iTunes Smart Playlists Rock
I'm turning into a big fan of Smart Playlists in iTunes 7.
Here is my current iTunes situation:
- 2500+ songs
- Wide range of genres
- Lots of podcasts
- Lots of podcasts improperly labeled as music after initial import of MP3s.
This makes Random Shuffle basically worthless if I'm beyond easy access to my computer or iPod to skip over tunes or podcasts that don't meet my tastes for a random shuffle.
Before, I could have unchecked items from the 2500+ I didn't want in my random shuffle, but that's way too much of a pain. But now I can achieve the same results in under a minute by creating a new Smart Playlist:
This Smart Playlist I whipped together cleans things up by:
- Removing files labeled as podcasts
- Skipping songs I've had a habit of skipping
- Limits plays to files with 128kbps Bit Rates (filters podcasts not properly labeled as podcasts)
- Removed Country (there's a time and a place for Country, but not every day for me)
- It also eliminates unchecked songs, picks 100 matching songs at random for this playlist in my iPod, and updates on the fly in iTunes
Smart Playlists provide an almost limitless number of criteria for building custom playlists. Life is good.
How have Smart Playlists changed your listening habits?