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Smart Playlists, Go!

  • Sep. 12th, 2007 at 12:00 PM
music
snidegrrl
I remember what I was going to ask you all about. Smart Playlists.

I have finally, after studiously ignoring them for so long based on the reasoning that no smart playlist could ever be as smart as ME, started making some smart playlists. Just to get some more things rated, to start with; I made a playlist for anything that has been played more than four times but isn't rated. That seemed to work, so I made several more:

4 and 4s: Rated 4, played 4 times.
Faves: everything rated 4 or 5
Faves Medium Played: Rated 4/5 and played 4-10 times.
Faves Rarely Played: Rated 4/5 and played 0-3 times.
Faves Well Played: Rated 4/5 and playes 10+ times.
NonRecent Plays: Hasn't been played in the past 6 months.
Unrated Unplayed: Surprises!

But apparently I am not creative and can't think of anything better. I wish my release date info was better for the music I have, because I would certainly use that.

So anyone else out there have really cool smart playlist ideas?

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Comments

( 19 comments — Leave a comment )
rakin
Sep. 12th, 2007 04:42 pm (UTC)
Wow... I think I listen to music too much. My Well Played range would be plays of 150+ times. One star songs are songs I hate. Zero star songs are songs I haven't rated yet.

Some of my Smart List:
Top 100 Rap (By play count)
Top 100 Rock (By play count)
Top 100 Soundtracks (By play count)
Music Videos (Kind = music video)
I have a bunch of smart lists by Artist with stars of 2+
Unrated (0 star songs)
Recently Played
Recently Added
ALL (All songs with stars of 2+)

I have some complex ones but I can't remember their filters from work.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 12th, 2007 05:04 pm (UTC)
How many songs do you have overall? My highest played song is 37, I think. I am approaching 7,000 songs.
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rakin
Sep. 12th, 2007 05:07 pm (UTC)
7326 Songs, 133 Videos, 14 Photos
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snidegrrl
Sep. 12th, 2007 05:11 pm (UTC)
Clearly I don't make enough time for music then.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 12th, 2007 05:12 pm (UTC)
Also, I am pretty sure that for a good long while my ipod plays were not syncing to itunes so that might be part of it.
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dj_ango
Sep. 12th, 2007 06:13 pm (UTC)
I really like getting a random section of my collection. I have a playlist that's 25 songs long and they are all number 7 tracks on an album. I also make playlists of songs from certain decades, or years. My highschool graduation year is a real funny one. Combining genres are fun play list too, I restrict the number of songs and just let the random treat me nice.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 12th, 2007 06:33 pm (UTC)
I would *love* to do that but I'm pretty sure that 30-40% of my collection does not have or has incorrect release dates. That's a big project to work on for sure. I got almost through the whole album art project before sort of letting it go. Maybe over the winter I will have time!
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professorbooty
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:28 pm (UTC)
...
I have considered the album art project, but I am afraid to go there.  Right now I only have the art that itunes was able to locate, and a few albums have really shitty or downright incorrect versions of the art.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:36 pm (UTC)
Re: ...
I did it in little spurts and large sessions over several months. It was fun to have something fussy and obsessive to do in between other big things. But again, I stopped when actual albums were blank, so there's 600 songs left to go but that involves, ugh, research, as I try to figure out what album things are from.
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zanramon
Sep. 12th, 2007 06:15 pm (UTC)
I have similar playlists.. I have some that do limiting, since the iPhone can only hold 8G of music, So I do 4&5 stars, last played, etc.. I also tag all my live and demo tracks and usually exclude them, since I don't want 10 different versions of the same song.

There's a whole site dedicated to crazy smart playlists: http://smartplaylists.com/

Oh, this also is probably old news to you, but I am just catching up with my podcasts, and This American Life had a good episode called "#339 The Break-Up" with extensive and surprisingly candid interviews with Phil Collins. If you haven't already, definitely check out the podcast.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 12th, 2007 06:36 pm (UTC)
Oooh. How do you tag the live & demo tracks? Although sometimes I think I would rather hear some live versions of Genesis songs. Hrm.

I looked at that site, but some of the ones where the playlist feeds into another playlist were hard for me to follow.

I did not know about that podcast, and will get it ASAP!
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zanramon
Sep. 12th, 2007 06:40 pm (UTC)
There's a field called 'grouping' that I use for rudimentary tags. I just add some basic info in there like "live", "demo", etc.. and then in the rule I just have "Grouping contains demo" or "Grouping does not contain live"

The problem with using "Grouping", is that if you edit multiple tracks at once, the previous value gets overwritten. It's high time Apple implemented real tags.
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judithiscariot
Sep. 12th, 2007 09:01 pm (UTC)
It's high time Apple implemented real tags.

YES#@$!#@%! i have been pissy about this for a good long time.
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professorbooty
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:30 pm (UTC)
...
Wait, does keywords do this too, if you edit a bunch of them at once?  I've been (perhaps naively) assuming that I'd be able to add keywords to multiple songs without overwriting any existing ones, but now that I consider it I bet it won't work.
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jwiv
Sep. 13th, 2007 12:11 am (UTC)
I'm useless as I put my faith in wacky algorithims which seems to work out okay.

http://musicip.com/
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professorbooty
Sep. 13th, 2007 04:38 pm (UTC)
...
One I did when my old 20 gig ipod was running really low on space was unrated songs over 7 minutes in length.  I'd play this and be more critical of tracks on it, looking for things that I could delete to make room for a couple of shorter songs.

As an aside, I regularly use 1-3 star ratings to flag things for later attention: one star to be removed, two stars to have something easily fixed (reimport and try to get it without skips, fix a typo in the title, etc.), three stars to have some actual editing done... (remove silence, split into two tracks, etc.)

I'm planning to do another smart playlist sometime soon, focusing on stuff Julie tends to like to hear when we're in the car together -- I'm still debating whether to do this with its own dedicated star rating (basically only using stars for special categorisation from that point on, rather than quality ranking) so I can edit tracks in and out of it on the fly, or whether to use keywords.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:14 pm (UTC)
Re: ...
I'm hoping that by getting the 80 gig I have effectively postponed forever any space issues. It's a weird line to walk where I want to have everything on the ipod, but for the most part there's a set of things I don't want it to bother to play all that often.
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professorbooty
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:26 pm (UTC)
Re: ...
For the most part, I really like the sort of unrestrained neurotic shuffling mine does from metal to ambient to pop to Godzilla soundtracks to folk and back again.

Also, yeah, 80 gigs is a megaton of space.  I've had mine for six months and am only just about to cross 30 gigs of stuff on it.  If I used it for video with any regularity, of course, that would be different.
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snidegrrl
Sep. 13th, 2007 05:33 pm (UTC)
Re: ...
Neurotic shuffling is something mine does really well. But sometimes it taunts me by playing things that suit the opposite of my mood.

I was so relieved to find that if you put TV shows on it, as you watch them, when you sync again it takes them back off. But I don't see myself using it for video much if at all. There isn't a terrific selection of music videos last time I checked!
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( 19 comments — Leave a comment )