Your Smart Playlist Ideas -- Post them Here

[WMarkJ]

Hopefully this form is ok for a question. I have 4 favorite Elvis Presley CD box sets. I would like them in a playlist to keep them available from other Elvis or other CDs. I would also like to set it up with a rule of 'playcount is 0'. However, when I get the album titles in and add the playcount is 0 rule, it does not work because match all rules is required to have the albums in the playlist rules. How can I set this up?

[SimonStern]

I created a smart playlist called ZZZ build one. That way it sorts to the bottom of the playlists. It selects all, excludes certain generes and artists that I don't want comming up in a shuffle-type play. Rateing must be EXACTLY 4 stars. Last played is not anytime in the last 16 weeks.

I then created a master playlist that plays ZZZ build one and anything with 5 stars. That way, the four star songs come and go and won't repeat for weeks at a time, but 5 star songs will always be there, ready to play.

I have numbered all of my playlists (smart and otherwise) so they sort into the order I want them on the iPod.

1 --
2 --
3 --
4 --

etc.

I also build smart playlists for my favorite artists and their associated bands. My Eric Clapton smart playlist includes all songs where the Artist contains "Clapton" (This gets me duets and jam sessions), but also Cream, the Yarbirds, Derek and the Dominoes, Blind Faith.

My Jimi Hendrix one works the same way with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Band of Gypsies, and Jimi Hendrix (solo works.)

[SimonStern]

Originally Posted by wmarkj

Hopefully this form is ok for a question. I have 4 favorite Elvis Presley CD box sets. I would like them in a playlist to keep them available from other Elvis or other CDs. I would also like to set it up with a rule of 'playcount is 0'. However, when I get the album titles in and add the playcount is 0 rule, it does not work because match all rules is required to have the albums in the playlist rules. How can I set this up?

If you set playcount to 0 then as soon as all the songs are played once, they will be out of the playlist. I don't understand the inclusion of the playcount critera, what are you trying to acomplish?

If the album name is unique on these box sets, why not just add the album names as the criteria for the smart playlist and leave it alone.

If the album name is not unique, then I would suggest adding something like "box set" to the comments field on those tracks and make the Smart Playlist say: "Artist = Elvis" and Comments contains "box set."

[squanto]

To build my smartplaylists, I use ratings and comments.

My ratings:

5=love the song
4=good song
3=ok song (don't hate it)
2=hate the song and don't want to hear it again
1=flag this song for editing

Things I put in the comments field:

Sleepy
Soft
Smooth
Japanese (I use this because I have tons of J-music, and a Jpop genre is not flexible enough)
Fun

Comments are fun to build playlists with, since they can be anything. The only problem is that it takes more effort to actually tag the song with the comment. That is where my Songs 2 Fix playlist comes in handy (see below)

Also, I uncheck all my Classical, Jazz, and Children's Music. The smart playlists below all have the "use checked songs only", so that they don't include these genres.

Some of my smartplaylists:

Songs 2 Fix: When I am away from the computer, and I am listening to a song that I want to edit the fields for later, I tag it with 1-star. Later on, in iTunes, I look at this playlist, then edit the songs there. In this scheme, 1-star doesn't refer to like/dislike of the song. It's just a flag.

-My Rating is 1-star

Sleepytime Songs: Songs to fall asleep to

-Comment includes Sleepy

Unrated 500MB: This playlist is used for sorting my collection when I am away from the comptuer

-My Rating is (no stars)

Top Jpop

-My Rating is in the range of 4stars and 5stars and
-Comment includes Japanese and
-Genre is Pop

J-Rock

-Comment includes Japanese and
-Genre is Rock/Pop

x3 - my 3 star songs. I use this playlist to build 3+Blend (see below). I use the letter x to start so it sorts at the bottom.

