Filed under: iLife, iTunes, WIN Business
Your favorite iTunes smart playlists
Earlier today I posted my wish for some additional iPod functionality, and TUAW reader Chris Fenison left a comment describing a smart playlist he created that retrieves the music added to his iTunes library within the past few days, so he always has a fresh playlist to listen to. This got me thinking about what other great iTunes smart playlists our readers have come up with. One I consider essential is the one I call "Random," which I use when I want to shuffle all the music on my 'Pod. It's set up to exclude iTrip stations, anything categorized as "children's music" (sorry, kids) and any audiobooks. There's something about the experience of Public Enemy followed by Raffi followed by NPR that I'd rather not repeat.So what are your favorite smart playlists? Do you have certain smart playlists for certain scenarios (bike riding vs. the commute to work or school)? Share the wealth.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
nofxosx said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
check out: www.smartplaylists.com
they also have an RSS feed.
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Dave Caolo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
nofxosx: Well, that made things easy, now didn't it? Thanks for the link.
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narco said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
One thing I've found fun during road-trips is to make a smart playlist with a key word in the song title, album or band name. So say the keyword I choose is "taste" and a few songs come on like "Taste of Honey" by The Bartlebees, or a song from the "A mind is a terrible thing to taste" album by Ministry. It's up to the people in my car to figure out what the keyword is just by listening to the song. It usually takes about 10 songs for someone to figure it out, but it helps pass the time quite a bit.
Fishes,
narco.
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Dave Caolo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
narco: A fun idea. I'll definitely give it a try.
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ben said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
i use the 'comments' field to add additional notations... like 'vinyl' for records i've recorded, or 'sample' to tag a song as sampled to create another one.... then i have smart playlists that keep it all neat and organized... very handy for iPod mixing.
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Taras said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I have a playlist called Abandoned tracks which has PlayCount < 1 (= 0 does not work as the field is blank) to play songs that haven't been played yet.
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bargs said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Try this: Play count=2, last played is after 5/8/05, limit to 10 songs selected by random, with live updating checked. Gauranteed 10 sweet songs at random, and the best part is that as soon as one song is over, another song is added to the end of the playlist.
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Porchland said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I like big, broad playlists that give me 50 or 100 or more tracks that I can play continuously, mostly at work. Two, "The OC" and "WOXY" are playlists where I've tagged the comments field of songs that have been played on "The OC" or on woxy.com (only the greatest radio station EVER!).
I also have a 2005 Megamix, which songs I've added after Jan. 1, 2005, that have at least a two-star rating.
I'd love to see iTMS start including data for the BPM (beats per minute) field to help me put together playlists for running. I'd like to be able to arrange a playlist that keeps my pace steadier for the first few miles and then allows me to push the last few miles OR to mix the BPMs to do intervals.
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_victor said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I have a smart playlist with nothing but Raffi, Public Enemy, and old satellite telemetry.
Hm. That explains a lot. Does that make me the bizarro world Dave?
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narco said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
I can't do "abandoned" type playlists, mostly because I rarely listen to a song all the way through. Having a 60GB iPod with 13,000+ songs, there's a lot of stuff I have to go through. I wish iTunes could somehow count songs that have played for half the time, rather than just until the song ends.
Fishes,
narco.
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Mike said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
My favorite playlist is set to give me 50 songs that haven't been played for 3 months or 6 months or whatever. I call it "Long time...No play"
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Dave Caolo said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Good ideas, all.
Mike and Taras: I tried to create a playlist of songs that never got played. I ended up nixing once I discovered those were the songs I was sick of hearing.
Bargas: Clever. I've already recreated this one myself
Victor: This most certainly makes you Bizarro Dave. Does that mean Kryptonite makes you stronger?
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Andrew said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
What's incredibly useful to me is one called "Just Added" which is simply tracks that have a Date Added of the Last 1 days. Sometimes I'm adding songs from different artists, and I forget which ones are new. This is an easy way to track them down.
