If you’re like me, you never listen to the radio because you’re very particular about the music you hear. Thankfully, this is the age of the iPod, when someone can carry their entire music library in their pocket, and you don’t have to worry about hearing a song you don’t like.
However, that doesn’t mean you’re always in the mood for certain songs. And if you have lots of single songs or old classics in your music collection, listening to them means you have to search for them. Just turning on the shuffle option in iTunes doesn’t cut it, because it’s a little too random; a song will be chosen regardless of whether you just heard it an hour ago or a year ago, and regardless of how much you like it.
The solution is a smart iTunes playlist: a playlist that will not only have a mix of new music and old classics, it’ll adjust according to your tastes. That means you won’t need to interact in selecting or skipping songs, and a song won’t play over and over again, unless you want it to.
Another advantage of a smart playlist is that you can put on some music quickly, without having to decide what you feel like. If you tend to get focused on projects for hours at a time, it’s nice to not have to constantly be choosing the music to play in the background. And whether you’re taking a 5‑minute walk to the grocery store, or a 5‑hour drive out of town, a smart iTunes playlist will fill the time with music perfectly.
Here’s how I do it.
Organize by rating
The first thing you need to do is rate the songs in your library. You don’t need to rate all of them, but the more you have rated, the more will be in rotation in your smart playlist. Here’s my rating system:
- 1 Star — These are songs I don’t like; usually part of an album, which is how they found their way into my collection. Rating a song with one star is more of a way of noting that I’ll probably delete it from my library eventually.
- 2 Stars — These are usually transition pieces in an album, but important pieces nonetheless because the album can be disjarred and unpleasant without these tracks. In other words, songs you want to keep but only want to hear in the context of other songs. Examples are Parabol by Tool (which is followed by Parabola), or Interlude off Absolution by Muse, which fades into Hysteria.
- 3 Stars — This is the meat of your smart playlist. Also considered songs you wouldn’t mind hearing a few times a year.
- 4 Stars — These are the songs that stand out as being a better than the rest. Songs you wouldn’t mind hearing more often, but still ones that you may get tired of.
- 5 Stars — Songs you don’t mind hearing over and over again, and whatever the situation or mood.
Protip: iTunes ratings are stored in your iTunes file, NOT in the audio files themselves. When making backups of your hard drive, make sure you backup your iTunes libary files too, or you may lose all your ratings if your hard drive dies.
Create your playlists
The smart playlist — which I like to call the -station — is actually a combination of four other playlists. These playlists interact with each other to keep your tunes going according to your tastes.
The Core
The ‑core is the collection of everything you want in your smart playlist, regardless of rating. You could look at it as a way of filtering out anything you wouldn’t normally want to hear, such as voice memos, TV shows, audiobooks, etc. And if you’re like me and need to be in a certain mood for genres like musicals and ambient, you can filters those out too.
Another way of doing this is to only include the genres you want to hear, instead of excluding the ones you don’t. So if you generally only like listening to electronic music but have a bunch of other genres in your collection as well, you can have “Genre contains dubstep, genre contains drum and bass, genre contains techno…”, etc.
The Infuser
The ‑infuser filters through all the songs in the ‑core playlist above for anything rated 3‑stars. And it’s selecting the biggest chunk of music at 500 songs, so it makes up the bulk of the mix.
The Sprinkler
The ‑sprinkler will add in songs that stand out from the rest, rated at 4‑stars. The setting for “Last played is not in the last 14 days” means you won’t have heard them in the last two weeks.
The Sprinkler+
The ‑sprinkler+ will add in any 5‑star songs you have, regardless of when you last heard them.
The Station
And finally, the ‑station takes songs at random from the three playlists you just created for your customized mix.
Protip: You can add a hyphen at the beginning of the playlists in your radio station to keep them organized together.
Extra: Bonus playlists
Unrated: You can make a handy “Unrated” playlist to help with the process of sorting through your songs. When you have over 10 days of continuous music, it can take a lot of time to rate each one, even if you already know how you feel about a song. This is especially helpful if you add a bunch of new music to your library and forget to rate them, because it can then all be found in one place. As soon as a song is rated, it will add itself to the rotation.
Favourites: This playlist is simply any song rated 4 or 5‑stars. I like to put this on as a pick-me up in the mornings or when I need an energy boost.
Play station
Once you have some songs rated and your playlists going, all you need to do is play the ‑station and let it take care of the rest. I choose not to enable shuffle, because I may decide to listen to something like a voice memo and then resume where I left off.
If you have your music synced with your iPod or iPhone and you play the ‑station from both there and your computer, it’s a good idea to sync up every now and then to update both on which songs have played. I usually go a week between syncs, so I fill my ‑station with a week’s worth of music.
Adjustments
As your music collection expands, your ratings and tastes may change too, so you’ll need to fine-tune your smart playlist every now and then.
