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Trick Out Your iPhone with These Smart Playlists

By , on Thursday, February 28th, 2008

iphone.pngAs I mentioned previously, i received an iPhone for this past Christmas. While I really love it, having to go from a 60gb iPod which held all of my music to having only 8gb of space took some getting used to. I started out by hand-picking various albums and tracks and changing the contents each night in preparation for the next day. It got to be pretty arduous, needless to say, and I was only listening to about 15% of my music, and it was almost entirely tracks that I really liked. In other words, roughly 85% of my music was sitting quietly in iTunes with very little hope of making it onto my iPhone. I sought a way to change all that…

Being a big fan of the Macbreak Weekly podcast, I’d heard Andy Ihnatko discuss his fantastic book, iPhone Fully Loaded. Wanting to really get everything I could out of my new toy, I ordered myself a copy (great book, highly recommended). One of the best chapters in the entire book is “How to Make 8 Gigabytes Seem Like 80″, which directly addressed the problem I was having with the music rotation. So, a good bit of what I’ll share below has been built upon the tips given by Andy in his book (which you should go buy).

So, after toying around with the capabilities of Smart Playlists in iTunes, I’ve come up with those listed below. The goal being a well-rounded snapshot of your library that changes regularly to keep things fresh.

Before we dig in, a couple of points:

  • My iPhone is the 8gb model, so the lists below are tailored to that amount of storage. If you have one of the newer 16gb models, you can safely double the size of each list’s allocation (or tune to taste).
  • It’s a good idea to make sure the genre is properly filled in for each track, though not necessary to make use of the lists below. The most obvious benefit is the ability to shuffle an entire genre, which is something I frequently do.
  • Obviously, this entire post assumes you’ve got more music than will fit on the 8gb iPhone. If you only have 5gb of music, well, you can just stop here :)
  • Rate your music! Once you get into the habit of rating songs as they come on, you’ll build a nice little data baseline for building innumerable playlists later on. It really is a great habit to get into!

Now then – to the lists!

Unrated Tracks (6gb) – This one will be the largest and is especially useful if you haven’t rated many (or any) of your tracks. I like to filter out all of the non-music content (audiobooks and stand-up comedy, specifically) so I’m not jolted out of a music-laden haze by Stephen Colbert reading his latest book. Here’s my current configuration:

Unrated Playlist

Greatest Hits (100 items or so) – Once you’ve spent a good amount of time playing through the previous list (and rating the songs as you go), you’ll start having more and more tracks with 4- or 5-star ratings. You don’t want these songs to be perpetually excluded from the rotation just because they’ve been rated, so create yourself a little playlist with a hundred or so tracks with really high ratings. That way, there will always be a good collection of stuff you know you like, even if the first list drew you a bunch of duds. My config for this list:

Greatest Hits

Second Chances (100 items or so) – These are the tracks to which you may have assigned poor ratings. Granted, you may actually not like them very much, but isn’t it also possible that you were in a crappy mood when you rated these songs? We’re looking for low play count and low skip count (as well as low rating, obviously). The idea is that these tracks get a second chance to make a good impression:

Second Chances

Death Row (no limit) – This is where tracks go to die, the songs that, based on your listening habits, should be considered candidates for deletion from your library. If you’ve rated a song low (say, 2 stars or less) and have skipped it a sufficient number of times, then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t like that particular song (and there’s nothing wrong with that – honestly). This one will not be added to the iPhone, in case that wasn’t clear :)

Death Row

iPhone Master (limit to 7gb) – One of the often-unsung features of iTunes Smart Playlists is the ability to nest them, and this is the perfect way to see this capability in action:

iPhone Master

This is where the true magic happens. Now, all you have to do is listen (and rate!) normally and each time you sync, you’ll have a different selection of tracks to experience (again, perhaps).

Note: Note that in each of the list dialogs pictured above, the “Live updating” box is always checked. This is *paramount* to this whole system working right. If you leave this box unchecked, then your playlists will never change after their initial creation. But checking those boxes ensures that any plays and ratings you applied since your last sync will be factored into the generation of the appropriate list, and that your lists will be regularly updated with different content.

