nerdery

Smart Playlists 101 (aka “My iTunes and iPod libraries used to be complete disasters and pains in the ass”)

A lot of people I know have their iTunes playlists set to manual and hate dealing with them. Having to manually update playlists and dragging songs/albums here and there is awful. Then you have 2 separate libraries to update, you never know which songs are on in one of the libraries, no mé gusta. While there is no real way to completely automate things (yet), I think I have come up with a solution that works very well. The key here is to use smart playlists as much as possible and let the computer do all the bullshit for you. There is a little fine tuning at first to figure out the rough number of songs to limit each playlist to, but after that it is smooth sailing.

There is one underlying system for the way I have things set up: 5 stars = favorite, 1 star = garbage and nothing in between. Ratings of 2, 3 or 4 stars are useless here. So when a song comes up you either love it, hate it or leave it alone.

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The Generic Overview

So this is what things look like for me in iTunes. Each genre playlist for favorites and another for random songs. As you can see I pretty much mainly listen to metal, reggae, hiphop and eighties music. But I also have a catchall “other” playlist for other stuff which may not really fall into those playlists (ie: Led Zep, Soundgarden, Bad Brains, etc.)

Each of these genres or groupings are then further sorted by favorites and by random. This way if I only want to hear the songs I give a shit about, I use the “fav” list. If I want to hear new stuff or to weed through my music more I use the “rnd” list. But I will explain things a bit better as I go.

There is a playlist that acts as my garbage can and another for entire albums I can’t leave home. And at any time if any of these smart playlists get stale you just select all the tracks in it and hit delete and it instantly pulls in all new randomly chosen tracks from the available pool for each.

Limiting each playlist to 100 tracks for starters will give you a good idea of how much music you can fit. Increase this number based upon which genres you listen to more until you’ve run out of space. With a limit in place each list can be flushed and re-randomized by deleting the tracks in it. I also used to have a separate list for all the “most recently added” albums and songs. But the amount of bullshit that accumulated in this list was amazing. It was full of loops, flash interface sounds, sound effects, and got deleted with the quickness.

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Example 1: Genre / Random

Naturally substitute “Metal” in this case for whatever you want and you can repeat this pattern for as many genres as you wish. Your “random” playlist will be where you go when you want to sort your music. When you find a song you love, rate it 5 stars and it will be added to the favorites playlist (non-exclusively) for that genre.

Genre contains: Metal
Rating is not: 1 star
Size is < 10Mb optional
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

When you come across a song you really never want to hear again (skits, interludes, etc.) you give it give it a rating of 1 star. It then goes away thanks to Rating is not 1 star and live updating. This also moves the disliked tracks into my trash playlist so I can later uncheck them to further keep the iTunes library healthy. Having both Rating is not 1 star and match only checked items may seem redundant but I have found that it is better to go with both options. And, as mentioned above, to refresh theses lists all you need to do is open select all the tracks in the playlist, hit delete and it will pull in all new random tracks.
Why “Genre contains” and not “Genre is”? Because people like to make miniscule sub-genres for all major Genres. In the case of “Metal” there can be a million variations like “Norwegian Brutal Technical Viking Metal” and this lumps it all together.

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Example 2: Genre / Favorites

Now that you have the basic idea of how this works this will make a bit more sense. This playlist simple pulls in all the songs you have chosen as favorites and leaves all the garbage out.

Genre contains: xxx
Rating is: 5 star
Size is < 10Mb optional
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

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Example 3: The Catch-All or Miscellany Playlist..

This is where things get a little messy but hang in there. For this playlist you basically want to just rule out what your other main playlists are. If you have playlist groups for Pop and Jazz, this playlist would contain “Genre does not contain Pop” and “Genre does not contain Jazz” to keep your music exclusive to each list.

Genre does containt: xxx repeat as necessary
Rating is not: 1 star
Size is < 10Mb optional
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

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Example 4: The Trash List

This is the list for all the tracks that sucks and you have rated as 1 star. This list only exists so I can select them all and do “uncheck selection” to nuke them. I could of course just delete them but then my ADD would kick in for not having complete albums.

Rating is: 1 star
✓ Live updating

Important note: this playlist does NOT get synced to my device since it’s nothing but suck.

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Example 5: The Zero’d Playlist

As the name would suggest, this is a playlist for songs that have a playcount of zero. When you really have no idea what you want to listen to this list comes in very handy as it tends to be songs or albums you completely forgot you had. The beauty of this list is that it constant updates itself and never needs refreshing. When you listen to a song the playcount increases and it no longer fits the criteria. Plus I don’t sort this list by genre which makes the mix even more interesting.

Playcount is: 0 sometimes i change it to 1
Rating is not: 1 star
Size is < 10Mb optional
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

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Example 6: All the Favorites in One Place

This playlist may seem pointless at first, but it actually serves 2 purposes: 1) To have all my favorites in one spot and 2) To fill my iPod Shuffle. I’m sure there is probably a way on the iPod/iPhone to sort songs by rating but I am lazy and prefer to just use my playlists. Most, if not all, of these songs will be duplicates of ones already in your Genre-specific favorites lists so it wont take up much extra space. In doing this writeup I realized that I don’t even have this playlist selected to sync to my iPhone, woops!

Rating is: 5 star
Size is < 10Mb optional
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

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Example 7: The Recent Items Playlist

This playlist is mainly for keeping track of things and scrobbling them to Last.fm. I also find that I generally listen to music at least once when I add it, so this is a makeshift way to have my newest music on there at all times. It’s not a perfect solution but it suits my needs just fine.

Last played is: In the past XX days
✓ Limit to ### items, Sorted by Random
✓ Match only checked items
✓ Live updating

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That ended up being quite a bit wordier than I expected.
If you have any better ideas please chime in below.

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