Every song rated
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I did this about a 8 months ago. I have over 8,300 songs. Most are from CD’s, over 1500 are from iTMS, and the rest, well, lets just say I found them. 
The CD’s were easy enough to rate, but the rest I did as I listened to them. I now have over 4,500 songs that I have rated 5 stars and listen to them via a smart playlist that randomly plays 200 of them selected by the least recently played. So it’s kind of like having my own radio station that plays music that I like and doesn’t repeat a song for over 3 months.
I still have quite a number of songs that I haven’t rated yet. Most are soundtracks and musicals that I don’t listen to very often. I wouldn’t want them appearing in my normal 5 star listening list (the smart playlist has 14 genre’s that I ignore. I really wish iTunes would allow us to choose AND or OR for each of the conditions in the list. It would make creating playlists sooooo much easier.
If I rate a song with only 1 star, it’s removed from the iPod later. 4 stars are songs that I don’t want to listen to at work, but don’t mind listening to while playing games, and 3 stars are songs I don’t really care for all that much, but are not really that bad. I don’t use 2 stars.
I rarely buy full albums these days. Typically, if I hear something on the radio I like, I’ll buy it. I’ll “find” albums off of bittorrent that I am interested in “checking out” to see if I like the album.
I really wish iTunes would allow us to choose AND or OR for each of the conditions in the list. It would make creating playlists sooooo much easier.
Why do you need OR? At any rate, you can get away with this now that playlists are a criteria selection. Just make a playlist with the criteria you wish to include/exlude, and perform the operation “Playlist is/is not” in the master smart playlist.
Here is a screenshot of the smart playlist I was talking about. If you know a better way to do this, please let me know. I would love to not have to put all those conditions in!
What part of iTunes is…
...and perform the operation “Playlist is/is not” in the master smart playlist.
I’m not familiar with “the master smart playlist”.
That’s my own terminology. Basically I’m just describing “nested” playlists, where the playlists you listen to include other playlists for criteria.
I see what you’re saying now about OR. I’m guessing that there are 8 or so genres that you actually listen to, and these 14 that you don’t.
What I would suggest doing is using the Grouping field in your songs and use a word that describes how you feel about these (or perhaps the others.)
Let’s call it “Dave Radio”. In your main library, select each genre one at a time in your Browser. (If the Browser is not active, hit cmd-B, or ctrl-B on a PC). Select the genre that you want to include in your radio-ish playlist, select all the songs and choose File / Get Info (or right click and select it from the contextual menu.) It will prompt you to let you know that you are changing info for every song selected. The *only* thing you want to type is Dave Radio into the Grouping category. Songs don’t have anything in this field by default--it’s something Apple put in to let people do something like this.
Do this for each genre that you want to include on your radio list, and then your smart playlist will be remarkably concise:
Grouping is Dave Radio
and
Rating is 5 stars.
If you don’t feel comfortable adding information into that field on all of your songs (for whatever reason), you can also do this by nesting two playlists.
One playlist, the utlitity playlist would be:
Match ANY of the following conditions:
(List of Genres that you LIKE)
The other playlist, that you would actually listen to would be:
Match ALL of the following conditions:
Playlist is <name of utility playlist above>
and
Rating is 5 stars.
I see what you’re saying now about OR. I’m guessing that there are 8 or so genres that you actually listen to, and these 14 that you don’t.
Actually, I have 32 genre’s listed.
The other playlist, that you would actually listen to would be:
Match ALL of the following conditions:
Playlist is <name of utility playlist above>
and
Rating is 5 stars.
Wow, that is much easier than what I was doing! I’ll have to set that up soon. I did even think about nesting playlists. Thanks!
I recently did this for my 400+ songs. Something strangely satisifying about making all those stars come to light.
Heh, you know it, TDavid! I spent about 3-4 minutes trying to figure out why my “Unrated” smart playlist wasn’t working. Refreshed it. Checked and unchecked “Live updating”. It never even crossed my mind that I was actually finished.
Just 346 to go for me!
By les on October 21, 2004 at 11:09pm link