How I Listen to My iPod (Part 3)
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..
Tags: itunes, smart playlists
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