I try to spend as much time as I can consuming music. I just can’t get enough. When I first started building my music collection on my PC, at least 10 years ago, I listened strictly with Winamp. It wasn’t until last year that I finally bought an 80gb video iPod. While I wasn’t crazy about iTunes, I decided to give it a shot and have used it since. I have tried alternatives but in my experience, I only seem to be able to easily do what I want with iTunes. I didn’t want to just throw everything on random or pick out specific artists/albums every time. So I started learning what I could do with Smart Playlists.

I setup a few different folders to group the playlists by their purpose. These folders currently are Charts, Genres, History, Labels, Playlists, and Types. I also use letter & number prefixes on my playlist names. The reason for this? I also drive a Scion tc which has iPod support integrated into the vehicle. Unfortunately, when you pull the playlists up through the car’s stereo, it throws them all together alphabetically. By adding the prefixes, I can keep the playlists grouped (and control the order that they show up in! More on that later.)

In this first post of the series, I’ll cover the Types group as they don’t rely on any other playlists to be built.

Types
In this folder, I setup smart playlists which typically need my attention in some form. They are also used to build other playlists as well as prevent some songs from making the final playlists.

• T AriaTV
  This playlist groups together all videos in the library. It is used later to build one of the Chart playlists.
  

  Match any
  Kind contains Video
  Kind contains Movie
  Live updating

• T Convert
  This playlist keeps track of any podcasts that I have rated more than one star. I check this playlist regularly and just use iTunes’ conversion tools to convert the podcast to MP3, add it to my library, and then delete the podcast.
  

  Match all
  Podcast is true
  Rating is greater than 1 star
  Live updating

• T Rate
  This playlist keeps track of any songs that I’ve listened to a couple of times but have yet to rate. These are typically songs that just need to be removed but it’s nice to have a place to check for them just in case. I am not always the best about making sure I have rated a song when I’m listening on the iPod at work. Or, in another case, I cannot rate songs while listening in the car.
  

  Match all
  Play Count is greater than 2
  Rating is empty
  Live updating

• T Short
  I use this playlist to categorize all of the short tracks in my library. I consider this to be anything less than 2 minutes long. I use this limiting playlist to weed out bridging tracks on albums that I may want when listening to the album in its entirety but not necessarily in my mixed playlists. It’s not the most precise way of grouping but it seems to work overall.
  

  Time is less than 2:00
  Live updating

• T Trash
  Ye olde recycling bin for the iPod. I’ll get more into my star rating system when I cover the History folder but for now, let me just say that I use a 1-star rating as a means to remove junk from the library. If it gets 1 star, it gets trashed. I check this folder every time I sync the iPod. A simple select all (Ctrl-A) and then group delete (Shift-Del) rids the library of this stuff in a flash.
  

  Rating is 1 star
  Live updating

• T Repair
  Finally, I have a regular playlist to track items that need to be fixed in one way or another. This could be an item that is a bad rip, has bad tagging, or a track with five minutes of silence in it. I add these to the Repair playlist manually. I originally used the 2-star rating for this purpose, much like the 1-star rating and Trash but I found later that I needed the 2-star rating for other things. Since I don’t come across these tracks often, I just add them manually.

So, as you can see, this is namely a group of playlists related to maintenance of the iTunes library. If you find any of these useful or have questions, drop a comment below. Have a better way that you do any of these things and you think I should try them out? By all means, let me reiterate the comment request.

In the next post of the series, I’ll go over my History group and how this group is the backbone of my listening experience.