-My rating is 3 stars
-Limit to 100 songs (random)

x4 - my 4 star songs. I use this playlist to build 3+Blend and 4+ Blend (see below)

-My rating is 4 stars
-Limit to 100 songs (random)

x5 -my 5 star songs. I use this playlist to build 3+Blend and 4+ Blend (see below)

-My rating is 5 stars
-Limit to 100 songs (random)

3+ Blend: By using the above playlists, I ensure that this blend is 1/3 of 3star, 4star, and 5star.

-Playlist is x3 or
-Playlist is x4 or
-Playlist is x5

4+ Blend: similar to 3+ Blend (you figure it out!)

I use shuffle songs usually. And to make sure you don't keep hearing the same initial song each time I choose a playlist, I sort the playlists by "last played" with the arrow up.

[Eric Lewis]

i make a new playlist with all new songs...or ones with 1 play count!

[WMarkJ]

Originally Posted by SimonStern

If you set playcount to 0 then as soon as all the songs are played once, they will be out of the playlist. I don't understand the inclusion of the playcount critera, what are you trying to acomplish?

If the album name is unique on these box sets, why not just add the album names as the criteria for the smart playlist and leave it alone.

If the album name is not unique, then I would suggest adding something like "box set" to the comments field on those tracks and make the Smart Playlist say: "Artist = Elvis" and Comments contains "box set."

Thanks SimonStern. Using Comments field does just what I wanted. I use Playcount = 0 in order to have a playlist of all box set tracks I have not yet heard. Once I hear them all, I will change the rule to "not heard in the last 14 days".

[JTrain_07]

Sorry if this was already posted I searched and couldn't find anything. Does anyone know how to set up a Monthly Top-10 smart playlist? I want my top 10 played songs for the month to be made into a playlist so I can look back and see what I was listening too months back. Thanks in advance.

[bwh79]

Originally Posted by JTrain_07

Sorry if this was already posted I searched and couldn't find anything. Does anyone know how to set up a Monthly Top-10 smart playlist? I want my top 10 played songs for the month to be made into a playlist so I can look back and see what I was listening too months back. Thanks in advance.

There's no way (that I know of, and I'll admit I'm still a newbie) to track how many times you've played a song in a specific time frame, unless you want to reset all your play counts each month. What you can do is make a playlists that tracks the most often played (ever) songs, and limit it to only songs that have been played in the past month. This will still count a song with 10 plays (one in the last month) higher than a song with 9 plays (all in the last month), but it will exclude the song with 12 plays that hasn't been played in a while. To do that you'd make a smarlist like this:

[X]Match [All] of the following rules:

[Playlist] [is] [<main playlist>] (Optional - I use this in all my smartlists because I share a computer and I don't want the other person's songs showing up in my smartlists)
[Last Played] [is in the last] [1] [Months]

[X]Limit to [10] [items] selected by [most often played].
[_]Match only Checked Items (also optional, I don't use this, I use "main" playlists instead)
[X]Live Updating

This will give you the top ten songs, that have been played at least once this month, regardless of how many times they were actually played this month.

Here's the autosync playlist I have set up. It's a smartlist based on four other smartlists and a standard playlist. Every time I plug in the iPod, its library gets updated to contain what it thinks are my favorite songs (by rating), some new stuff, some old stuff, some things I need to rate, and whatever I have decided really really needs to be on there. I got the idea from another thread I saw on the boards, but I forget from whom the idea came originally. Here goes:

My Hotlist
[Standard playlist]

Songs that absolutely have to be on the iPod go into this playlist.

My Unrated

[X] Match [all] of the following rules:

[Playlist] [is] [My Music]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Hotlist]
[My Rating] [is] [.....]

[X] Limit to [700] [MB] selected by [least recently added]
[X] Live Updating

This selects my unrated tracks, and picks older ones before newer ones (based on when they were added to the library, not when they were released).

My Least Recently Played

[X] Match [all]

[Playlist] [is] [My Music]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Hotlist]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Unrated]

[X] Limit to [1000] [MB] selected by [least recently played]
[X] Live Updating

This selects older tracks that I may have forgotten about.

