Your Smart Playlist Ideas -- Post them Here

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djsonic

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I spent this last weekend making sure that all 2400+ songs I have in my 'Pod have the correct genre, album title and year (release date). Then created several smart playlists, 60's, 70's. 80's..... and so on.

I created a few more playlists, by genre - Pop, Rock, Metal, etc....

Pretty basic really but it works fer me :)
 

dharmabum420

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My most important playlists (outside of pre-set ones like Recently Added or Played):

Year: decade, 60's-00's
Recent Favourites (4-5 star songs played in last 2 weeks, limited to 100 by most frequently played)
Favourite (Genre) (3-5 star songs in Rock, Reggae, Jazz, Classical, etc.)

But my most used is my "Main Playlist". This is a dependent playlist compiling 10 other playlists, which excludes genres I don't want popping up randomly (Classical, Instrumental Jazz, etc.) or songs that are too long (over 15 minutes), or albums I like to listen to end-to-end (like Dark Side of the Moon).

Of those that are left, it gives me a mix of roughly 37.5% 5-star, 37.5% 4-star, 17% 3-star and 8% 2-star songs, that haven't been played in the last 3 days/7 days/14 days/28 days, respectively. It also limits the number of songs from artists which I have a ton of to a reasonable number, so every 3rd song isn't by the same 3 or 4 artists.

I love smart playlists.
 

Rod Smith

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My ipod is a shuffle and to get the most out of your shuffle you need to autofill from a smartlist and it should be a very smartlist. My SUPERLIST has five conditions. SUPERLIST contains songs that are are on one or more of five other smartlists (sublists).

SUPERLIST is limited to 152 songs selected at random (a song on SUPERLIST will stay on SUPERLIST until it no longer meets the conditions of any of the five sublists). This works because each of the five sublists is limited on the basis of least often played. There's more to it than I can tell you here. It demands another thread or three. The relative size that each sublist (limited on basis of least often played) determines how big a part of SUPERLIST each playlist plays. Word.

SUPERLIST and the ipod shuffle are great for OCD sufferers, "I must llisten to SUPERLIST in order (autofilled randomly, not played in shuffle mode) or something bad might happen" If you listen to SUPERLIST nothing bad will happen, but it will be awhile before you hear that song you listened to 27 times already if you have a big library. This keeps it fresh and prevents burnout on the very best songs you have. We all have songs that we know are the best song but we heard it too much, needs a long break.

I'm not intending to shout about SUPERLIST by shifting it to uppercase. I named SUPERLIST in my itunes with all caps because it's, well, SUPER, and I have retained the original spelling here. The last word in this post that's all caps might have been shouting, oops, sorry!
 
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Sequence

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I have:

1 Hour FreshMix :
- My rating is in the range 3 stars to 5 stars
- Last Played is not in the last 1 week
- Limit to 60 Minutes selected by random

Great but Unlistened :
- My rating is in the range 4 stars to 5 stars
- Last Played is not in the last 2 weeks
- Limit to 25 Songs Selected by Least Recently added

5-Stars :
- My rating is 5 stars

4-Stars :
- Same as above but "4"

Top 25 Most Played :
- Limit to 25 Songs Selected by Most Often Played

Unrated Songs :
- Songs in there are not rated, when I have nothing to do I listen to these and rate them from 1 to 5 Stars.

Dead Songs :
- Songs that have a rating of 1 are in there, these are songs that will most likely be removed from the iPod.

That's it!
 

neb

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Money's Worth
Playlist is: Purchased Music
Lasted Played: is not in the last month
Genre is not: Audiobooks
Genre is not: Classical

Limit to 10 songs selected by random

This was you ensure you listen to the music you've paid for using iTunes, shame you cannot get one for the CDs you've bought. That way money would not be wasted :)
 

siddharthm91

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What Smart Playlists do YOU have?

No idea if this is the right forum for this topic. but it's the closest I could find.

What Smart Playlists are on your iPod? Mine:

1. Great But Forgotten: Play Count +3
Rating +4
Last Played: > 2 Weeks

Gives me songs I used to lke but have not played once in a while

2. Heavy Rotation: Rating: +4
Last Played: In the past 2 weeks

Gives me songs that are currently in.

3. Best Of The Best: Play Count: more than 100
Rating: 5 Stars

All time favourites.

Your ideas might help me a lot, thank you.
 

flipj

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Recently I do not have access to the star option when I select My Star Rating when creating a smart playlist. The box is empty where one should be able to select the star value and can not be changed. All other options are working fine except when you select MY Star Option.
Any ideas?
 

