Binary Bonsai

I really love iTunes, I do. It is so easy to find what you need that it’s unheard of. The interface is lean and mean with no ‘premium services’ buttons to be seen for miles and miles. It’s about my music, nothing else! That said, there is a thing or two I would like to tweak ever so slightly.

Smart playlists for instance. I use smart playlists all the time, they’re like a God-sent. Here are some of the playlists that I currently have (as a general rule I never include the genres: soundtracks, books & spoken and comedy in my smart playlists):

• High School: Genre is not jazz, blues, industrial, progressive electronica or rock & roll (since I didn’t listen to any of those genres in high school – Except ProgElec, but that’s a mood thing) and the year is 1994- 1997. Unfortunatly this doesn’t include The Crow.

• Unrated: rating is 0.

• Added Today: Added within the last day, max of 48 (just enough to fill a maximized iTunes list). Makes it a lot easier to manage incoming music. I also have an ‘Added Last Week’.

• Been A While: 3+ stars, not played in 30 days and playcount is less than 6.

• Decades: 70’s, 60’s and so on.

(Here are a lot of really cool comments on iTunes smart playlists)

iTunes really has me using my music library in an entirely new way. Before I would usually pick out a single album or an artist and listen to that until I got sick of it and then move on to something else. Now I’m much more genre oriented, which is much more satisfying! Lately I have been concentrating on 60’s music (The Beatles, Beach Boy and Simon & Garfunkel in particular) and Jazz, Blues, Urban and General R&B, which is like discovering music all over again! I love it! Currently B.B. King (And on that note, let me just recommend B.B. King’s Definitive Greatest Hits!), John Lee Hooker, Clapton (pseudo-rediscovery), Terence Trent D’Arby (a rediscovery from when I was a child, one of the first CD’s my parents every got), Alicia Keys and Erykah Badu (Mama’s Gun is a fantastic album!) are topping the playlists.

A cool feature, when I’m not in the mood for setting up a smart playlist, is to ctrl-click a few genres, shuffle and play. It’s so fast! And it’s quick and easy to cut out a genre or add in a genre on the fly.

Also after having systematically (and rather anally) gone through every single track and album added to the library, adding year of publication, has allowed me to listen to my music chronologically. This might seem like a minor thing, but it really works to add flavor to the music. And with the smart playlists automatically dividing up the decades for me it’s easy to slip into 70’s mode for a few hours.

I try to rate the songs as I go – though I miss about 30-40% of them – which makes the smart playlists even better as you can start filtering out the 1 and 2 star tracks. 1 star for songs that’re broken or so horrible that they can serve as entertainment. 2 stars for stuff I’d prefer to not listen to, the tracks that I usually skip anyway. 3 stars for overall listenable stuff. 4 stars for tracks that’re great; I try to not rate them on a general level, but rather within the genre they belong to. This is the best way to do it, since there are genres that enjoy more than others, so as to not tip the scale. 5 are for those tracks that I can listen to over and over and over…

One thing I’ve had to keep in mind throughout my rating-frenzy is to make sure that the rating reflects my taste over the ‘quality’ of the track and not the other way around. I for instance love Queen’s ‘Queen II’ album, but I doubt that most other people will enjoy it much (fantasy glam-rock anyone?). It seems fairly obvious, but if I were to rate that album for its quality it would probably be one star less on every track, making it loose rotation in my smart playlists.

Anyway, there is one tweak that I would love to see added to iTunes 4.2. As it is now the playlists are all based on AND or OR. You can’t mix them. So you can’t for instance do (this isn’t any kind of ‘language’ for iTunes, it’s just me transferring it to text): genre=jazz OR genre=blues NOT rating=1 AND NOT rating=2 — Currently I have: genre=jazz AND genre=blues, that’s about as close as I can get.

Also I wish there was a way to ‘sync’ another computer with smart playlists, kind of how you can sync your iPod. Say I want to copy some of my music onto Rikke’s machine, I have to do it the hard way. This is of course possible, but with several hundreds of artist directories it can be rather hard to find just the stuff you want. It would be much easier to just setup a smart playlist like this: rating is 3+, genre is not ‘spoken & books’, random 5GB. — In one fell swoop I can be sure that iTunes makes some fairly good choices… I hope someone will hack some kind of plugin together for that.

I think I can say with a great deal of certainty that I’m not moving from iTunes again. I still have Winamp in the dock, but that’s mostly for the odd song that I either don’t want copied to the library or for streaming something off of a website. For all intents and purposes I never use anything but iTunes.

Now if it can broadcast shoutcast streams it would be perfect! Then I could essentially control my Xbox from my computer.

Update: Is it possible to emulate a DVD-R? If it is, then what you could do is use a smartplaylist – as detailed above – to filter out the music you want to copy, and then ‘burn it’ (which would really be copying it) to a directory, which could then be a network directory. Here’s how it works. I’ll look into this.