For those who haven’t seen skip count, I’m fairly sure it was added in iTunes 7 and doesn’t exist prior to this… at least on the Windows side of the coin.

As for the backup, Windows users can get Microsoft’s Synctoy for Windows XP, which does a half-decent job of copying files places for backup, but I’m fairly sure setting up rsync would result in a more efficient backup process, speed-wise.

How about using the new feature of Itunes that lets you select multiple Libraries? I keep 4 libraries on my system Music Spoken Word (Audiobooks and Saved podcasts) Comedy Christmas Music

Just hold the option key when you start up Itunes, you can setup a new library or select an existing one.

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[…] Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users […]

Thanks Merlin! I’m down @ 41% of 60g without an external or blank cd-rw’s. I know it’s all the netcasts of video and audio that I want to keep, but some I barely touch when I download an episode without subscribing. Unfortunately, they get lost in the shuffle never to be seen until I reformat the drive.

one thing i should bring up, that i forwarded to macfixit when itunes 7 first arrived on the scene, is that the algorithm that itunes 7 uses for determining whether a track has been “skipped” or “played” is really dodgy. in itunes 6 and previous, you had to listen to a track to the last possible second for it to be counted as played. so if you were using a smart playlist to count tracks being played, and you were at your desk and decided to didn’t want to listen to the fade out at the end of a track and hitt he fast forward button, it wouldn’t be counted. that made the “most played” smartlists pretty unreliable.

now, the track doesn’t need to play through all the way, but i can’t seem to figure out how much itunes 7 needs to play through before it will consider it played. is it a percentage? is it number of seconds remaining? no clue.

and “skipped” is even more schizophrenic. i had my music library selected, and just wanted to listen to all of the songs by one artist. type the name in the search field, blammo. instant playlist. hit randomize button and start listening. of course, i started skipping through the songs, but i was watching the skip count. from what i could tell, about half the time, if i skipped really quickly (the first second or two) it wouldn’t even register as skipped. huh? it was as if itunes 7 was saying “well, how do you know if you don’t like it if you don’t even give it a chance? i’m not adding this to your skip count…” if you let the track get in at least 5-10 seconds and skip, it usually added one to the skip count. but again, not always. utterly bizarre, mostly because it’s so darned unpredictable. if anyone has access to apple’s notes on how the new “played” and “skipped” counts are actually incremented, i would like to have a look.

One thing which would be useful is to know other people’s ideas on hwat the star ratings mean to them.

For me it works like this:

1 - poor - delete without any thought 2 - ok - delete if space required 3 - good 4 - very good - always happy to hear 5 - the very best

That way I know if I have a playlist with more than three stars I’ll always hear stuff I really like. Most of my songs are 3 stars, I do have playslist where I include 3 star songs and I find myself moving them to 2 or 4 star ratings as I hear them more.

I have similar ideas for iPhoto / Aperture ratings:

1 - delete - bad quality / out of focus 2 - delete if space needed - fix able but not very good 3 - good should keep 4 - very good and should print 5 - the very best definitely print and show to people!!

I’ve been slowly catching up on rating songs using the Rate These smart playlist. I use the Synergy pref pane to interact with iTunes. It allows me to add ratings, advance songs, etc.

What I noticed when using the Rate These playlist is that I could only get in one star (using the Synergy key combo) before the song disappeared from the list. My suggestion would be to uncheck Live Updating while you’re actively trying to rate songs.

I use a set of playlists so complicated that I can hardly remember what they all do. They’re extremely useful for sorting through and rating my constant supply of new music. Excuse the lame names. The first thing I use is a “Recently Added” smart playlist that I use to find new music. The next playlist is “The Great Divide”. It is fed by a regular playlist that I add new files to that I want to listen to and sort. If I listen to something on that playlist twice without rating it, it leaves the playlist. If I give it a rating below three, it gets killed off as well. 3 or 4 or 5 start songs go on to “Potential”. If a song gets played three times and has a four or five star rating it gets added to my favorites playlist. If not, it’s layed to rest. This works very well if you have limited space on your ipod (I have a nano) and has a real radio feel to it.

[…] Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users | 43 Folders (tags: apple osx itunes) […]

For those who don’t have time to rate their library there is a osx program called iRate which can be set to scan through every track and rate it based on “how many times it has been played/time you’ve had it” or something like that.

Very useful for a 10 day long library :)

Ironically, I struggled with finding a good way to start this task not only because the idea of rating over 8000 songs seemed hellish, but because I couldn’t get my head around a balanced rating system. Initially, it seemed like only three stars would be needed, though five allows for a bit more nuance. This got me up and running fast, but requires some long-term vigilance in order to fine tune. Here’s what I did:

First, bulk edit any artists or albums you like to listen to at any time with three stars automatically.

Four stars are reserved for your favorite bands. Think of it as an automatic extra star for just being the Pixies. Hello Pixies.

A five star rating is a “break glass in case of emergency” song. These are ice-cold awesome songs so powerful (or classic) that deserve special treatment. A good way to determine what constitutes a five is to sort by rating. For instance, as much as I may love The Misfits’ “Astro Zombies,” it is not in the same league as “Everlong.” You should not have too many fives. At most they should constitute around 10% of your library.

