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"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists
Merlin Mann | Nov 9 2006
New for Friday 11/10: In my MacBreak Weekly capacity as Vice-President in Charge of Digging Pointless Ratholes™, I recently mentioned some tricks that I use to create better playlists in iTunes. One of these tricks -- which is an oldie, and which I'm certain I yoinked from some uncredited smarter person out in the blogtropolis -- is to create a "Music Only" list. So you know how you have increasing buttloads of non-music (podcasts, audio books, etc.) in your iTunes library? It's really annoying to throw on one of your sexy Smart Playlists or the Party Shuffle, only to have a 20 minute nap or a Noam Chomsky lecture kick in. I get around this by basing almost all my Smart Playlists on my one canonical "Music Only" list, which currently looks like this:
Yes, it's very hacky, and yes there's probably a more elegant way to accomplish this effect, but so far it's been a handy jumping off point for my favorite Smart Playlists. This helps me build stuff like... New and unlistened-to
My neglected lovers
If you're even a casual iTunes user, it pays to spend some time rating your songs (no they can't all be "5 stars"), adding rich metadata, and building Smart Playlists. So powerful. And it you're using a (GUI-free) iPod Shuffle but not Smart Playlists? Man, that's just nuts.  Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users
By popular demand, here are five more Smart Playlists, designed to help you manage very large libraries and bubble up interesting tracks (that you may not realize you like). (more ») 50 Comments
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 I have a playlist that's...Submitted by don (not verified) on November 9, 2006 - 11:09am.
I have a playlist that's my primary place for listening to iTunes which is an auto-updating playlist which does some similar stuff. It actually uses a preliminary smart playlist as the first filter giving me playcount=0 OR not a podcast. Then I do some additional filtering from there (remove Christmas music, drop a few other things, limit to an hour and a half, but auto-refresh, etc. giving priority to the least frequently listened-to stuff) so when a new podcast shows up, it will automatically show up in the top slots at the start of the day. It doesn't translate well into iPod listening since auto-updating smart playlists on the iPod are neither auto-updating nor smart, but since it's rare that I'm using an iPod (I have to borrow my wife's if I do), that's not too bad. » POSTED IN:
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