Well, over the summer, I’ve been playing around with iTunes’ “Smart Playlist” features, and I think that I may have possibly found what are the “perfect” random playlists. Now, before I begin, let me say that the original concepts are not mine. I saw a blog article about this somewhere before that gave me the “blueprints” to work from, so to speak. However, I’ve improved on them (greatly), and now I“m going to share ‘em with you guys.
First some pre-requisites. Though these were created and tested on iTunes, I would assume that they can be, if not replicated, then emulated fairly closesly on any music player that allows some sort of “Smart” playlist building feature. Secondly, these playlists really depend on you rating your collection. I’m not saying that every song needs rating, but… well, you’ll see. :P The third step is optional. You’ll need a “normal” playlist that includes songs that you absolutely wouldn’t want playing in any of your playlists. I say that this step is optional because if you rate your collection, then you can just rate those songs with a low rating and they won’t be included. I call this playlist “Slow Songs.”
Secondly, I make some assumptions on how you rate songs. This is how I interpret my ratings and how I base the ratings part of the autoplaylist, so if they do not accurate reflect your system, then you can monitor and adjust as necessary.
- 0 Stars (Unrated) – You either haven’t listened to this, or you don’t feel strongly enough about it to give it a rating.
- 1 Star (Absolute Crap) – You don’t want to hear this mess ever.
- 2 Stars (Poor to Average) – You might want to hear some of this sometime, but most of the time, you’d rather skip it
- 3 Stars (Good) – You’d probably want to listen to it all the way through if it came up randomly
- 4 Stars (Excellent) – You could probably listen to this a few times in a row.
- 5 Stars (Stupendous!!!) – This song is absolutely amazing! You could listen to it a million times in a row!
Now that I have all that background info out of the way… ON TO THE LISTS!
Daily Listening
The purpose of this playlist is to give you a random playlist that you can, well… listen to while going about your daily activities. :P
You’re probably not going to want to listen to Christmas music during your daily grind, nor are you probably going to want to listen Speeches, videos or podcasts. The country part is my own addition, feel free to add any genres you’d not normally want to hear in its own rule. The one and two-star rules are defined separately instead of using a “greater than” rule so as not to rule out the music that doesn’t have a rating yet. Now, the last played will vary greatly based on the size of your collection. A good rule of thumb is to set a value that will give you at least a quarter of your collection, even if you played your music non-stop. The number of items that you limit it to is a bit of personal preference, as well. 50 or 100 items are good choices.
Listen to This
This playlist is another random one that will play more of your favorite songs. Originally, I had this one set up as basically a “Random Top Rated Songs Playlist”, but then expanded it to included 3-Star songs as well, for more variety.
Use the same ideas set from the “Daily Listening” playlist, if you’d like to change around the rules to more closely match your own setup or preferences. For this playlist, I’d recommend limiting the number of items (depending on the size of your collection) to no more than 50 items.
New Shit
This playlist randomly play a song that was added in the last month, but not if it’s been played in the last day. It has the same basic foundations as the previous two playlists.
Unplayed
As the name suggests, this playlist randomly plays any songs that have not had a play in your collection.
Well, there you have ‘em. Quite possibly the “perfect” playlists. If you have any comments or suggestions, or have a playlist of your own you’d like to share, drop a comment on the article. :)