Digital Alterity

Apple’s iPod has changed the way that thousands of people relate to their music collections. Gone are the days when you could have, at most, a handful of your CDs for your listening pleasure when outside of your home. No, these days, even if you have over 500 full-length albums, you can easily store all of them in a device that lives happily in your pocket—with space left over for backup of your favorite files as well. Such a change in scope begs a corresponding change in methods. Don’t content yourself with only listening to entire albums or the iPod’s built-in hit-or-miss shuffle. Using smart playlists, you can seize control of your music collection and carry your own private radio station in your pocket that only plays the songs you care about.

Initial Setup

The first step in taking control of your music collection using the techniques outlined in this article is to rate all your music. Depending on your CD collection, you might be looking at a monumental task. In that vein, it might help to create a simple smart playlist that keeps track of all your songs that haven’t been rated. Just create a new playlist by going to File, “New Smart Playlist…” and set the lone condition “My Rating is [blank]“. Make sure the playlist is set for live updating before you confirm your selection. This means that as you rate your songs, they will drop off of your unrated playlist, providing you with a convenient list of all the songs you have yet to rate. As a point of advice, if you’re familiar with an album that you’re ripping into iTunes, go ahead and rate the songs as you import the music into iTunes. Doing so breaks the task into manageable chunks.

If you have a third-generation iPod (row of four buttons above the scroll wheel) or later, you can rate songs directly from your iPod, freeing you from being chained to sitting in front of your computer for this task. Just press the middle selection button while listening to a song. The first time you press this button, you’ll turn the progress bar into a selector bar that allows you to “fast forward” or “rewind” through a track. If you press the selection button a second time, however, you’ll gain access to the rating menu. Just select the star rating you’d like to assign using the scroll wheel and confirm with the middle selection button. When you sync up your iPod, it will automatically move the ratings back into iTunes for you. If you don’t have a third- or fourth-generation iPod, it might help to have a small pad of paper and pen in one of your pockets. That way you can jot down ratings while you’re out of the house and just enter the ratings into iTunes when you return to your computer.

What ratings should you assign? Well, that’s entirely up to you. It’s important that you have a method to the madness though because otherwise your ratings won’t have a standard meaning for you to depend on. I find that the following system works well for me:

1 star. I hate this song. I never want to hear it ever.

2 stars. I don’t like this song. I wouldn’t be upset if I never heard it.

3 stars. I don’t really have a strong opinion about this song. In fact, it’s just kind of there. I don’t mind hearing it really, but likewise, I’m not excited by the idea of having it randomly popping into my playlists all the time either.

4 stars. I like this song. I enjoy hearing it most of the time. This is a song that I want to appear randomly in my playlists.

5 stars. I love this song. I never mind hearing it. The song may have intense personal significance to me. I can rely on this song and other songs with this rating to be songs that I’ll be thrilled to listen to.

The playlists you’ll see in this article assume that you’ll be using similar criteria for your ratings, but you can tweak any of them to reflect your personal rating style as well. The most important tip is to make sure there’s some degree of consistency in your ratings. You might understand that you rated the entire Tool catalog a four because you “like Tool”, but the computer won’t know that you didn’t really want to listen to “(-) Ions”. Take each track on its own merits and assign ratings based on your own personal preferences. You don’t have to impress anyone here. It’s your music collection. Make the ratings you want.

The Big Picture

It’s helpful to have a 10,000-foot overview of how this playlist system is going to work. Essentially what we’re doing is creating a number of “feeder” component playlists which will help catch songs that meet varying criteria then we’ll mesh all of those songs together with a master playlist using iTunes 4.2’s playlist criteria.

The reason why we go through this bother is because iTunes doesn’t at present have the capability to nest different logical criteria. You have the option of having it meet all of the given criteria or any number of the given criteria. The ability to nest playlists using the playlist criteria, however, gives us the full range of logical possibilities.

New and Hot Feeder Playlist

If you’re at all like me, when you get a new CD, you’d like to listen to it more frequently than some of the CDs that you purchased five or six years ago. There’s a couple of ways that you can you go about creating the New and Hot smart playlist. If you’d like to have a smart playlist that only treats your music as new for a specific period of time, then you’ll want to use our first option. If you’d rather just have your new-and-hot bias directed toward the 100 most recent songs in your collection, then option two is probably more to your liking.

