[grrr223]

I'd really like to get a nice discussion going about the way people organize their playlists. I put this in the music section because I feel that the playlists are essential to determining what you listen to. Smart playlists are a very overlooked feature of iTunes and the iPod. Using the ID3 tags along with other meta-data that the iTunes and the iPod accumulate, you are able to custom tailor exactly what you want to listen to. I was even more impressed when I found out that the iPod is powerful enough to update your smart playlists on the fly. So if you have a playlist of Top Rock Songs (Rating = 5 star, Genre contains "rock"), and you decide you don't like a song as much, and rate it say a 4, it won't appear in that list anymore, or if you have a Never listened to playlist, it will automatically be updated as well, I love them.

So, what are some smart playlists that you use? Here are a few that I have on my iPod right now.

1. Recently Added - (I think it's added in the last day, so I can make sure I hear what I ripped the night before)
2. Recently Played
3. Top 100 Most Played
4. Classic Rock - (I think it's genre = rock, year is between 1960 and 1979)
5. Favs - Hot - (I think it's 5 star songs I've listened to in the last week)
6. Favs - Recycle (I think it's 5 star songs I've heard in the past month, but not in the last 2 weeks)
7. Purchased Music (all my iTunes Music Store AAC files)
8. Top Rap Songs
9. Top Rock Songs
10. Top Songs
11. Unheard 5 Star
12. Unheard 45 Days (
13. Unheard 15 Days 5 Star

Those last two are great, so I never have to get tired of hearing the same stuff over and over. I figure I listen to my iPod about 8 hours a day, and it holds 15 days of music, so in an ideal world, I'd listen to all my music in 45 days, So this means I am listening to all new music if I want. The 15 day 5 star unheard playlist is because I have fewer 5 star songs, so it would take less time to listen to all of them.

So please chime in with some of the playlists you have on your MP3 player. I'd also like to hear what other software lets you creat the equivalent of Smart Playlists, I know Windows Media Player 9 lets you do stuff very similar to this, but how easy is it to transfer those lists to your player? and is the player able to add to playcounts and let you rate songs and stuff like that?

Happy Listening!

EDIT:
I almost forgot. I am very anal when it comes to the ID3 tags on my music, and I've gotten in the habit of going to AllMusicGuide.com whenever I rip a CD and copying all the Style and Tone information into the comment field. This allows me to create some fun playlists like

1. Heavy Metal from the 80s
2. East Coast Rap
3. West Coast Rap
4. Songs like (Insert Band Name Hear)

The last one is fun because I jsut enter the different styles, and it's a fun way to hear new music. I have so much music that I have hardly listened to, and I have been buying so many CDs this summer now that I discovered used CDs from Amazon, Half.com, and I joined BMG, that all this stuff helps a lot.

And when you combine these powerful smart playlists with the iPod's new On-The-Go playlist feature, it's a breeze to just go through my playlists, add the styles, or artists that I feel in the mood for, put it on shuffle, and enjoy. By the way, does anyone know what the song limit is on the On-The-Go playlist, I think it's something like 1000

, oh well, I'll live I guess.

 

[MikeM]

I listen almost exclusively to my 'Not Recent' smart playlists. [I always have my iPod on random play as well.]

I keep one at 40 days old and one at 48. I've found that with my current song total, I can get through them all in about 48, so I know that within 50 days, I've listened to everything!

The 40 day list is to offer more of a selection if the 48 list is short or empty.

I've also made instant Best Of playlists. I choose the artist name and a rating of at least 3 stars. The live updating is great- adding a cd by an artist already on a Best Of list puts my favorite tracks automatically into the list.

I also keep a smart list for cd's I've just imported, so I remeber to go rate them. Its set to 0 for a rating. I rate every track at least a 1 and use the 0 exclusively to keep track of new stuff.

I have bigger lists based on rating alone. I keep a 2+ list, which is 2 or higher and is most of my music. If I'm not happy with what its playing for several tracks, I'll switch to my 3+ or even 4+ playlists to guarantee I'm getting something I really like.

