Celebrate International Women’s Day with 24 Radio Hours of Music by Women

I heard tonight that a local radio station will celebrate International Women’s Day by playing songs exclusively by women for 24 straight hours.  This got me thinking — could I fill an entire day’s worth of music sung only by women and do so using only songs that I actually know and like?

I realized I have almost 1,000 songs in my MP3 collection that have been acquired over two decades.  I figure if I have it, it’s a safe bet to say I like the song so I wondered how many hours all those songs would add up to.

First I needed to set a couple of ground rules.  Since the objective is to fill “24 hours” of Radio airplay, I have to take into account commercials and DJ banter.  Some googling suggests that a typical radio station plays 80% music every hour which sounds about right.  That works out to 40 minutes each hour or 16 total hours of music over a 24 hour period.

Finally, to be eligible for this list, the song must be sung exclusively by a woman or women.  Duets or guest spots make the song ineligible.

To figure this out, I needed to scan all of my MP3s and dump the list into Excel along with each song Duration.

I accomplished that with the following code:

Function Get-MP3Duration($FilePath)
{
$shell = New-Object -COMObject Shell.Application

$folder = Split-Path $filepath
$file = Split-Path $filepath -Leaf

$shellfolder = $shell.Namespace($folder)
$shellfile = $shellfolder.ParseName($file)

$shellfolder.GetDetailsOf($shellfile, 27);
}

$MP3s = Get-ChildItem -recurse c:\mp3s *.mp3 | select name, fullname

$Results = @()

ForEach($MP3 in $MP3s)
{
write-host "Processing $($MP3.name)" -ForegroundColor Green
$Results += [pscustomobject]@{
Name = $MP3.name
Duration = Get-MP3Duration $($MP3.fullname)
}
}

$results | convertto-csv -Delimiter "^" | clip

I then went through and deleted any songs by men or that otherwise didn’t qualify.  I ended up with 238 songs totaling 16 hours an 7 minutes which is exactly in the sweet spot I needed.

So in honor of International Women’s Day, here are the songs I would choose if I had to program a radio station with only music by women for a day: