Usually when I listen to music, I want easy-listening background tracks, but I don’t want a select few songs played on loop. I imagine the common way to manage this is by having a manual playlist of songs, adding each song one-by-one, removing songs as they become old.
Spending more and more time on a Mac, using Zune Software as my music software has become increasingly more difficult. I’ve always disliked iTunes, WinAMP, Rythmbox and the mass of other music players due to their (comparatively) basic user interfaces, even with skins they haven’t kept my interest.
After resorting to iTunes I’ve become used to it’s simple interface and made a decent attempt at using it on Shuffle, rating annoying songs low and hitting “Next” has become something of a muscle-memory action. I had hoped that by rating songs I disliked low, they would play less, similar to the “Choose higher rated items more often” feature in iPod/iTunes sync. Seeking confirmation I Googled the subject, and an OmniNerd article gave the answer, iTunes Shuffle doesn’t care what rating songs have.
Exploring the iTunes user interface further, I discovered iTunes Smart Playlists. The standard playlists appear to be relatively unhelpful, but they can be easily customized to be brilliant!
By editing the rules behind one of the existing playlists, the playlists can be easily made much more powerful.
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| The list of Smart Playlists included by default |
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| Editing an existing Smart Playlist to remove low-rated songs |
Most of my music is unrated, so it has taken a while to cut down on the number of irritating songs that play, but I’ve noticed the quality of music that plays is slowly improving. With the above setting, only music I’ve rated highly, or haven’t rated at all is played; anything I’ve rated low is banned from the playlist.
I’m very happy, although this will take a decent amount of work to get to weed-out the songs I don’t want, I can still listen to a mix of tunes I either like, or haven’t heard - I’m nearly there! iTunes Smart Playlists have solved one of the most prominent issues of managing a decent sized music collection, a feature that I don’t know if I’d be be able to abandon easily.
