Getting the Most Out of Your iPod

A blog doesn't need a clever name links to these great playlist suggestions from Exploded Library:

The other problem, kind of touched on in my previous iPod playlist post, that it is so easy for good music to buried and lost in an iPod.

Naturally, I have found one answer to these two problems by creating a new kind of playlist. This is a hybrid smart list, containing two other smart playlists. The best thing is that it's self-updating and requires very little maintenance.

Ingredient 1: Smart playlist of recently added tracks. This is simple, choose "Date Added" in the last 3 months - or whichever period you like, it could also be a number of days or weeks. Make sure that the Live Updating box is checked, so that new things are automatically captured and the old ones will drop off.

Ingredient 2: Smart playlist containing good songs which aren't played very often. The first step here is to specify "My rating" as greater than 2 or 3 stars (depending on how picky you want to be). Of course you need to have most of your music rated for this to work effectively. One easy way of doing this is to make an Unrated playlist, containing only the unrated songs - so that you can rate them when you're ever in the mood. The second step is that this must be a limited playlist. For me it's limited to the 25 least often played songs. You might need to tinker with this number at some point to capture the ratio between old and new music which works best for you. Make sure that this list is also live updating.

Ingredient 3: Another smart playlist which combines the contents of the first two lists. At the top of the window, if you'll need to make sure that you choose "Match any of the following conditions", which is basically a boolean OR. Then for those conditions, choose "Playlist" is - and select the other two playlists, i.e. new stuff and good but less played.

For the record, I, too, like organizing my iPod, and I'm not even a librarian.  Particularly on low energy days, it feels much more satisfying to organize something than to actually DO something.  I'll be flying to Sweden in a couple of months for my sister's wedding, and I am already looking forward to spending some quality time rating the thousands of songs in my iPod.  It must be a sickness of some kind!

Comments

[used computers]

I'm not convinced. The fact that one can point to some people using mobile phones as their music player does not mean that mobile phones are necessarily the factor. Looking around (both in the UK yesterday and Chicago today), I see many, many more people with their ears hooked to mp3 players than I do listening to music on a phone.