In the first post of this series, I introduced how I use Smart Playlists to control my iPod listening experience whether I am at home, in the car, or at work. The first group of playlists I discussed are the Types folder which is mainly used for maintenance of the iTunes library.

In the second part of the series, I am going to discuss the History group.

History
In this folder, I create a playlist for each possible rating. These playlists are used to decide which tracks are allowed into the final mix based on when they were last played.

• H 2 Star
  So, for the first example, let’s look at the playlist for songs with a 2 star rating. As you’ll see looking at the rules below, this basically creates a list of every song played in the last 90 days with a rating less than 3 stars. This will get all of my 2 star rated songs as well as songs that I did not rate when they played. I don’t worry about excluding the 1 star songs in this playlist because they are routinely cleaned out of the Trash playlist (discussed in Part 1).

  Match all
  Last Played is in the last 90 days
  Rating is less than 3 stars
  Live updating

• H 3 Star
  I won’t discuss the rest of these in as much detail as they are all the same concept. What we are doing here is using the star ratings to decide how often we want songs to be allowed into the final mix playlist.

  Match all
  Last Played is in the last 30 days
  Rating is less than 4 stars
  Live updating

• H 4 Star
  

  Match all
  Last Played is in the last 7 days
  Rating is less than 5 stars
  Live updating

• H 5 Star
  In this one, we don’t worry about checking the rating. My own personal preference is that once I hear a track, I don’t want it to be eligible for play again for 24 hours.

  Match all
  Last Played is in the last 1 days
  Live updating

• H Skipped
  I also include a historical playlist for keeping track of any songs that I have skipped in the last week. These songs aren’t eligible for play again while they remain in this list. I also don’t include Podcasts in this list as I know I’m more likely to skip these at times.

  Match all
  Last Skipped is in the last 1 weeks
  Podcast is false
  Live updating

And that does it for the History playlist. I will use this group of playlists later when I create the final mix. You may have also realized by now that it’s a good way to see everything that you’ve played as far back as you setup the playlists (90 days here).

In the next post, I’ll talk about the Charts group which is what I use to decide most of the songs that ARE included in the final mix.