Spicing up iTunes playlists

I really like my iPod. I’ve got a 4GB Mini that I keep in the car (hooked up to the stereo) and I listen to that instead of the radio. I have a couple of playlists that account for about 2GB of songs on there. You would think with that many songs all would be good. And most of time it is, but after a while, you will listen to all of those songs and start to hear the same ones over and over and over. Even your most favorite of songs will begin to grate on your nerves.

So how do you prevent this?

For me the secret has been to set up two new play lists. One is dedicated to new songs (i.e. just bought or ripped), and the other is for songs that haven’t been played a while.

With iTunes, you can setup a play list that will select songs based on certain fields. For me, most of my play lists revolve around the “rating” of the song. 1 Star means I don’t like it, 5 Stars means its the best thing I’ve ever heard. As a consequence, I have a lot of songs that fall into the 3 to 4 star range. Randomly choosing songs from this pool is ok, but for some reason I always seem to wind up with the same core groups of songs, and like I said earlier, they are starting to get stale.

It turns out that there is another field that iTunes keeps track of, the “last time played”. This is interesting because now we can build a play list based not only on how much we like the song, but also how long it has been since we have heard it. Combining the two ideas together leads to an interesting new play list. Here’s a picture of how I have mine setup:

The real beauty of this play list is that as songs are listened to, their “last played” date is set to now, and when I sync up the next time, a new song will take its place. This way, I can keep listening to the songs I like, but don’t have to worry about stale songs because the play list is always being refreshed.

And as I listen to songs on the Mac, this updates the last played dates also, so the net effect is I’m adding a lot of chaotic variability to the play list. Which in turn means that the songs on the play list will tend to be more “random” because there are two sources of input (the iPod and iTunes) that are influencing the results of what gets picked.