iTunes Smart Playlist - rate your music

Originally uploaded by olsenis.

A large chunk my high school years were spent in a delivery truck. To pass the time driving from location to location, we rocked out to the radio. Not satelite radio. Not iPod. Not CD player. Just FM radio. Given the choice between a pop station, several country and two classic rock stations we always went with classic rock. Typically, we would flip between the stations to avoid commercials. Our process was severely flawed because we would end up listening to the same songs over and over again--sometimes back to back. After all, classic rock only included two decades worth of songs at the time and both stations play the same small sample. The alternative was to pick one station and deal with lame local business commercials.

By the time I started college, my reaction to bands like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Who was not unlike a Disney worker hearing "It's a Small World" on his drive home from work. Did I mention this was college? If provoked enough I would try to explain the unhealthy amount of classic rock I had consumed over the past four years.

The theme of it isn't what you listen to but how much you listen to it has stuck with me over the years. With a little work, you can setup iTunes to make sure you don't hear the same songs over and over.

Ratings

I could never wrap my head around giving a song a definite 1 - 5 star rating. A better use for rating stars is to denote how often you want to hear a song:

***** - haven't listened to it for two weeks
**** - haven't listened to for four weeks
*** - haven't listened to for 90 days
** - don't sync with the iPod
* - don't listen to ever

The next time you are listening to a song, take a second and give it a star rating. Obviously, this could be a lot of work if you have a huge collection. Cleaning out the (*) and (**) is probably the most rewarding and goes the quickest because you don't even have to listen to the whole song.

After casually rating songs while listening to them something pretty cool happened. My 4 and 5 star play lists were growing into my perfect radio station. Gems hidden on generally lame CDs were coming out of the woodwork. New life was breathed into my seemingly old and boring music collection. Over a year later and I have gone through almost 5,000 songs. All the work was so worth it because my iPod is always stocked with exactly what I want to hear. I sync it maybe once a week to pull off the stuff I have listened to and put on some fresh stuff. At this point, the system is on auto-pilot. Occasionally, I will change a star because I was to hear it more or less but really it is iTunes keeping track of what I have and have not listened to. If you are a big music fan, this should be your new labor of love.

Make your own 4 star play list by following the instructions from the post I did in March:
http://blog.theslowlane.net/2009/03/itunes-smart-playlist-get-more-from.html

Now add an additional row for rating and than choose the number of stars the play list should have (ie 3 or more).

If you have any questions, drop me a comment.