iTunes Smart Playlists (they are smarter than me)

I was driving one night, listening to my iPod. It had about 30 gigabytes of music stored, and I thought to myself, “There’s nothing to listen to.” I had literally thousands of songs available to me in the palm of my hand, at the flick of my thumb, but alas, I had nothing to listen to. In retrospect, that was ridiculous, I had plenty to listen to.

I recently was seduced by the 16gb iPod Touch and i succumbed to its charms and dropped the $400. For the first few days, I’d look at it and think “Prreetttttty.” So how was I, who had 30 gigabytes of music stored on his 40 gigabyte iPod going to have something to listen to on a mere 16 gigabytes of storage?

In reality, the “Every piece of damn music I own is going to be with me at all times” approach can be a bit overwhelming, whether you know it or not. Its easy to fall into a rut of only listening to the same few artists over and over. That’s exactly what I’d been doing.

My First iTunes Smart Playlist

I read Merlin Mann’s How-to on Smart Playlists and thought I’d give it a try. I decided to make a simple one first. I created a playlist called “Unlistened!” by telling iTunes to only play songs that have a Play Count of Zero. My jaw dropped when I opened the playlist. It was more than 2,000 songs in size. That means, out of the over 5,000 songs on my iPod and computer, I’ve only given just over half of them even a single listen in the last year!

Does this mean I need to get rid of some music? Of course not. Besides, I bought and paid for it dammit. I’m sure there were plenty of times that the perfect song was available for my mood, but I just didn’t realize it.

Decide What You Like: Rate Your Music

This is one of the more important steps in to using Smart Playlists. Start rating your music as you listen to it. For me, its been an ongoing process. As I’m listening to an album, if the song hasn’t been rated, I rate it. I absolutely love the Beatles (that’s not a bold statement is it?), but I HATE their song Birthday. There I said it. Sue me. It gets a mere one star.

Rating these has its reward of course. You can then set up smart playlists to only play random 5-Star songs etc… but I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. A good way to do this is to create a playlist of songs that have no ratings, and sort the listing by play-count.

Forgotten Love Playlist

This is one of my favorite smart playlists. Suggested by Merlin Mann at 43 Folders. Songs that I haven’t listened to in 60 days that have more than a 4-Star rating.

The point of this article isn’t to teach you how to make Smart Playlists. 43 Folders already has a great article on that. But I didn’t understand their power to help you create a playlist that is full of things that you want to listen to. Now on my 16gb iPod, I have yet to think “I don’t have anything to listen to”.