Promote and demote as needed along these lines. A “meh” song on an otherwise great record? Give it a two. A great song on a three star record gets bumped up to four. One star ratings are reserved for songs that are only worth listening to for that cool high-hat fill in the bridge.

TV themes, novelty tunes, comedy records, and whatever’s left over get no rating. This allows you to weed the suckage out of your smart playlists pretty quickly and gives you a nice chunk of unrated junk to check out at your leisure. And since iPods allow you to rate songs as well, you can save some of the detail work for the road after synching up.

Coupled with correct genre tags and (I’ve found) year tags, you’ll have a pretty good ability to quickly pull some sweet playlists together.

[…] The folks over at 43folders have posted about an ingenious way to find those huge space hogs in your iTunes library and destroy them. The secret? The iTunes Smart Playlist. […]

I just trimmed 6 GB off my powerbook HD using the “old podcasts” list. Brilliant. Simply the most effective way to free up space on my drive that I’ve come across. Thanks Merlin.

Good tips. The only thing I noticed is your playlists seems overly complicated. I struggled with building a good playlist structure until I finally landed on this solution. It divides your music into likes and dislikes (using star ratings), and loads your iPod appropriately (more likes than dislikes).

[…] Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power usersMore iTunes tips for those of you with more music than free time. By Lopy The Loper | posted in The Daily Loper Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links […]

Sorry, that URL for the logic professor’s blog was all mashed up for some reason. Here it is again: http://consequently.org/news/2006/02/04/fun_with_playlists_squeezing_your_music_library_onto_a_2gb_ipod/index.php

Is anyone using the grouping or category slots at all? I’ve found them useful for sub-classifying genres even further, then creating playlists that slice through my library in several different directions. For instance, a certain track by the band Gorguts may have have “Death Metal” as it’s genre and “Experimental” as a grouping. This makes it easy for it to end up in a playlist with, say, Captain Beefheart, in the genre “Rock”, and grouped as “Experimental”, and Ornette Coleman, “Jazz” also grouped as “Experimental”.

One improvement that would be great would be to allow the creation of even more genre tags.

Also, since I’ve been using automatic lyric-finding software like pearlyrics , I find myself wanting to make smart playlists based on lyrics. Songs that mention cheese? Country songs that mention dogs or cats? The possibilities are endless…

I also can’t find a way to delete from Smart Playlists… in Windows. Any suggestions?

Never mind; Shift-Delete seems to do the trick!

Thanks for the great ideas, K.

Plenty more good playlist ideas at http://smartplaylists.com/

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To keep my library organized, I use Libra (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22029).

I keep my stock music library (for multimedia production) in a separate library than my personal collection.

Google “Doug’s Applescripts” for unlimited iTunes usefulness.

Not played in the last however many months is very good for iPod playlists.

I like using a “Rotation” playlist. I put stuff in there that I either want to listen to again or haven’t listened to yet but want to. It also gets synced to my nano. It fills 1/2 of my iPod usually, with the other half split between top rated tracks that haven’t been played in at least 6 months and an assortment of unplayed tracks. (I have about 100 gigs of music that still has a playcount of zero.)

iPods (at least nanos) don’t talk skip count, so it’s not as useful as it might otherwise be.

Getting rid of artwork is silly!

Merlin,

Call me stupid, but I just don’t get the “Basic Culling” list. First off, if you’ve never listened to something, why would it be rated anyway? I don’t rate my songs, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t rate them without at least one listen first!

Second, if a song has a play count of 0, isn’t it obvious that it hasn’t been played in the last two months either?

The only way I see this list being useful is if “Match All” is changed to “Match Any.” Or is there something really basic I’m missing?

Tagging songs in iTunes…

Maybe it is just me, but the greatest personal benefit of web2.0 to me is not the “social” aspect, but the tagging. I am a digital pack-rat; I always have been. The problem with being a pack-rat in the paradigm of folder/file is actually fi…

[…] Revenge of the Smart Playlist: Wow! So many hours of procrastination will stem from this one post I want to prostrate myself at Merlin Mann’s feet. (tags: kottke itunes music playlists procrastination) […]

Good stuff. I’ve been forcing myself to rate my songs, lately. It really does help in setting up playlists, etc…

One tip I can offer for easy rating, is through your fav Quicksilver. I have setup QS to rate currently playing song using keyboard shortcut Control-1, Control-2, etc.. This makes it super easy while I work to rate them.

@Ryan Option-delete should delete the selected song from your library and all playlists, I think.

Some nice Playlists,thanks.

One thing I’ve never been to figure out is how to delete all of the songs from within the playlist. So, while the playlists are great for collecting the songs together, right now I still have to go back into the Library to move the files to the trash. Or am I missing something huge?

I wish I could remember the name of the app that did this for me, but I recently gained a couple gigs of disk space by running something that deleted the album art from my iTunes files. Graphics. Things that aren’t actually audio, in other words, but that bloat up the directory anyway.