So..

In the last two posts, I’ve discussed using Smart Playlists to formulate dynamic playlists that control my listening experience. In the first, I talked about maintenance playlists and in the second, I talked about history playlists.

In this post, I’m going to talk about what I call my Charts playlists. The playlists that make up this group are different criteria for what I actually include in my mix playlists. Let’s get to it!

Charts

• C AriaTV
  This is a way for me to throw some random video podcasts into my mixes. We briefly touched on this playlist in Part One. The difference here is that I’m only including a limited number of videos with the smart playlists options. This is a tool I will be using alot in this part.

  Playlist is T AriaTV
  Limit to 5 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Comedy
  In this playlist, I gather some stand-up comedy or novelty music together for inclusion. One thing to note here - different from other playlists - is that I specifically limit via the Last Played rule. At first, I used the star rating on stand-up comedy but I realized that I’d hear routines I enjoyed far too often to the point of playing them out. So I just do the limiting here instead of with the History playlists from part two.

  Match all
  Genre contains Comedy
  Last Played is not in the last 3 months
  Limit to 5 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Covers
  Here’s a fun playlist: nothin’ but song covers. This playlist includes another new element that I haven’t really discussed to this point and that is the Grouping tag in iTunes. I used the Grouping tag to mark different types of files. One of these are covers. I also use the entire Playlist Folder Name in one of the rules. In my experience, this seems to work without issue. I also ensure that songs that are being found in other playlists don’t also get added here. For example, a song might have a Grouping tag of “Single | Cover” — I don’t want the song to take up two slots in seperate playlists.

  Match all
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is not C New Hits
  Playlist is not C New Music
  Playlist is not C Past Hits
  Limit to 5 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Like
  This is a playlist to grab songs that I enjoy but don’t want to hear all of the time. This playlist will also grab songs that don’t fall into any of the other types of lists.

  Match all
  Rating is in the range of 2 stars to 3 stars
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is not C Comedy
  Playlist is not C Covers
  Playlist is not C New Hits
  Playlist is not C New Music
  Playlist is not C Past Hits
  Playlist is not C Mashup
  Limit to 10 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Love
  This is just like the C Like playlist except it’s the songs I don’t mind hearing much more often.

  Match all
  Rating is greater than 3 stars
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is not C Covers
  Playlist is not C New Hits
  Playlist is not C New Music
  Playlist is not C Past Hits
  Playlist is not C Mashup
  Limit to 20 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Mashup
  Much like the C Covers playlist, mashups are another group of song types that I categorize but I do it with the Genre tag.

  Match all
  Genre is Mashup
  Playlist is not History
  Limit to 5 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C New Hits
  This playlist grabs all of the singles from the current year. I flag all singles with the Grouping tag, as you may have noticed up above.

  Match all
  Grouping contains Single
  Year is 2007
  Playlist is not History
  Limit to 25 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C New Music
  This playlist grabs new music that isn’t getting all of the mainstream attention.

  Match all
  Year is 2007
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is not C New Hits
  Podcast is false
  Playlist is not T Short
  Limit to 15 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Past Hits
  This playlist lumps together all of the singles from past years.

  Match all
  Playlist is not History
  Grouping contains Single
  Playlist is not T Short
  Limit to 20 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Podcasts
  This is a way to grab from my podcasts at random. I also allow podcasts to be played up to 3 times before kicking them out of this list.

  Match all
  Podcast is true
  Playlist is not T AriaTV
  Play Count is less than 3
  Playlist is not History
  Limit to 15 items selected by random
  Live updating

• C Unplayed
  Finally, this playlist grabs songs that still haven’t been played (trust me, there are always plenty!)

  Match all
  Play Count is 0
  Playlist is not T Short
  Limit to 20 items selected by random
  Live updating

Okay, so there you have it. Those are the playlists that makeup the majority of my listening experience. In the next (and final) post of the series, I’ll talk about how I tie together all of the playlists that I’ve discussed. I’m sure that there are other things that you could do here that fall into the same types of playlists and I would love to expand my own. If you have any, please let me know!Until next time..