I hate just putting a playlist on random and listening to it. When you have over 9000 files in your library, it makes for a very erratic listening experience. There are certain things that I want to hear more often than others. With the power of Smart Playlists in iTunes, I have been discussing how I accomplish this.

In the first three posts of the series, I have laid out the schematics for playlists that manage the library, exclude songs from my playlists based on specific criteria, and include songs into my playlists based on other criteria.

In this last post, I’m going to talk about how I tie all of these together to create the different playlists that I actually listen to.

Playlists

• M Melting Pot
  The first thing I do to build these playlists is get together one big playlists that the subsequent playlists are built from. I won’t go into detail what these rules mean. If you’ve read the previous parts to this series, you will understand them.

  Match all
  Playlist is Charts
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is not T Repair
  Playlist is not T Rate
  Limit to 24 hours selected by random
  Live updating

• 0 Mix
  I preface this playlist with the number 0 because of the way that the Scion iPod integration works. In the playlists menu, the playlists are sorted numerically and then alphabetically. This is the playlist that I am almost always listening to. It’s really simple at this point.

  Playlist is M Melting Pot
  Limit to 50 items selected by random
  Live updating

• 1 Commute
  This is the playlist that I tend to listen to in the car when driving to/from work. The reason why? It is full of songs that I love and don’t mind hearing all of the time. One of the rules is from a group of playlists that I haven’t discussed (G Ambient). This is a genre playlist. I’m sure, if you’ve read this far, you can guess how to set that one up. (Hint: Make a playlist matching songs based on their genre tag. You can make one for each genre type.)

  Match all
  Playlist is not History
  Playlist is M Melting Pot
  Playlist is not T Short
  Rating is greater than 3 stars
  Playlist is not G Ambient
  Playlist is not T Aria TV
  Limit to 25 items selected by random
  Live updating

• 2 Kids
  This is one that I came up with because I got tired of worrying about what was going to play next when the children were around. There’s one big critera for this playlist.. I simply use the Comments field to manually tag anything that I don’t want my kids to hear. I just add “x-x” into the Comments area. I also add rules to eliminate any podcasts that they don’t need to hear (eg SModcast, The Onion Radio).

  Match all
  Playlist is 0 Mix
  Comment does not contain x-x
  Album is not SModcast - Quick Stop Entertainment
  etc.. (any other podcasts to be eliminated)
  Playlist is not T Aria TV
  Limit to 50 items selected by random
  Live updating

• 8 Mein!
  This is a playlist that contains all of the music that I have written. I use the same concept as the Kids playlist for this one, except the tag that I use in comments is “Mein!” — (Side Note: wow, I just noticed that I’ve put together a little over 4 hours worth of music. Unfortunately, some of it is missing too.)

  Comment contains Mein!
  Live updating

• A Album
  This doesn’t really fall into the other categories but it’s a playlist that I came up with recently and it’s always one song. As a way to keep myself listening to full albums, I came up with a quick and dirty way to select an album at random. Sort of. By using the current month number (eg 9), it selects an album for me at random. I usually make a mental note of what song gets pulled up here. If I see it come up in another playlist, I’ll drop out of it and listen to whatever album that song is included on. The neat thing is that once I’ve listened to the album, this is automatically updated with a new one due to the song being listened to in the course of the album.

  Play Count is <#Insert Month Number Here#>
  Limit to 1 item selected by random
  Live updating

Well, that’s about all I have for this series. I hope that it gave somebody out there (you?) some new ideas for using Smart Playlists. If you have any ideas for me, please leave a comment! I love checking out new ideas and learning new ways to do all this fun playlist customization.

Below is an example of what the 0 Mix playlist ends up looking like- (warning: wide image!)