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billyw said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
This is brilliant, and can be easily refined by adding more 'sub-playlists' to the main one:
http://www.maximumaardvark.com/archives/2005/04/22/making_the_ipods_shuffle_function_work_better
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Frank Patrick said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
Used to live on a "Been Awhile" playlist...everything 3 stars or better (universe of about 3300 non-classical, non-holiday, non-comedy tunes) not listened to in the last 6 months. It seemed to settle in at about 200-400 songs at any one time. But I wanted to hear my favorites and some of my classical more often, so the following arcane system, developed once I realized that there was the ability to include playlists in playlists, allowing you to mix and logic with or logic.
One playlist of my 3-stars not played in the last 6 months. (currently about 220 out of 2100)
One playlist of my 4-stars not played in the last 2 months. (330 out of 900)
One playlist of my 5-stars not played in the last 1 month. (100 out of 164)
One playlist of my 4- and 5-star classicals not played in the last 3 months. (a lot of mozart chamber music, baroque, and philip glass and steve reich, both of whom I have to skip past if my better half is in the car while playing) (64 of 330...I'm about to add more to the 4-star universe in this category.)
One playlist of tunes added in the last 3 months not played in the last 2 weeks if listened to less than 4 times. (that's the arcane part, or just the weird engineering mind of mine expressing itself) (25 of 50 -- usually dip into itms once a month for 10-15 new tunes)
One playlist of PDQ Bach not listened to in the last 2 months. (yeah, I know. more weird.) (12 of 98)
And one playlist to rule them all, set to shuffle.
After a couple months of this, there's about 700 songs in the list, giving me a higher rotation of my faves, and giving the new ones a chance of exposure as well. The classical and PDQ Bachs are a bit depleted because I have the master playlist sorted by last listened - oldest first - so new sessions have been starting with those neglected categories.
And every once in a while, I'll clean out the "It's been over a year" playlist.
(oh, yeah. I do often upgrade and downgrade tunes while playing. you do know that if you click the center button twice while playing, you can add or deduct stars from your rankings.)
That's probably way more about me than you wanted to know.
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teksno said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
well i kepp a few...
the first is a recently play that keeps stuff there for up to six weeks unless its rated with more then 2 stars...
it looks like this
last played : is not in the last : 6 : weeks
my rating : is less than : ***
-----------------------------
wo that an easy one...it keeps out my favs for a good reason...which is for a list called "listen here". it the list i play in my party shuffle...
listen here looks like this:
playlist : is not : recently played
genre : is not : holiday
-------------------
and since my top rated songs are in there for ever, i get music i like as well as music i haver=nt heard for the last 6 weeks...there is also a few other specific deny clauses that pertain to certin sons and a few artists but i wont bore you with those.
i use the party shuffle to play my music cause i dont really have anything i dont like...and i think in a library of over 10000 songs, thats fairly impressive. so i use party shuffle with the option to play higer rated songs more often. its nice and works well for me.
what i really wish was possible with itunes though is being able to have some lists, like say a my favs or top rated, auto update every time you plug in the ipod, but still maintaing manual controll over other transfers...that would be nice...and save me some head ache...
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jen said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
woxy.com was/is local to me, broke my heart when I couldn't get them in the car anymore, I'm trying to work in audio hijack to see if i can get i to record certain hours of woxy.com and put it on the pod for in the car days...
I would pass on my random list idea, but I see dave already did it, heheh I gave it to him!
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big steve said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
OMG! I thought i was the only one with a THE OC smart playlist.
I'm actually a [modestly] intelligent, adult male (I even work for a well known computer company named after a fruit), but the show is my life. I use an OC MIX term in the grouping to create three smart playlists - one for each season and one that's the best overall songs. I actually have EVERY SONG ever played on the show (currently 273 songs), all cataloged by season, episode, and in some cases what was happening as they played (ex: South - Paint the Silence - Episode 9 - Marissa & Ryan's first kiss on the ferris wheel).
That actually brings me to one of my most-wanted features - the ability to have a song linked to multiple albums (in a graceful way). I tried this for a while with unix symbolic links, but it never worked with the iPod. It sucks when you have a song that is both in a soundtrack and a full album and you have to have two files if you want to keep your albums organized properly... boo itunes.
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Callum said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
"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.
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Dave Simanoff said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
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.
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