I genuinely like some of it. I occasionally listen to other things, but usually its Wanger, Vivaldi, Motzart, Boccherini, and Ravel.
 
Trance, Euro House. Artists like Paul van Dyk, Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, John Luniz, etc.

My main source is Winamp Shoutcast Radio. Free and 128 kbps of pristine quality. I usually search for 'vocal trance' and hook in on the feeds from Digitally Imported.
 
The Band
Dire Straits
Bob Dylan
Pink Floyd / Roger Waters
Jethro Tull
Def Leppard
Electric Light Orchestra
Grateful Dead
 
I occasionally listen to classical or celtic/world, but more often fall into the "sweet sound of system fan 1" camp with Cogman. I find it does distract me, or at least, it places something really pleasant right at the edge of my focus and encourages me to switch to it rather than grapple with something hard.
 
Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
The Band
Dire Straits
Bob Dylan
Pink Floyd / Roger Waters
Jethro Tull
Def Leppard
Electric Light Orchestra
Grateful Dead
Click to expand...

Similar boat here...

I listen to music to minimize the noise of my co-workers. Most people can tell if I'm working and not neffing by if I have my earbuds in.
 
I put my 15k + song library on random - if I have to choose what I'm listening to I start thinking about what I'd like to hear more, and find myself skipping tracks more than coding.
 
Come to think of it, sometimes I take a DVD that I know really well and put it on infinite loop for soft background noise.
 
Originally posted by: phaxmohdem
- Trance Anthems mixed by Dave Pearce (Basically 4 hours of... "une cha une cha une cha.." awesomeness
- All of YTCracker's stuff (slightly embarrassing, but I'll own it)
- The Hackers movie soundtrack
- DaRude Sandstorm album
- ATB - Addicted to the Music album
- NIN - With Teeth album
Click to expand...

This stuff would give me the twitch, there's no way I could concentrate on coding.
 
Originally posted by: degibson
Come to think of it, sometimes I take a DVD that I know really well and put it on infinite loop for soft background noise.
Click to expand...

I do a similar thing sometimes. I will put on old episodes of The Simpsons or South Park in the background. I know them so well that I hardly pay any attention but having them on is relaxing and makes the environment a little bit "fun". I laughed while I was listening to the Stack Overflow podcast and Joel Spolsky mentioned that he is much more productive when he has old sitcoms (Friends, Seinfield etc) that he has seen a thousand times playing.

When I'm listening to music it's usually heavy, but not too heavy. Although I love Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, Dire Straits etc I find it too mellow to work to. I like working with hard rock and punk like Dropkick Murphys, Full Devil Jacket, TOOL, Iron Maiden, etc.
 
Synthpop, Futurepop, EBM.

sometimes i launch my TV software and leave it on the upper corner of the screen, tuned to NatGeo or History Ch.... but then i dont get shite done. 😛
 
Usually nothing much. Sometimes I get in "closed door" mode though, bust out my MP3 collection, hit up the playlist and put the headphones on, and proceed to do a good deal of code. My collection consists of everything literally.
 
some are tracks from the splinter cell series PC games, and background ambiance from max payne 1+2 (rain ambience, city ambience, parking garage ambience)

 
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