Saturday, November 07, 2009

i Got It!

I wanna thank everyone who chimed in with tips on using iTunes more effectively. Things are moving along at a brisk pace, despite my slightly damaged new CD-ROM drive (long story, but let's just say Best Buy and their extended warranted plan are completely useless -- insisting that I take a replacement computer when I told them I had already spent 100 hours setting it up and simply wanted the CD thing replaced -- and the Asus people were great, mailing me a new drive). I now have just shy of 5,000 songs in my iTunes Library but actually figured out the solution to my "albums vs. fave songs" dilemma, which I thought I'd share with you guys since no one brought it up. (Perhaps you don't know about this, either?)

If you recall, I worried that despite my being an "album" person, I might not want every song off every album by all my favorite bands on my iPod because shuffling would no longer have a "radio" feel to it with too many titles by one artist constantly coming on, or songs I don't really want to hear on a regular basis mixing into the rotation. Sure, you can hit the "next" button, but that kind of kills the mood. What I just discovered is that there's a an option to "skip when shuffling," which means I can put a Gershwin collection or those old Japan albums -- things I might only want to listen to once in a while on a plane or train but not alongside hits by Blondie and Madonna -- and not have the songs in the shuffle line-up. Genius!

3 comments:

gordo said...

I've created a couple of favorites playlists using 5 stars but also putting codes in the BPM field.

I then create a smart playlist where the contents of the playlist are (1) the favorites folder and (2) play count less than 1.

Once the song has been played it falls out of the smart playlist until I reset the playcount. That way I'm not hearing the same songs over and over again.

Danny in WeHo said...

Great tip thanks!!

Manuel said...

I've set Skip when Shuffling for all my classical music. Also, I mostly use smart playlists that only contain songs rated 3 stars or higher and where date last played is not in the last 6 months. In this way you don't have to reset the play count which by the way is pretty neat to see over time how your personal charts turn out.