GeekForce

I wrote earlier about how I had my setup to allow me to rate music in a better way. It’s working out really well, so I thought I’d document it further, for those who want to be in the know.

I dont like to use iTunes to rate music while i’m listening. mostly because it’s not very convenient to do - too many mouse clicks.

Now, with the iPod, rating is easy, and takes about 3 clicks, and a twirl of the thumb. It’s great.

My goals for using the iPod initially were to get all my music rated. This called for the use of a Smart PlayList in iTunes. It looks like this

The first thing to notice is that My rating has NO STARS in it. This gives me songs that I have not rated. I’m leveraging an important consideration in database design here - the NULL value. When songs have a no rating, or a NULL, they make it into this play list. Notice that I have limited this playlist to 700MB, so that it does not fill my iPod, but I does put over 100 songs on my iPod that are unrated.

It’s very convenient to sit during the day, even at work, and rate songs. Here’s the important thing to remember: When i sychronize my iPod at night, all the songs that i have rated, go out of the list, leaving space for others that i have not rated yet.

So, I have a rolling 700MB of songs that I have not rated. It works really well, and my iPod’s content is changing all the time, so I dont get caught in the ‘My iPod only likes to play the Bee Gee’s’ problem or some such…

This got me to thinking of other ways that I could use the iPod to further arbitrate my tastes… The next playlist was the ‘My Favorite Songs’ playlist. This one has only the songs I rated 5 stars. Again, this is a Smart Play List. It looks like this

Notice that this playlist has a few more songs in it - it’s 750MB. This time I set My Rating to 5 Stars, and Live Updating is checked.

Here are the implications of this: If I rate a previously unrated song as 5 stars, it now shows up in this playlist. So, it went from the Unrated playlist, to the Favorites list. So, it remains on my iPod.

This also means that if I’m listening to a 5 star song, and decide that I’ve changed my mind, and rate it 4, or 3 stars, the next time I sync, that song leaves my iPod.

So, with these two Smart Play Lists, I have both unrated, and my favorite songs. So, I’m rating my music, and managing my taste, without ever touching things on my home system. Remember that your ratings from the iPod transfer to your iTunes library. so as you use the iPod, you’re updating your home library. This is a really great bonus.

Fortunately for us geeks, things can get dizzyingly more complex.

Look at this Smart Play List. What do you make of it?

See the Skip Count criteria? It’s set to ‘is 0′. Skip Count is a really great feature of the iPod, and iTunes, and you can use it to further control the music that gets to your iPod, to ensure that you only get the stuff you really love.

A skip is counted whenever you skip through a song. You do this by clicking the next control on the right side of the wheel.

This playlist gets me all the songs that are better than average, that I’ve never skipped through. I must like them an awful lot, if I’ve never skipped them, right? Well, maybe…

now its time to think about what the music on the iPod looks like. The corpus if you will…

Songs that I’ve rated a 5 will always be there, at least 750MB of them. 750 MB of songs that I’ve never skipped that have a rating greater than 3 stars will be on the ipod. Songs that I’ve never rated are on there too. If I skip through a 3 or 4 star rated song, it gets removed from my iPod. Notice that it doesn’t matter if I skip through a 5 star song. Because the song has fives stars, it’s in the Favorites playlist too. So, it’ll stay on the iPod.

I have to admit that setting the Skip Count option to include songs I’ve never skipped has me a little cautious, probably skipping something once, is no crime, I’m just not in the mood for it. But for now, it seems to be working pretty well.

What will this do for you? well, it’s a new way to use your iPod, for one. If you’ve got one of the 80GB ones that you can just willy-nilly chuck your whole music collection into, you might consider setting these playlists up, and starting to use them, as they may help to improve the variety of music that you hear.

I like to think that this makes you iPod more of a music ecosystem. Songs are now fighting for top billing, but that fight is your actual listening habits. like i said there are a dizzying number of variables that iTunes stores about the music you listen to, and you can build Smart PlayLists that use any and all of this information to give you very strange, or effective management of your music.

Hopefully this post is a foot in the door for some, and intuitively obvious for others.

There’s another article over at 43 folders with some ways to help manage your music library using smart playlists. You might also want to look at this post, where 43folders explains how to get down to the basics ofplaylists that have JUST your music in them.