Flashes of Panic

I’ve hinted at this before, but it’s painfully geeky and I figured nobody else would want to know. But Joe asked.

The central idea is this: I don’t want to hear any song so often I get sick of it. But I do want to hear songs I like more often.

The problem with creating a complicated playlist criteria in iTunes (and hence on the iPod) is that “smart” playlists must be either made entirely of AND rules (“Match all of these criteria”) or entirely of OR rules (“Match any of these criteria”.) You can’t combine ANDs and ORs in one list. So what I do is create a series of playlists made of AND rules, then a master playlist which is, essentially, an OR of all those AND playlists. Like so:

First, I created five “smart” playlists with two rules each, one for the rating of the song and one for how long since it was last played. For example, if the rating is five stars and the last-played date is more than ten days ago, it makes that list. Songs need to match both rules to be on these lists.

As the ratings get lower, the “how long” is longer; one star, for me, is currently 70 days. This is barely relevant, because one-star songs are usually the first to go when I’m deleting music, but it gives an idea of the range. The larger the collection, the longer these times go; when I had half as many songs on an iPod, one star was only forty days and five stars was only five.

The next step is the master playlist. This list includes songs which are on any of the five rated playlists; there’s just a rule each of those playlists, where “playlist is X.” So that bundles up the whole library, generally showing a bit more than a third of the total. I also check the box which says only to play “checked” songs, so I can un-check the checkbox next to the song and it won’t play no matter what its rating. Needless to say, I “shuffle” the master playlist (play it in random order.)

The weakness here is that all my music needs a rating. The simple way of dealing with this is to create a sixth sub-playlist, “Unrated,” which includes all unrated songs, no matter how long it’s been since they were played. This means if I want a song to go away, I need to rate it! It’s an ongoing process; I have songs still in the library which haven’t been rated because they haven’t played in three months. I also continually change ratings; any time a song catches my ear, I’ll bring up the iTunes menu and check the rating, bumping it up if I like it or down if it bugs me. (Sometimes if it bugs me, I’ll just delete it. Why should I keep something I don’t like?)

This can, of course, be The Death of the Album. I do still play CDs from start to finish now and then. I also make occasional mix playlists because songs just work well together. (Kelsey played a set on Saturday which could’ve been a good playlist from my library; in fact, I’m making a playlist with the ones I’ve got.) And sometimes, particularly when I’m at the gym or in the car, I will just play the five-star playlist.

So, yeah, I’m kinda geeky about my music. And all in all, it works surprisingly well.

Now Playing: Roses Grow from Free by Concrete Blonde