Getting smart with iTunes
written by Stuart on February 23rd, 2006
The best part of iTunes, other than it playing host to my incredibly tasteful music collection, is it's ability to create smart playlists. The 'Smart' thing is present throughout OS X, from smart folders in the finder, smart mailboxes in mail, to those in iTunes. I can't help feeling however, that I'm not getting the most out of this extremely powerful filtering engine.
At present, other than the default smart playlists, I have thirteen smart playlists, which you can see listed to the left. They go from the uber simple, my bands EP for example, which looks for tracks marked with a specific album title, given that it is a work in progress a smart playlist, which updates every time it is accessed, is a more suitable option than a normal playlist, which requires adding tracks manually.
I do have some more interesting lists however. Dusty lists all tracks with five or more plays, the most recent of which is more than three months ago. The idea being that the songs I like, but haven't heard in a while will be found here. Also, given that most of my MP3 files are well tagged, I have two playlists, splitting my library between pre, and post turn of the century songs.
Sunny was an idea I got from somewhere else, it looks for tracks with 'sun' in the title, the idea being that I should get a nice summery feeling playlist, which isn't necessarily the case. The The playlist lists the countless artists in my collection with The in the title, and is pretty useless given that band names have little bearing on the type of material they serve up.
Popularish is probably the playlist I use the most, it gives me all the songs I have which have been played on five to ten occasions, and this is a pretty good indication that it's either a pretty good song, or it's really short and I never bother skipping it.
Ideas?
Wouldn't it be nice if you could download a smart playlist in the same way you do an automator action? that way we could create an effective and simple repository of playlist ideas. First up though, it's a matter of sorting out those pesky ID3 tags, without which you limit the effectiveness of filtering.
Something else I would like to be able to do is, when I go on an artwok adding kick, I want to be able to filter my songs based on the presence, or otherwise or artwork, so I can quickly go from track to track, and get cracking with the aid of something like Clutter.
How are you using smart playlists? I'm sure there must be someone amongst us who is getting more from them than me!
Hey, there are some nice concepts and ideas in there.
I never use iTunes. Do you think I should switch?
I couldn’t imagine using anything else now, what are you using at the minute?
I tend not to use Smart Playlists to any great extent either but I remember picking up some useful ideas from this post.
That sounds pretty funky.
I quite like iTunes but there are certain aspects of it that annoy the tits off me. One of these is the inability to import the tracks back off your iPod. It’s a pain in the arse that Apple have deliberately blocked this feature.
Yep, I agree completely, there are loads of freeware apps that do this for you, but that’s not the point, as you say, it’s a pain in the arse.
Nice one - just added Dusty to my smart playlists - waiting for it to fill up now…
Just wish I could use iTunes with my Sony NW-HD3 on a Mac!