Option 1. Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range of 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 1 days, Genre is not Books and Spoken, and Date Added is in the last 2 weeks (or whatever interval fits your CD buying habits). Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

Option 2. Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range of 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 1 days, and Genre is not Books and Spoken. Limit the playlist to 100 or 200 songs selected by most recently added. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selections.

Essentially, iTunes looks through your music library and gives you all of your recent songs that you either like or love. The stipulation that the music hasn’t been played in the last day makes sure that the songs get removed from your playlist once you’ve listened to them. This becomes important to your final master playlist.

Random Favorites Feeder Playlist

This playlist is the heart of your master mix playlist. It supplies a constant stream of music that you like but haven’t listened to recently. Here’s how it works:

Enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is in the range 4 or 5, Last Played is not in the last 3 days, and Genre is not Books and Spoken. Limit the playlist to eight hours (or whatever value seems reasonable for your music collection) selected by random. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

This playlist served as my primary musical outlet for quite some time by itself. It will always feed you music that you want to hear but haven’t listened to in at least three days. The songs drop off of your playlist as you listen to them but get replaced by other favorites from your library.

Absolute Favorites Feeder Playlist

You’ve presumably rated your songs with the highest rating for a reason. A rating of five stars signifies that a song is part of the upper echelon of your library and, as such, is deserving of special attention in your musical choices. The playlist itself is rather simple.

Enter the following criterion into a new smart playlist in iTunes: My rating is 5. Limit to 25 songs selected by least recently played. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection.

This playlist serves a couple of very important roles. Firstly, it makes certain that your twenty-five least recently played songs with the highest rating will get special listening consideration in your final master playlist. Secondly, it serves as an oversight list for your review. If you notice a song that you haven’t listened to for six months and you find that you still don’t have a particular desire to listen to it, you might want to consider bumping that song down from a five-star rating.

Heavy Rotation Feeder Playlist

Ever find a song while looking through your music collection that you just don’t hear often enough for your liking? Maybe you feel that the song is underplayed (and therefore poorly represented on your Top 25 Most Played list, which is delivered with iTunes). Maybe you’d just like to give a few songs an extra bit of weighting in the final equation. Sure “Ten Minutes” by The Get Up Kids is only rated a four in your collection, but you just don’t hear it often enough for your liking. The key to such arbitrary factors is to have a dedicated playlist for just that sort of thing.

Create a new regular playlist in iTunes and name it something like “Special Consideration” or “Underplayed”. Into this playlist, drag and drop any song that you encounter in your library which you want to give just a little bit more weight in the final equation. Now, enter the following criteria into a new smart playlist: Playlist is the regular playlist you just created and Last Played is not in the last 1 days. Ensure that the playlist is live updating and confirm your selection. Name the playlist Heavy Rotation (or anything else that you prefer).

Why the intermediary smart playlist? In my initial setup, I just used the raw regular playlist as a feeder for my master playlist, but I noticed a small bug. Normally songs would drop off my master playlist as they were listened to, but songs which were on my Heavy Rotation playlist simply stayed right where they were. This messed up the random aspect of the mix list, so I added the consideration about Last Played. Honestly, I wish I could set it to “is not in the last 1 hour”, but iTunes has days as the unit of finest temporal granularity.

Tying It All Together

Now that we’ve got all of our feeder playlists in place, it’s time to collect them all into a master unified playlist that will supply us with many pleasant tunes over the next several months. It’s as easy as creating a new smart playlist.

Enter the following criteria into a new iTunes smart playlist: Playlist is Heavy Rotation, Playlist is Absolute Favorites, Playlist is New and Hot, and Playlist is Random Favorites. Limit this list to however much music you’d like to listen to at any one time selected by random and ensure that the playlist is live updating. It’s also imperative that you change the drop-down list at the top of the dialog box to read “Match any of the following conditions”. Otherwise you’ll pull in very few (if any) songs.

Note that you can tweak the overall balance of music by altering the size of the various playlists. Getting too many random filler songs? Scale back Random Favorites to a smaller size. Want to listen to more of your recently added songs? Fiddle with New and Hot. You’re not going to permanently break anything by playing around. Experiment freely, content in the knowledge that you can always recreate the playlist you had initially using this ever-present article as a guide.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2004 at 23:39:10 and is filed under Music, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.