Finally, I kept the default Top 25 most played, just to look. There's always a low rated track on there because of the random play.

I think this is a great idea for a thread. I would certainly like to how other people use smart playlists, so I can steal your ideas.

 

[grrr223]

Awesome, this is exactly what I'm looking for. One reason I love my iPod is that I get to listen to ALL my music. This is the same reason I own a 400 disc CD player (and plan to buy another one, although that's a discussion for another day). I do have one more question if anyone can offer any tips. Here is my problem:

I have about twice as many songs as will fit on my iPod. What happens is that all of my smart playlists obviously contain all of my songs so that I don't have enough room to import my "Hard Rock", but then I lose the functionality of having that playlist. Unfortunately, as amazing as the Smart Playlists are, they don't let you have both AND and OR criteria. (I guess Apple adding a SQL CLI interface isn't going to be happening anytime soon

)

Ideally, this is what I would like: to be able to randomly select 30 gb of music to add to my iPod, and then be able to apply all of my smart playlists to just that library so I would be able to fit it all on my iPod. Does this make sense? Has anyone had any experience with multiple music library managers? Would they help me at all?

Actually, I have not tried manually synching my iPod yet, would that give me more control over what I put on it, yet still let me use my smart playlists?

Thanks guys (and girls).

 

[blessingx]

Not much of a playlist user as I pretty much listen by album, but a couple apps you might be interested in:

MP3Rage is an MP3 tag editor for OS9 and OSX

Clutter is a album art finder for OSX which pastes them over to iTunes.

 

[MikeM]

With that much music, manual updating is not going to be fun.

My suggestion:

Use an attribute that you don't use normally to segment your collection into 30 gb chunks.

Use BPM- which is something I don't use. Choose something else if you use that- or sacrifice one to this.

Create a smart list using Kind is MPEG (or AAC, etc.), limiting it to 30 gb randomly, and then select the choosen files and change the BPM to say 50.

Then, set your smart playlists to include only 50 BPM tracks.

You'll want to clear the BPM from all files and re-choose the random 30gb from time to time to keep it fresh. But with 30gb, it doesn't have to be too often.

 

[grrr223]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I can probably write an apple script to change all the lists for me. I guess there's no way around the AND OR limitation though. This means that I can't make playlists that use "any" attribute if I want to make sure that they all have the attribute of 50 BPM, oh well, it's certainly a start in the right direction.

Quote:

Originally posted by blessingx Not much of a playlist user as I pretty much listen by album, but a couple apps you might be interested in: MP3Rage is an MP3 tag editor for OS9 and OSX Clutter is a album art finder for OSX which pastes them over to iTunes.

I listen a lot by album too. By using the album shuffle feature in conjuction with smart playlists, it lets me listen to entire albums that also meet other criteria.

Those are both great programs. I use iTunes for about 90% of my ID3 tag editing, but if you ever need to do those weird things like adding or removing track number from the track name, stuff like that, MP3 Rage is great.

Clutter is also awesome, especially now that it has the "Add to Album" feature. Although....it's a lot faster (at least on my G3 450) to just select all the songs and drag the image over than to let the applescript run. Actually, I think I'm going to stop using that feature altogether and stop adding artwork to my songs and just let Clutter display the covers for me. I bet I could add a few hundred more songs if I got rid of the artwork in the 5000 songs I currently have residing on my iPod.

BTW, I love both of you guy's icons. AND I think it's pretty cool that we're having this discussion on this forum with Mr. Headphoneus Supremus over there with over 1500 posts, MikeM with 40, and me somewhere in the middle. This place is great for letting those with experience share it with everyone else.

 

[blessingx]

Don't forget Doug's Applescripts for extracting track numbers, switching CDDB artist/track names, etc.

Hey, that Headphoneus Supremus title applied just days ago (I'm still a newbie).

