[talisker]

Sorry if this is blindingly obvious, but I just had a thought about playlists the other day. I'd like to have some smart playlists set up to play, say, chill-out tunes, or party tunes etc. The problem of course is setting them up and choosing the songs as it can take ages.

I've never been a fan of the song rating feature, as what songs I like varies from day to day, and while I do have favourites in my collection, I don't necessarily want to hear them more frequently than anything else. So what I now do is use it to categorise songs for smart playlists, along the lines of:

Rating of 0 - no categorisation made yet
1 - flag for deletion
2 - slow, chilled music
3 - uptempo noisy stuff
4 & 5 - nothing yet, may use in future

So rather than spending hours categorising songs in iTunes, whenever I hear a song playing on the iPod I think is a good chill-out track I just whack a 2 rating on it and so on. Unlike a simple "how much I like it" rating this doesn't change from day to day. I can then easily use smart playlists to play whatever type of track I like. And when I'm next hooked up to iTunes, I can delete any tracks rated 1.

Anyway, it works for me.

[Sandbaggins]

Thats a good Idea. Too bad I've rated most of my tunes.

Check this site out: http://smartplaylists.com/

[talisker]

Originally posted by Sandbaggins:
Thats a good Idea. Too bad I've rated most of my tunes.

Check this site out: http://smartplaylists.com/

I've seen smartplaylists.com, but so many of the suggestions there are like "tag all your chill-out tracks with a comment saying "chill" then simply make a smart playlist that picks them all up", which seems stupid, frankly. If you're going to do that why not just set up a normal playlist and drag the songs in.

[saranwarp]

Originally posted by talisker:
I've seen smartplaylists.com, but so many of the suggestions there are like "tag all your chill-out tracks with a comment saying "chill" then simply make a smart playlist that picks them all up", which seems stupid, frankly. If you're going to do that why not just set up a normal playlist and drag the songs in.

Because most people use star ratings for how much they like the songs, and typing in "chill" takes about 2 seconds. Your idea works well for people who don't make use of star ratings and only have 5 or less ideas for smart playlists, but not so well for everyone else. But hey, whatever works for you gets a big

[talisker]

Originally posted by saranwarp:
Because most people use star ratings for how much they like the songs, and typing in "chill" takes about 2 seconds. Your idea works well for people who don't make use of star ratings and only have 5 or less ideas for smart playlists, but not so well for everyone else. But hey, whatever works for you gets a big

The key difference between typing in "chill" and using the star rating thing is that you can do the latter on the iPod whenever the fancy takes you, whereas you can only do the "chill" thing when connected to iTunes. And while it limits you to five "music types" you can have an infinite number of smart playlists. e.g. chill-out songs more than 5 minutes long that I haven't heard in the last week, or "party" songs where the album or track name contains "live" and which were made between 1970 and 1980 and I've listened to less than 4 times etc etc . The key limiting factor to this method is whether you use ratings for "how much do I like this song" or not.

Anyway, I agree that how to use playlists is a pretty personal thing!