Ask TUAW: What's your favorite Smart Playlist?

I like the simple ones

2006 - all the music from this year
One Week - music i've imported in the last week

Many of my favorite artists have their own smart playlists that includes everything they've worked on. I have a Ben Gibbard playlist that puts in everthing from Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service, Solo Performances, and All Time Quarterback.

I use several Smart Playlists, but not enough. I like all the suggestions I've read here, but here's one that I haven't seen:

I do monthly backups of my library. I have a Smart Playlist called ": To Backup" (I put a colon-space at the front of 'special' playlists) which is set as "BPM < 1." I don't use the BPM for anything else but backups -- I store the date of the backup in the BPM field, so for my August backup, I'll set the BPM to 608: Year 2006, month 08 for each track in the ": To Backup" playlist after I've backed it up. When I've done so, it immediately disappears from that playlist.

I also have a ": DRM" Smart Playlist ("Kind contains 'Protected'") that lists all the tracks and videos that are DRM-protected in my library. It makes it easy to know whether someone else is going to have problems streaming from my shared library, for instance.

I've also done what Holden Pike has done, by creating "The First Songs" (Title contains ' First ' -- space is important) and "The Last Songs" (Title contains ' Last '), but I found that those actually worked better as regular playlists, so I had to remake them as static ones.

Cascaded Smart Playlists are also excellent for making audio CDs of large playlists (smart or otherwise). Simply create a Smart Playlist as "Playlist is 'x', Grouping does not contain 'BURNT', Limit to 78 minutes, Select randomly." That'll get you a fresh sublist of the master playlist that you can burn as an audio CD. When you've burnt it, add "BURNT" to the Grouping for all the tracks, then refresh the playlist, and you have a brand new disc ready to be burnt. Rinse, repeat!

My smart playlists are a genre/artist, and more then three stars.

That keeps me happy!



Thinking im going to set up a "dont forget me" playlist here soon though, cus i do all the time.

I have a lot of standup acts, videos, PDFs, podcasts, and audiobooks in my library so a smart list that filters out everything that ISN'T a genre of music is great. Especially to use as an alarm for Awakening (waking up to standup doesn't quite work)

I use iTunes and my iPod for listening to audiobooks. Audible.com only allows books from two accounts to be on an iPod at one time - makes no sense to me, but that's the rule - I have several accounts at Audible.com and keeping track of which book belongs to which account was a hassle until I discovered the "grouping" function in iTunes. Now when I download a book, I put the name of the account into the "grouping" field and then I have a smart playlist set up for each account.

Life is good.

Margaret

My fave is my '2006 Playlist' where I've simply got it set to include everything added after 31/12/05, so I can see what new songs I've added this year, and what's been played the most.

Presumably you could also do this with '2004 Playlist' etc. if your iTunes library stretches back that far, mine should but iPodrip lost me all my dates.

I use this playlist to keep track of all the CDs I own:

comments contain "owns"
track number is 1
disc number is less than 2

My favorite Smart Playlist is pretty simple, it includes songs that I haven't listened to in the last month and that have a rating of more than3 stars. I call it the Ultralist, nothing ever gets overplayed because once a song is played, it drops off the list for a month.

Another thing I do to enrich my Smart Playlists is I rate all of my songs according to energy level, I add a number between 1 and 5 in the comments field. Then I can quickly create a playlist that matches my mood, for example, I can go (rating = more than 3 stars, comment (energy level) = 1 or 2) and the sesulting playlist has all the best slow songs in my playlist, on the opposite end of the spectrum, i can select only the songs with 4 or 5 in the comment field and have a great party playlist.

I hope Apple includes an energy rating system in the next version of iTunes, it is sort of a pain in the ass to type all this in manually in to the comments field, but it si definitley worth it.

When one playlist won't do, make six and combine them!

1 star, >52 weeks since last spin
2 stars, >26 weeks …
3 stars, >13 weeks …
4 stars, >7 weeks …
5 stars, >4 weeks …
and a special playlist for the songs which are worth more than 5 stars, which I like to call
11s, >2 weeks …

Combine them all with a smart playlist which contains those playlists, then set the iTunes party shuffle to use it, and put it at the top of your iPod playlists by putting an asterisk at the front (*Radio Radio), and you have a constantly-refreshing playlist that keeps the best stuff coming more often, while still mixing in the stuff you didn't like the first time around but might this time. (And if your iPod can't handle the massive awesomeness of the complete list, just set a size limit and you're off and running.)

I have 54 smart playlists that work together to manage my nearly 25GB library on my Powerbook.

I listen to a variety of genres of music from classical to rock, along with swing/big band, jazz, and a large variety of christian music.

I have smart playlists for each genre that I listen to (choral, opera, piano, big band, blues, christian rock, comedy, etc.)

Each of these smart playlists pulls from a main smart playlist, but filters by genre. The main playlist pulls from 10 smart playlists based on rating: 0 stars - 5 stars, new music (added in last 2 weeks), old music (not listened to in 8 weeks), not played, and skipped music.

Each of the rating playlists pulls from a complete smart playlist, but filters on a number of criterea related to rating, last played, etc. Each playlist only pulls over a certain number of songs selected by random in order to control the ratio of rating so that I listen to my more of my popular music more than my less popular.

The complete smart playlist has all of the music I listen to normally, but excludes audio books, christmas music, podcasts, videos, etc.

Finally I have Radio shuffle smart playlists for the four main classes of music I listen to. These pull from the previously mentioned genre smart playlists.

On top of all of this I have an applescript running which automatically rates my music as I listen to it. It increases the rating by 1 star if I finish the song and decreases it by one star if I skip it. It also rates all unrated music at 2 stars the first time it is listened to.

Using all of these together enables me to have custom shuffle lists that are sorted by genre and rating and play-frequency, and allows all of my music to get rated automatically without intervention, it also ensures that I listen to my favorites more frequently, but not so much that they get overplayed. Also, my less popular music, or music that has not been listened to in a while gets worked in.

All of this is based off of http://www.jensbaumeister.de/node/69 (i think that is the right site, it may no longer work though), I sort of took his well thought out system and took it to the next level.

It is confusing to describe, and was confusing to design, but it works so well without any intervention. If enough people are interested in setting up something like this, I can put together some sort of massive post of instructions.