Creative iPod playlists
My wife recently wanted an iPod and bought the 80GB iPod black. We are in the process of putting our entire family’s music on the Mac through iTunes. Since her music tastes differ from the rest of ours in many cases (I prefer more 70s and 80s classic and hard rock and she likes more pop and the kids are over the map), we have begun exploring creating different playlists for each of us. This way whomever is listening to the iPod can listen to the type of music they are interested in.
We learned that by setting the shuffle to “songs” (SETTINGS->SHUFFLE->Songs) it is possible to shuffle within playlists.
I just did some searching through Google to see what creative playlist generating others were doing and came across this strategy from maximumaardvark:
I created five smart playlists. The first three are simple: I call them ‘x-star radio’, where x is a number between 3 and 5 inclusive. The ‘3-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 3 stars that have not been played in the last 10 weeks. The ‘4-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 4 stars that have not been played in the last 4 weeks. The ‘5-star radio’ playlist contains all songs rated 5 stars that have not been played in the last 2 days (since I use the 5 star rating to mark songs that I am, like, so totally in love with right now). The fourth playlist is a smart playlist that contains all of the songs added to my iTunes library within the last 21 days. I tie it all together with a fifth playlist called ‘@Radio’ (the @ keeps it at the lexicographical top of my playlists). It’s a smart playlist that is defined as the union of the other four.
Sounds like a good strategy. Anybody reading have other good playlist techniques? Here’s a good guide to creating smart playlists I found.