NBrownie09

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Re: Your Smart Playlists

-James said:
What Smart Playlists do you have set up in iTunes, and what criteria do songs in your music library have to match in order to become a part of them? These are mine:

The Best Songs
My Rating is 5 stars
Limit to 50 songs selected by most often played

The Good Songs
My Rating is 4 stars
Limit to 50 songs selected by most often played
Why the hell would someone listen to 'good songs' when they can listen to 'the best songs'??? wtf.
just curious.
 

iDaniel

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Re: Re: Your Smart Playlists

NBrownie09 said:
Why the hell would someone listen to 'good songs' when they can listen to 'the best songs'??? wtf.
just curious.
If you are in the mood for something else.
 

andy2808

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your best smart-playlists and how to make them.

i need some help with new ideas for smart playlists

could anyone help, plz

thanks in advance. :D
 

skruggie

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Have you tried making a smart playlist that rotates your entire library, as if it was a personal radio station? I got the idea off smartplaylists.com but modified it a bit to suit my purposes. It is 1 main playlists that runs off of 6 sub-playlists.
 

andy2808

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i was asked to make a smartplaylist for a friend who is into astronomy and was fed up with his heavy rock, and punk coming up on shuffle so this is what I made...

"Astronomical!"

Comment contains 'Calm'
Name contains Planet
" " Star
" " Space
" " (all of the solar system)
" " Alien
" " Supernova

etc.

what would you do to improve it?
i've got to e-mail it to him soon

thanks in advance :D
 

ozpodphot

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andy2808 said:
i was asked to make a smartplaylist for a friend who is into astronomy and was fed up with his heavy rock, and punk coming up on shuffle so this is what I made...

"Astronomical!"

Comment contains 'Calm'
Name contains Planet
" " Star
" " Space
" " (all of the solar system)
" " Alien
" " Supernova

etc.

what would you do to improve it?
i've got to e-mail it to him soon

thanks in advance :D
Not strictly astronomical, but I'd add "sky" and "cloud" to the name contains rules. Also, you might want to exclude tracks longer than [x] (eg. to avoid including that 19 min live version of "Dark Side of the Moon" where the middle 11 minutes just sounds like someone licking a guitar).:shake:
 
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ozpodphot

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On a separate note, I'm quite happy with my solution to this problem:
- I like listening on "shuffle songs" quite a bit
- I have a fair bit of classical and children's music, as well as iTrip stations, none of which I want when listening on shuffle
- I don't want to set the pod to shuffle all songs, since this is a pain when you want to listen to a whole album in order or classical
- my pod seems to love the Beatles' "Abbey Road", which is a great album but I get completely sick of hearing it on shuffle

Basically, I wanted to be able to play the whole library randomly but excluding the stuff that's no good on random and stuff I've just heard. So, my "Random" SPL is...
- Genre is not classical
- Genre is not children's music
- Artist is not Griffin Technology
- Last played is not in the last 30 days

Make sure "auto updating smart playlist" is on.

The last played rule and auto updating are critical because it means that once I've heard a song on the random SPL, it drops off. So the next time I come back to play "Random", the song has gone from the SPL.

Now, I'm sure the pod will put Abbey Road up into the beginning of the Random SPL (little #######), but I'm guaranteed that once I've heard it one more time it'll drop off for at least 30 days. Phew!
 

andy2808

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any songs you don't want on shuffle (comedy songs, interludes etc.) you can choose to remove from the shuffle:

choose your song(s)
click 'get info'
'options'
click the 'skip when shuffling' box

i know this would take a while but if grouped together by making a smart playlist you could then apply this to multiple items and delete the playlist (ive only got a 4GB mini so i can do this without taking too long :D)
 

andy2808

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oh yeah, thks for the tips i think he's got the 'Dark Side Of The Moon' album and live copies :D

'night' could be another criteria

damn time zones i have to wait ages before US and aussies start posting again !!!! :rolleyes:
 

ozpodphot

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andy2808 said:
any songs you don't want on shuffle (comedy songs, interludes etc.) you can choose to remove from the shuffle:

choose your song(s)
click 'get info'
'options'
click the 'skip when shuffling' box

i know this would take a while but if grouped together by making a smart playlist you could then apply this to multiple items and delete the playlist (ive only got a 4GB mini so i can do this without taking too long :D)
thanks. this is a great tip. wish I'd known about it long ago.:)
 

rockmyplimsoul

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andy2808 said:
any songs you don't want on shuffle (comedy songs, interludes etc.) you can choose to remove from the shuffle:

choose your song(s)
click 'get info'
'options'
click the 'skip when shuffling' box
i have never been able to get this 'skip when shuffling' feature to work on my 5G or mini. it works fine in itunes, but not on either of my ipods. yes, i deleted the songs from the ipods and re-sync'd the songs after i modified their properties to 'skip'. i have the latest fw on both ipods and the latest itunes. i know i'm doing this correctly since it works within itunes, but for some reason the feature doesn't transfer over to my ipods. any ideas? anyone else having trouble with this feature? i'd love to be able to use it!
 

ozpodphot

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bummer. I was planning to try it out this weekend. will still do so and let you know if I have any luck. I'm running a 4G.
 
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