 

[grrr223]

Doug's Applescripts is awesome. my most used ones are:

Copy Tracks to CD (an amazing script to make sure you replace songs when you're re-ripping a CD into a new format)

Albumize selection (numbers all the tracks for you, which can be a bit of a pain to do by hand in iTunes)

Remove n characters from front of track name

Proper English Capitalization (CDDB's stupidity, and my analness when it comes to tags caused me to waste hours of my life making the's and to's lowercase, but now I just run this.)


Actually, Doug's Applescripts is the reason I am able to use iTunes for 90% of my ID3 editing. I also like the auto-complete when typing in artist and album names. Those are the features that make Apple shine above the competition.

 

[MikeM]

Quote:

Originally posted by blessingx Hey, that Headphoneus Supremus title applied just days ago (I'm still a newbie).

Yeah- I just noticed we registered on the same month. Maybe I need to start posting more. This is another one!

 

[grrr223]

Wow, I'm really the one falling behind, I've been here for over 2 years

 

[blessingx]

Mine are;

Number Prefix to Track Number
Put This Before/After/In This
Swap This With That
Remove n Characters From Front

I also use AACelerator (and its Applescripts) for AAC encoding and iPod prep. Doug's MakeMineMPEG4 is also great.

iTunes just needs to get FLAC support and I'll be happy!

Post. Post. Post. While unemployed it's a time filler!

 

[grrr223]

I think I'll check out some of those scripts, they sound very useful. Track numbers can be a real pain. Fortunately, I can say that I am no longer unemployed. I registered with a temp agency and am now at least able to receive a paycheck even though what I'm doing is a little boring. I am actually waiting to hear about a very good job, it's sooo stressful, why can't they just make up their minds already?!?

I agree about the FLAC support. How about this for an ideal world: Imagine iTunes being able to simultaneously store multiple versions of the same file so you could store them using lossless compression like FLAC (or whatever else comes along), and then would be able to hook up your new G5 to your stereo with it's digital audio outs for full quality, multi-channel sound. Yet, also be able to have a compressed, AAC for example, for use on your iPod. With the price of storage coming down, it is very feasible. If anyone can do it, Apple can. Just look at their replace song feature, that is such a great innovation, it's just the way it should be.

Ahh...to dream

 

[MacDEF]

Smart Playlists are one of the features that sets iTunes/iPod apart from all other MP3 players and player software. Until you've used them, you really don't know what you're missing

I also keep my iPod on "shuffle" all the time (by song) so I hear more of a variety. I have several Smart Playlists that I use frequently:

- 200 Not Recent: randomly picks 200 songs that I haven't heard in the past month.

- Never Played: a list of tracks that have never been listened to.

- Rated 4+: a playlist containing all of the tracks rated 4 or higher.

- Rated 3+: a playlist containing all of the tracks rated 3 or higher. (Note than when I had a smaller iPod, I added a criteria to this playlist to randomly select a certain # of MB of music -- that way I always had all my 4+ songs, and the rest of the iPod was filled with a selection of songs rated 3.)

- Unrated: I actually rate every song in my library, but after I import new music, I often forget to rate it. This playlist lets me quickly listen to, and rate, all unrated tracks.

I have a bunch more, but these are some of the ones I use the most.


As for AppleScripts, I have a bunch of them, most from Doug's site. "Track Names to Word Caps," "Track Names Word Caps to Lower Case," and "Swap Name & Artist" get used frequently for cleaning up messy CDDB info. "Enable/Disable Selected Tracks" saves a lot of time, and "Make Playlist by Artist" is also fairly cool if I know I'm going to be listening to a particular artist (it saves me having to browse by artist).

 

[sephka]

Is the smart playlist concept patented by Apple? I want to see it implemented in Creative products

 

[andrzejpw]

Personally, I'm very excited about the fact that iTunes/Smart Playlists will be coming to the windows platform in the near future. Now, is this a feature of the ipod or iTunes? Say I don't dock my ipod for a month. Will my playlist be updated on my pod?

I wouldn't be holding out for ogg/flac support. It seems as if Apple really wants to push AAC out the door.