iPod Smart Playlists

I get asked how I organize my iPod playlists quite a bit so I thought I’d write a mini guide.

The Apple iPod has one of the best features ever. The smart playlist. I picked up my 4G iPod (40gb) about a year ago and I’ve been tweaking these things ever since.

The smart playlist is simply a list of instructions/details that create a playlist on the fly based on the conditions you set. To create my list I use a sequence of Smart Playlists that land in one central playlist.

Step One

You must rate all most of your songs. It’s a good idea to go through and rate all the albums you know pretty well first to get them quickly out of the way, I have a system for rating the other stuff as you’ll see later.

Step Two

Start creating the playlists! My naming technique is personal choice so you can change it for what works best for you. The _ is so that it will appear at the top of your playlists.

The first playlist to create is _NewSongs with the following conditions:

• Playlist is newSongs


• Limit to 25 songs select by least recently played


• Live updating

newSongs is a static playlist where I dump all my newly added music’ after I’ve heard it enough and have rated it I delete it form that playlist.

Step Three

Next we create _3_Stars with these settings:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is ***
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 15 songs selected by random
• Live updating

Follow by creating these 2 playlists:

_4_stars

• My Rating is ****
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 45 songs selected by random
• Live updating

_5_Stars

• My Rating is *****
• Last Played is not in the last 1 days
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 80 songs selected by random
• Live updating

Step Four

Now we should have 5 playlists ‘ _NewSongs, newSongs, _3_Stars, 4_Stars, and _5_Stars.

Here we should create _NotRecent to catch all the songs that we love, but haven’t heard in a long time. The rules for this playlist are:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is *****
• Playlist is not _5_Stars
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 15 songs selected by least recently played
• Live updating

Step Five

Almost done! Now we’re going to create _Recent0. This is how I fix the fact that I haven’t rated all my music yet. Let’s be honest’ I haven’t rated more than half of my music yet. This playlist pulls up some songs with no rating and will keep them in rotation until I rate them. The hope is that hearing the same song over and over again will inspire me to get tired of it and rate it just so that it will leave my list. =)

The settings for _Recent0 are:

• Match all of the following conditions:
• My Rating is (0 stars)
• Playlist is not _NewSongs
• Limit to 20 songs selected by most recently played
• Live updating

Step Six

Now we create the list that wraps them all together, __Main. which has two underscores to keep it at the top of the list. This playlist basically just wraps everything into one. The settings:

• Match any of the following conditions:
• Playlist is _NewSongs
• Playlist is _3_Stars
• Playlist is _4_Stars
• Playlist is _5_Stars
• Playlist is _NotRecent
• Playlist is _Recent0
• Live updating

And now you should have a playlist with a good mix of 200 songs for your listening pleasure.

Step Seven

There is no step seven! Well actually there sort of is.

To keep these up to date, any time you add new music to your iPod drop a copy of it to your NewSongs static playlist, and when you’re tired of your NewMusic delete it from the playlist.

And rate your songs!

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