Bearfruit

Apple - iTunes: “Party Shuffle” Here’s a nifty iTunes trick. The Party Shuffle is nice except that it tends to “get in a rut” sometimes and play a whole batch of songs that you’ve rated as 1 or 2 stars; even if you have check the box to play higher rated songs more often.

My solution is to create three smart playlists and use these as the source for my Party Shuffle.

Before I explain, it will help to know that I rate my music 1 to 5 stars therefore 0 stars means not rated yet. I also have a personal rule of thumb that I don’t rate songs when my only complaint is that “I’m not in the mood for this now.” So if a christmas song comes on my first impulse might be to say, “ack, this stinks!” and rate it as a 1 star, but really, if I’m in the christmas mood it might be 4 stars.

OK, now to the playlists. The first smart playlist has only one rule “Rating is equal to 0 stars”. This will always list all of the music I haven’t had a chance to rate. When I feel like the party shuffle is not playing anything new, I tell it to use this as the source. I try to rate each song as it plays, but invariably I only rate 10 - 20%. That’s ok, it adds variety and works towards the goal.

The second playlist is “My Top Rated Classical.” This one is special because I’ve found I’m either in the mood for classical or I’m not. This has two rules, “Rating is greater than 2 stars,” and “Genre is Classical.” Maybe, when more of my music library is rated I’ll change this to 3 stars but right now I need more variety than this provides.

The third playlist is “My Top Rated.” I’ve modified the playlist that iTunes ships to have the following rules: “Rating is greater than 2 stars”, “Genre is not Holiday” and “Genre is not Classical”.

All of the above playlists have checked “live updating” and “Match all of the following conditions.” Other options are disabled.

Now, I can change the source of my partyshuffle to suit my current taste.

iTunes Developers: Please, add a feature that allows putting a link to the playlists on your Windows desktop. It would be nice to just click the icon that says “My Top Rated Music” and have it launch iTunes and start playing.