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!)

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..

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.