Feaverish

To the person who arrived at my site searching for “invented iTunes”: Welcome! You’ve come to the right place. It’s a little known fact that the program used every day by millions of people worldwide was whipped together in a few hours in my college dorm room while I was supposed to be reading Milton. Of course, it was slimmed down a bit when Apple bought it (the original GUI was a clown face, with the clown’s eyes, nose, and mouth hole serving as the buttons), but I’m happy to see that my vision of bringing order to billions of illegally downloaded songs remains more or less true to its roots (discarded clown face notwithstanding).

A couple days ago I was sitting in the pub with a friend who bemoaned the fact that, despite having over 10,000 songs on his computer and iPod, he could never find anything to listen to. I made a trenchant remark to the effect that, when your music library consists solely of U2 and Willie Nelson songs, you’re bound to experience some stagnation, but in all seriousness I’ve made a bunch of playlists and whatnot to make sure this never happens to me, and I’ll graciously share them with you after the jump.

My single most important playlist is called “Ear Catching.” It’s basically just a regular playlist where I throw songs I hear and really like. Maybe they’re old favorites I’ve forgotten about, but usually they’re new songs from albums I just got. I try to keep this playlist around 100 songs or so, and the idea is that it’s good for a listen no matter what mood I’m in. Put it on shuffle and I’ll hear nothing but songs I really like.

The problem is, it’s only 100 songs. So to expand the experience a little bit, I make an “Ear Catching Albums” playlist. This playlist holds the entire albums of the songs in the Ear Catching playlist. Obviously, it can get pretty large. Ear Catching Albums gives me all the songs on Ear Catching, as well as a bunch of closely related music that I probably haven’t listened too very much.

Rounding out the Ear Catching series is an “Ear Catching Bands” playlist. This one’s truly huge, with every song by every band in my Ear Catching playlist. I don’t listen to it as often as the first two, but there’s always a lot of good stuff in here, by bands I really like.

I’ve also got Smart Playlists at each star level. So the ★★★★ playlist is a couple thousand great songs, and the ★★★★★ are the two hundred or so best. Of course, the default iTunes Top Rated playlist includes all ★★★★ and ★★★★★ songs, and I keep this one around.

I keep a “Not Lately” Smart Playlist that is constantly updated with songs I haven’t listened to in the last three months. This is a good way to weed out music you never listen to, and of course you could make it more interesting by including ratings. So for example, maybe you want a Smart Playlist showing only ★★★★ songs you haven’t listened to in the last three months, or whatever.

Using star ratings to find music means that unrated music will get shortchanged, so I’ve got a “Rate Me!” (exclamation point absolutely necessary) Smart Playlist showing all unrated songs. I put this on shuffle every once in a while and rate as many songs as I can. When it gets too high (say, over 500 songs) I might listen to it all day every day for a week or so to try and get it down to zero.

I’ve got a “New” Smart Playlist showing all the albums added in the last three months (though this time period might change if the playlist gets too big), and I try to listen to this playlist on “Album Shuffle” instead of the standard “Song Shuffle,” just to keep the whole Album Experience intact.

When iTunes introduced the Party Shuffle feature, I thought it was kind of pointless, but I’ve been using it a lot lately, and it’s actually pretty neat. The great thing about Party Shuffle is that you can reorder and delete upcoming songs, unlike just shuffling your entire library, for instance, where you have to skip tracks you don’t like and you never know what’s coming next. Party Shuffle’s a great way to hear music you haven’t heard in a while, music that isn’t on any other playlists, and singles and whatnot you’d never navigate to using iTunes’ browser.

Finally, I’ve got two Top 40 playlists, one for songs and one for albums. These are the 40 songs and albums I’m most into at the moment, and I songs rotate in and out several times a week.

Smart Playlists is a great site where users share their favorite smart playlists. There’s some really creative stuff there, so you should check it out.

Anybody got any tips they want to share?