My Recently Added

[X] Match [all]

[Playlist] [is] [My Music]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Hotlist]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Unrated]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Least Recently Played]

[X] Limit to [1000] [MB] selected by [most recently added]
[X] Live Updating

This keeps my newly added music in the mix, whether I have rated it or not.

My Highest Rated

[X] Match [all]

[Playlist] [is] [My Music]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Hotlist]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Unrated]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Least Recently Played]
[Playlist] [is not] [My Recently Added]

[X] Limit to [1000] [MB] selected by [highest rating]
[X] Live Updating

This one selects my highest-rated tracks to keep my favorite music on my iPod.

Each of those is hidden in a folder called "Smarlist Support Lists". There are similar lists for my girlfriend, except that they pick from her music instead of mine.

*My Smartlist

[X] Match [any] of the following rules:

[Playlist] [is] [My Hotlist]
[Playlist] [is] [My Highest Rated]
[Playlist] [is] [My Recently Added]
[Playlist] [is] [My Least Recently Played]
[Playlist] [is] [My Unrated]

[X] Live Updating

There's an asterisk before the list name so that that list is always displayed at the top of the column. This list gathers together the four other sub-lists, plus anything that I have added to "My Hotlist", and syncs everything to the iPod. If the list grows too large (due to adding too many tracks to "My Hotlist"), then I just reduce the size limit of one or more of the other sub-lists. I've only been using this system for a couple of days but so far it seems to work really well. I get to shuffle up the music I haven't heard recently so that nothing gets forgotten, while still keeping my favorite tracks on the iPod all the time.

[e2mtt]

I have a slightly long way of processing my music, but it works really slick.

I have multiple playlists, relating to the rating:

5-star (any song rated 5, not played in the last 3 days)
4-star (any song rated 4, not played in the last 2 weeks)
3-star (any song rated 3, not played in the last 6 weeks)
2-star (any song rated 2, not played in the last 6 months)
New (default setting in Itunes)
Unrated (any unrated song, not played in the last 4 weeks)

I then make a “hit radio” playlist, that just plays these 6 playlists mixed together. Perfect mix. When a song plays, you can then adjust the rating as required, it is easy to pick up on a song that you hear too often and drop it a star, or promote a great song you haven’t heard in a while.

You can also adjust the “last played” factor on each level to adjust to your preference & music library size.

You could easily add a “music playlist only” modifier to each rule playlist if you have a lot of comedy or spoken word stuff that you want exluded.

The stuff I rate 1-star are things I never want to hear in a music playlist, but don't want to discard for some reason. (horrible song or maybe a spoken segue, but I have the whole album so I don't want to delete it)

For my Ipod, I pull from the same "hit radio" playlist, but I also exclude the 2-star stuff.

[clt7755]

Originally Posted by JTrain_07

Sorry if this was already posted I searched and couldn't find anything. Does anyone know how to set up a Monthly Top-10 smart playlist? I want my top 10 played songs for the month to be made into a playlist so I can look back and see what I was listening too months back. Thanks in advance.

I haven't actually tried this, but it seems logical to me:

What if you made a smart list that contained songs played not prior to [1st of the month] and not after [last day of the month], What ever star levels you wanted, genres, exclusions, or other criteria such as number of times played (greater than [whatever]. Limit it to 10 songs.Then on the last day of the month highlight all the songs in that smartlist and make a regular playlist that is named by [Top Ten ~mm/yy]. If that, for some reason, doesn't get you your list quite right, try limiting your smart list to 20 songs save them into the Top Ten Songs for [mm/yy) regular playlist you created and go through them manually, delete the ones that you don't want- hell- it's only 20 songs, right). Then go in and change the date criteria in that smartlist you created for the next month. Do it all again every month. Hope this works for you! Mind letting me know?

In solidarity, Cat

[raynebair]

I haven't gotten too complex with my playlists yet, but I did create a "Holiday" playlist and a "Not Holiday" playlist so I can include/exclude holiday music.

