[talisker]

Having just got an iPod, I've been playing around with smart playlists and ways of organising my music, and have read a lot on the web about how you can use the comments field to put multiple labels against a song, maybe "upbeat","chill-out","scottish (!)", whatever, then set up a smart playlist that will pick up all the upbeat tunes, or even all the upbeat Scottish songs etc.

Is it just me, or is this just not a horribly involved way of using smart playlists and tagging to do what standard playlists have always done? i.e. instead of tagging each song, just set up standard playlists for upbeat, chill-out etc and drag the songs into each one. If you want to create a new upbeat scottish playlist just set up a new playlist, open up the upbeat one, and copy all the scottish songs in it to the new playlist.

The whole point of smart playlists is that they update automatically for things like when songs were last played, when they were imported etc, not that they update because you've added a tag to a song. It's a damn sight easier to drag a song to a playlist than add a tag, and surely from a technical point of view there's no difference. When you use smart playlists to accomplish these straightforward "dumb playlist" tasks you're effectively ignoring the built in iTunes funcionality and writting a bit of code to do it the hard way.

[Membranophonist]

"The whole point of smart playlists is that they update automatically for things like when songs were last played, when they were imported etc, not that they update because you've added a tag to a song."

Not so. I tag all my tracks with personnel listings (in the Comments field, which is really too small for large ensemble listings), which allows me to create Smart Playlists featuring particular musicians. Considering that I have nearly 500 tracks featuring Wayne Shorter, manually building a playlist for him would be a royal PITA.

[talisker]

Originally posted by Membranophonist:
"The whole point of smart playlists is that they update automatically for things like when songs were last played, when they were imported etc, not that they update because you've added a tag to a song."

Not so. I tag all my tracks with personnel listings (in the Comments field, which is really too small for large ensemble listings), which allows me to create Smart Playlists featuring particular musicians. Considering that I have nearly 500 tracks featuring Wayne Shorter, manually building a playlist for him would be a royal PITA.

But surely it's no more work to manually build a playlist for him than it is to tag each track that he's on?

[Membranophonist]

I suppose it really depends on whether you want to spend the time on the front or back side! I'd rather add all the tag information while I'm focused on that process than try to remember it when I want to create a playlist.

[Mr Scruff]

The point of smart playlists is that newly ripped tracks already have a lot of metadata (artist, trackname, genre, album, year etc) which is crying out to be referenced in some intelligent way.

If users then add more metadata to their tracks, they can do even cleverer things with their playlists, and if they decide they want to do it slightly differently, they just have to change the playlist conditions rather than re-assemble the whole playlist by hand.

This is what everyone is hoping the Finder is going to metamorphasize into (it's where Windows is going with Longhorn).