Every person listens to music differently too, and many of these settings are very subjective. For example if you find your ‑station has too many 3‑star songs and you haven’t heard any 5‑star in a while, lower the number of songs from 500 song limit in the ‑core playlist. Or if you find you’re hearing your 4‑star songs too frequently, increase the date range for when it was last played in the ‑infuser playlist.
Credits
Much of this article is based on this fantastic post by Adam Knight, and tweaked for my own geeky (and probably OCD) purposes, so much thanks goes to him.
This is awesome! I’m going to do this when get home.
My library is in desperate need of clean-up too, so I’ll have to devote some time to that. I had shuffle on while I was playing Torchlight this weekend and some real crap came up.
You could simplify ‑core to just use “Media Kind” is “Music”.
You’re right, thanks for the tip…I’ve updated the screenshot.
I’ve always wanted this but have never gotten past the stage of rating the songs because… well I move on to other things that interest me more than organizing digital files.
Maybe I should get Brent to do this for me. Whenever he sees that only half my tracks have artwork and the titles/artists aren’t all capitalized in the same fashion he takes my stuff and ‘fixes’ it for me.
But you only need to organize them once and then they’re all clean and pretty! I guess it all comes down to priority…I’d clean my music files before I clean my bathroom.
Glad to hear Brent is as much of a stickler about that stuff as me. That’s probably be the only thing we have in common.
You actually have more in common than that. Let me think:
-you both have musical instrument playing as hobbies
‑You are both into having a very neat and tidy house (I’m assuming this since your house has always been tidy when I was there)
‑you are both dudes
Thanks for this post! I have never rated my songs because as I tend to be up, down, or in the middle, I have about seven playlists that follow those and other criteria; never thought of doing it this way. I’m going to cull my lists soon and then clean it up with this.
The sad part for me is that I now realize since I no longer commute, I rarely am able to listen to more than a half hour of music at a stretch, every morning, while playing with my grownup facepaints.…. that’s SO not enough music per day. I need to increase my quota.
I’ve noticed the same thing about changing commutes. I used to have over an hour bus ride to work, so I used to listen to albums that would last that long. And since I was stuck without anything else to do, that meant I had a lot more tolerance for progressive rock songs that go on for over 15 minutes.
Wow, I’ve never thought to organize a playlist this way! I usually just go by a mood or a theme or just plain “songs for driving” and end up with a ton of repeats.
I used to listen to my music based purely on mood too. I had several playlists organized as such, but eventually I found it much too tedious to sort my songs into each one cause it’s not something you can do quickly and easily when you’re on the go; with the star ratings, it’s something you can do right on your iPhone or iPod.
Eventually, I found the ultimate smart playlist to be good enough.
Thanks for sharing this idea! I adjusted my core list to allow the Soundtrack genre and filter out specific tracks within that genre using the 2‑star rating. Some soundtrack albums contain actual songs, not just the instrumental background music from a movie. “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou” contain songs that were popular in their own right prior to the film, and the “Out of Africa” soundtrack includes Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, a piece which holds a 5‑star rating in my library!
Can you write the following smartlist for me. I can’t seem to get it. I want two rules. One play higher rated songs more often. Play songs once a week. i look forward to your reply. Using Itunes for Mac OSX 10.4 version 6
I do something very similar, except that I limit my unranked playlist to 25 songs picked at random. Gives me more incentive to do it when it’s only 25. Anyway, When I rate a song of course it goes away and a new one pops in, and the song would skip to the next song in queue. In iTunes 11, it stops the playlist now :(
My library outgrew my 160gb ipod a year ago and I’ve been putting off finding a work around since then. Thanks for such a clear and excellent post.
Hey there. Amazing article. I do exactly the same thing.
What I recommend too is a list
“Songs of the moment”
ie. songs added in last 12m, listened too over 5 times and rating 4* or over.
I love this playlist and picks up always good tunes.
‑Giulio
Hey Jeff — this is a great article! I had no idea that itunes has this kind of capability. You’ve basically figured out how to built your own recommendation engine! I too have the shuffle woes where I feel like I skip 50 songs in a row and give up.
One thing I wonder — is it easy to share these prebuilt playlists between itunes users? I like to throw outdoor parties and it would be cool to have different friends stream to my sound system, and give me their preprogrammed list if I like it.
Hi Jeff, I love the system you have put in place. I do have one question for you, how do you determine the rating distribution. What I mean is do you set yourself an amount (or percentage) of 5 stars vs 4 stars vs 3 stars. I always end up having too much of one or the other either because I tend to overrate.
Hey Alex, I don’t have a ratio system to keep a balance of 3 vs 4 vs 5 star ratings. If you feel like you’re ending up with too many of one type in your station, try adjusting the “Limit to X items” option for both the Sprinkler and Sprinkler+ playlists.
Question for you…
I like randomness and don’t want to hear the same artist two times in a row and preferably once every 5 songs.
Do you have any idea to make the following rule: “artist not played in last 5 songs” ?
Thanks.
Only problem I’m having is the 5 star songs do not remove themselves once played. As I have more than 200 I set Sprinkler+ to not contain songs played in the last 24 hours.