I just read Louis Gray’s post How Smart Are Your Playlists? over on the The Apple Blog, where he describes the Smart Playlists he uses in iTunes. I have a large music library in iTunes and have recently been playing around with Smart Playlists myself, and find they can really enhance one’s listening experience. I especially liked Louis’s idea of creating a “neglected” Smart Playlist to help him hear music that he would otherwise be missing.
In “The Neglected”, I feature songs where “Last played is not in the last 6 months”, with Live updating checked. Sometimes, this playlist can fill to the point where I have 12 hours or more to go through before it is empty. But if I make “The Neglected” my starting point, I’m sure not to be repeating songs I heard recently.
I’m going to go create a playlist of my own neglected tunes, which sounds like a much more effective way of getting to listen to all of the music I add to iTunes than my previous method (which was to try and regularly visit my “Added in the last 3 months” Smart Playlist.) I should probably also consider implementing something like Louis’s “Bad ROI” playlist, which tracks tunes with a low number of play counts for possible weeding out.
What are your favorite Smart Playlists?
I have a massive music library (18,000+ songs) -- all legal -- that I have never been able to completely listen to everything. I have one smart playlist that I go back to constantly, called "listen to everything once", which is simply a smart playlist that lists all songs that have a play count of 0. Sure, I probably listened to all the songs once upon a time, when it was on CD, but I bought (and still buy) a lot of CDs, and not a day goes by that I don't hear something in my collection and say to myself "who is this?!" It's great fun. I hope to one day catch up, but I fear I'm adding more to my collection then finding time to listen to it (much like my reading collection -- with a subscription to the New Yorker, how does one find time to read anything else?!)
My most used smart playlist is actually the rather negative sounding "Don't Like" playlist - which is basically a bin where I put anything with one star, or any stuff that I don't want on my iPod or to appear in another smart playlist. Then when I build another smart playlist I can ensure that a condition is that the song is not in the "Don't Like" playlist.
I also have a neglected songs and a recent additions playlist - but find myself listening to the more recently added stuff a lot of the time.
Another good one is the 'Girlfriend Friendly' playlist - which is just stuff I've listened to over five times - this means no nasty surprises like Ukrainian folk music appears.
I was a bit of a Smart Playlist fanatic until about a fortnight ago when I downloaded The Filter and have used it consistently and almost exclusively since, finding it to be more useful at picking out stuff that I wouldn't usually listen to.