All of my playlists are quite complex in that I exclude Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Children's Music from them for my iPod (my daughter's has only Children's Music). I also use multiple genres, for example some of my Children's Music is Classical, so it will have both genre. Then I filter with "Does (Not) Contain" instead of "is/is not".

Because my Nano won't hold all my music, I also created a "Nano Random" playlist that comprises all the criteria for the "Not Holiday" but also limits to 2GB and selects random so that it fills up the available space on my Nano (the other 2GB of space is used up by unplayed podcasts for right now).

All also have "match only checked items" and "live updating" turned on.

Question - If I create a playlist based on another playlist, it syncs the songs to the iPod, but I get a flag that the playlist is based on a playlist not found. Will that affect the music on the iPod?

[Code Monkey]

Originally Posted by raynebair

Question - If I create a playlist based on another playlist, it syncs the songs to the iPod, but I get a flag that the playlist is based on a playlist not found. Will that affect the music on the iPod?

What will happen is that that live updating will not take place on the iPod until you sync it with iTunes. Live updating only works on the iPod when *all* referenced lists in a chain are present on the iPod. An easy enough work around is to copy the contents of your intermediate music pool list to a normal playlist and sync that to the iPod and change your mixlists to point to the normal copy instead of the chained smartlist. You'll have to clear and recopy the contents of the normal playlist periodically, but it does allow live updating under situations you otherwise could not accomplish on the iPod.

[chippe01]

I have many, many smart playlists which use combinations of play count, rating, last played, genre, playlist is/is not, comments, groupong, artist, etc. Grouping and comments are great for creating unique smart playlists.

However, it is very annoying when using the grouping and comments fields because you can't just ADD TO either of these fields if there is something there already. I've had a few good ideas for new playlists with these fields, but it would mean either overwriting what's in these fields already by doing a group edit, or doing the songs that already have data in these fields one-by-one.

Is there any PC script in existence that will merely ADD to these fields instead of replacing what is already there for a large collection of songs?

[Germansuplex]

Maybe someone can give me a hand. This is almost like a brain teaser that I have been unable to solve.

I have a smart playlist entitled "American Idol". In it is all tracks I have of live American Idol performances, as well as commercial albums by American Idol artists. For live performances on the actual show, I have the artist in the track name, and "American Idol" as the artist and album artist. For instance, "One - Elliott Yamin & Mary J. Blige" is the track title, and "American Idol" is the artist. The album is "Unreleased". Meanwhile, albums by Taylor Hicks, Ruben Studdard, etc. are tagged as you might imagine.

There is one small issue: I have a music video of the "One" performance I named above, tagged exactly the same way as the audio version. This pops up in the smart playlist, and I cannot figure out how to get it out without modifying the tag (which I don't want to do). Because there are several conditions that I need to have to keep all American Idol stars in this playlist (Artist is Taylor Hicks, Artist is Daughtry, Artist is Ruben Studdard, etc.), I must use "match any of the following rules", which means the
"Kind is MPEG Audio File" option is not going to work. Also, I really don't like using the comment field, and the grouping field is already used for other purposes. I guess what I'm saying is I want to do this without modifying any tags.

Anyone know of a way to get that music video out of the playlist without editing the tag? I'm sure it may be something elementary that's just flying over my head.

[Code Monkey]

Originally Posted by Germansuplex

Anyone know of a way to get that music video out of the playlist without editing the tag? I'm sure it may be something elementary that's just flying over my head.

The problem is that you're wanting to link two different Boolean conditions {MATCH ANY: Artist is American Idol, Artist is Taylor Hicks, etc.} with and exclusion in a single list and there is only one way to get that done in a single list, and you're probably not going to want to do this, is to go with a {MATCH ALL:...} list and put in every single genre or artist that doesn't include your Idol artists along with kind is MPEG audio file.

The shorter version is to use two lists, one the list you already have, the second list saying {MATCH ALL: Playlist is First Idol List; Kind IS MPEG audio file}.