Your favorite iTunes smart playlists

I have a complicated set up that uses ratings to determine the frequency that songs come up in shuffle. I have 3 playlists that feed 1 main playlist: first is one with all 5 star songs not played in the last week, second is all 4 star songs not played in the last month, third all 3 star songs not played in the last 6 weeks. Each one of these usually winds up around 70-100 songs. My playlist "Clever Shuffle" is a combination of all of those, anything added less than 3 months ago, plus anything I comment "Include" (so I can throw in stuff I haven't rated yet) Anything rated 2 doesn't get played, anything rated 1 I uncheck or delete.

One of my favourite playlists is "Playcount greater than 20". It is full of good songs and excellent for playing music on shuffle. You might want to tweak the limit a bit, but for my library 20 seems good.

Check out http://www.smartplaylists.com/

I use @ signs to mark sections (elapsed time) of long tracks that I like i.e. @23@52 as suffix to title; great help when scrolling/listening on my iPod. Also use ! in titles with a smart playlist so have my absolute favorites in one playlist, use ratings otherwisefor lesser titles.

I too have a variation of the Recently and Forgotten playlists but a group of smart palylists I really dig is Decades. I made a smart playlist of music from the 60's then the 70's then the 80's etc. Now if I want to listen to music from a particular era it's easy. Use the smart feature to pull out irrelevant tracks.

These are all great ideas. Basically we want to find ways to shuffle songs in a more relevant way. I wish there was a feature in smartlists about the size limit: fill the remaining empty space in ipod. I have 30GB music (and growing) I use a 4GB iPod mini. In fact I use it like a iPod shuffle :) Also, it would be helpful if there was a way in Ipod that we can remove that song in the next synchronisation (uncheck that song).

Like many of the people above I appreciate my "never played" playlist to get to tracks I may have forgotten about (they're all 3 star or higher as well). I'm also quite fond of my "best of genre" playlists that include songs that are 4 star or better in each of my genres. My smart playlists by rating (1star, 2star, etc.) are great for when I'm in a musical mood and I want to give my lower rated tracks another listen to see if I judged them too hastily. And finally, my recently added playlist makes it easier to duplicate the days when I had to cart around all my CD's in the car and I listened to my newest purchases all the time because they were what I had with me at the time. I guess you can chalk this one up to nostalgia for the "old days."

I have 90GB of music, and a 40GB ipod, so, first, there's a manual playlist: :::IPOD Selection Next, I have smart playlists in itunes for: Recent - 25 Recent - 100 Recent - 500 Recent - 1000 (covering x recent ADDED songs) I then have a set of IPOD selection-specific lists, like: IPOD - Recent 25 IPOD - Recent 100 IPOD - Recent 500 IPOD - Recent 1000 These are mergers of the IPOD Selection and the Recent lists. This way, I can simply manage the IPOD set and these ipod-subsets get automatically updated. I synch the ipod to ":::IPOD Selection" and the "IPOD Recent" ones. I also have: Recent - Not on IPOD (helps me remember what music I've recently gotten but not put on the pod - not in ":::IPOD Selection" and within last 3 months) ...and, my recent fave: ***shuffle This pulls 120 songs from my WHOLE library, ordered by random, skipping over 6 minutes or under 30 seconds. Gives me a little taste of my full library. Now...If only apple would give us an EASY way of manging a "Current Albums I Like" list. I know I drag and drop into a playlist, but - for instance - I can't BROWSE this set by album or artist on the ipod???! So, it seems it needs a new interface feature, of SOME sort... later, m

I've got a "Five Stars and Stale" playlist, which includes everything that's top-rated but that hasn't been played in more than 3 months. It's a great way to rediscover old songs that I haven't heard in a while.

"Boil That Egg" a smart playlist comprising of 7 minute Songs. 7 minutes to boil my perfect egg... "Recently Played" I have it set to archive 6 months of songs, I can then tell what I played where, and match that up to who, makes sense when drunk friends say "what was that... boom boom cha cha... you played me last nigh." ussualy the answer is "Brian Eno." "New" is quite useful on my iBook, but the iPod reformats it - accending by name, not date added, as it should be. Shame.