Happy listening!

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    [...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptNote: Note that in each of the list dialogs pictured above, the “Live updating” box is always checked. This is *paramount* to this whole system working right. If you leave this box unchecked, then your playlists will never change after … [...]

  • Susan

    Your pictures aren’t showing, there is a Flickr message “This picture is currently unavailable”.
    If you could describe the way to make the playlist in text, that would be great.

    Great article! Gonna go buy that book through your link asap.

  • http://iphone.blogslog.info/?p=28671 Iphone » Blog Archive » Trick Out Your iPhone with These Smart Playlists

    [...] brett wrote an interesting post today on Trick Out Your iPhone with These Smart PlaylistsHere’s a quick excerptAs I mentioned previously, i received an iPhone for this past Christmas. While I really love it, having to go from a 60gb iPod which held all of my music to having only 8gb of space took some getting used to. … [...]

  • http://www.fixtunes.com Kells

    If your art isn’t showing you can also use FixTunes to upload the missing album art. FixTunes works with your iTunes to find missing album art and correct song details.

  • http://brettkelly.org brett

    @Kells

    I assume you’re affiliated with FixTunes in some way? I’ve never used FixTunes, though I’m aware of what it is and does.

    I think that since Apple added the ability to get album artwork into iTunes (and it does a pretty damn good job, to be honest), apps like FixTunes aren’t as useful as they once were. And I think most of the people who are as OCD about their music (like I am) would probably be pretty careful about keeping metadata and artwork up to date and in order :)

  • http://blog.scottjelias.net Scott Elias

    I’ve got some similar lists, but I like the “meta” list that includes songs from any of your other lists. I’ll give these a try!!

  • http://leadershipbuzz.com Jay Kelly

    I use a ‘Music Only’ playlist that keeps comedy, podcasts, etc. out of the mix. Then I build all my smart playlists (like the ones you list) around that.

    That keeps me from having to include ‘not audiobooks,’ etc in ever list.

  • http://facelikefizz.wordpress.com Rachel Murphy

    Brilliant! I seem to listen to the same stuff over and over again on my iPhone. I’m going to give this a go.

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  • Travis Hulsey

    Just noticed that the last item in the last image almost cancels out everything that has gone before – by allowing it to match ‘any’ of the following, it really does just that, so when it finds something that is ‘NOT’ in the ‘Death Row’ playlist it gets to go inside and play with all the other stuff.

    The only reason I discovered this was because I wanted a playlist with no videos, audiobooks, etc… and suddenly all of the above were showing up. Removing the ‘Not in ”Death Row” ‘ rule removed them.

    Perhaps that playlist is unnecessary?

  • http://trypticon.org Trejkaz

    I noticed that too. I ended up nuking it and configuring similar versions of the other three playlists, but mixing in a “Not Music” playlist with it so that I can configure that separately. Then I added the three useful playlists directly to the sync list.

    The main upshot is that when you have a bit of time where you know you will have your hands free, you can go directly into Unrated Tracks and start filling in the gaps.

  • Kypdurron5

    Good article, and I'm currently using it….only there's one hole in your playlist logic. The final playlist, the one you're going to sync…”iPhone Master” will pick any song/video in your library up to 7GB and ignore everything else. Why? Because you're matching “any” of the criteria, meaning anything in your entire library not on the “Death Row” playlist will sync including audiobooks, podcasts, etc….. “Any” criteria is an OR operand, and each statement is evaluated independently. I wish you could mix and match so that the first 3 were OR criteria and the last 1 was AND (not). The way around this is to make 2 playlists instead of this one- an “ANY” playlist named Top 3 Playlists that contains the first 3 criteria, and THEN make a Master iPod “ALL” playlist with the last one (not Death Row), and Playlist is Top 3 Playlists. Might I also suggest making all these playlists with something like “Sort- ” at the beginning, that way they won't get mixed in with the other iTunes playlists and won't risk being deleted if you forget which playlists are used in the chain. Otherwise, great article, thanks a lot! The funny thing is that this could all be avoided if Apple would just include a checkbox for “If full, sync random subset up to device capacity.” I would actually be happy with that.

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