malik's blog

I've been playing around with itunes... way too much. One of the cool features they have are "smart playlists". Smart playlists let you create a list of songs dynamically based on things like when it was last played, or what type of song it is etc... Here are some of the settings I'm using to make smart playlists:

• High Playcount
  1. Last Skipped is not in the last 180 days
  2. Last Played is not in the last last 30 days
  3. Rating is 1
     
  4. Play Count is greater than 4
  5. Randomly select 250 MB
     
• High Rating
  1. Rating greater than 1 star
  2. Last Played is not in the last 30 days
  3. Last Skipped in not in the last 60 days
  4. playlist is not "High Playcount"
  5. Randomly Select 250 MB
     
• Random
  1. Bit Rate is greater than 130kpbs
  2. Skip Count is 0
  3. Last Played is not in the last 90 days
  4. Unrated
  5. Randomly select 600 MB
     
• Recently Added / Unplayed
  1. Artist/Album not blank
  2. Play Count & Skip Count are 0
  3. Bit Rate is greater than 127 kbs
  4. Podcast is false
  5. Kind does not contain video
  6. Rating is not 1 star
  7. Select 500 MB by most recently added
     
• Played but unrated
  
  1. Play Count is between 1 and 5
  2. Skip Count is less than 3
  3. LastPlayed is not in the last 30 days
  4. Last Skipped is not in the last 120 days
  5. Unrated
  6. Bit Rate is greater than 120kpbs
  7. Select 400MB randomly
     

I have around 250GB/55000 songs. It's enough to play straight for 260 hours. I like to explore it by using the "random" playlist. As you can see most of these playlists drop any music that isn't at least 130kps. This is the bottom limit because I find some audiobooks encoded to that rate and I'd like to exclude them. Also the lower the bit rate the worse the music sounds. I've found some songs that I dislike at a low bit rate but like at a higher one. If I'm exploring around there's a chance of getting a negative impression of an artist I've never heard before just because I heard them at a low bit rate.

If a song gets "skipped" it gets kicked out of most of these playlists for 30 days. That mostly works, but I may bump that up to several months.

For Ratings I mark songs I never want to hear again with 1 star. 2 or more stars and it gets picked up more frequently by my "High Rating playlist". One problem I have with the high rating playlist is that I haven't rated enough songs so it tend to have the same stuff all the time.