iTunes

There is a secret to creating killer Smart Playlists in iTunes. You have to know what not to play. The best way to do that is with an “ignore list”. And I’m going to show you how to make one.

For several years now iTunes has given you the ability to use playlists themselves as parameters when building smart playlists. That means you can make a smart playlist that does (or does not) include another playlist. Why is this important? It’s important because — if you’re like me — you love to hear almost all of the music in your library, but there is a tremendous amount of stuff that you do not want to hear out of the blue.

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While we were waiting for the Olympics to start out here on the West coast, we caught the end of an old Entourage episode on HBO. The track playing over the end credits was Sinnerman, by Nina Simone. That song is also played during the conclusion of The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan, which has been on television a few hundred thousand times lately, and I really like it. This time I remembered to email a note to myself from my iPhone to download it.

Since Phelps isn’t racing until 10pm, I decided to grab the song. I’ll gladly pay $.99 for a track on iTunes, so I fired ‘er up and … ugh … Of course that’s one of the “album only” songs. For some mysterious reason every now and then Apple (or the record label, or who knows) sets it so that some songs cannot be downloaded individually. You have to buy the whole album to get the track. While I’m okay to shell $.99 for a great song, I’m loathe to drop $9.99 for an album when I only want one song.

So of course I flip iTunes the bird and fire up Limewire. But for some reason, even though there are apparently hundreds of copies of that song available, none of them will download. (I suspect my ISP is blocking Limewire, actually.)

Torrents to the rescue. I found a copy on torrents.to, fired up Transmission, and should have the whole Thomas Crown Affair OST in about twenty minutes. This is why I love the Internets.

One of the cool new features of the updated iPhone software is the ability to take a screen shot. If you hold the home button and then press the power button, the system will save a screen capture to your “camera roll” library. You can then email it or save it to your computer when you next synch, just as if it was a photo taken with the camera. I’m sure this will come in very handy for developers and debuggers.

And, of course, it gives us all a cool way to show everyone what we have on our iPhone home screens. Here’s mine. Nifty, eh?

Just about everyone that uses iTunes has a hella hard time keeping their music files organized. This is a shame because (a) it’s actually pretty simple and (b) it is a colossal pain in the ass to move your library if it’s not organized correctly. (Note that I’m talking about the organization of your actual music files and not the appropriate tagging and categorization of your music library.) The bummer of the thing is that the folks at Apple unwittingly made this more complicated and difficult by trying to make it simple and easy. It happens. Trust me. I have been building software for just over a decade now and it happens all.the.time. Don’t get mad at Apple for this one. Let’s just fix it.

First I’ll tell you what you need to do, and then I’ll explain why.

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A Partial List of Artists in My iTunes Library That I Cannot Decide How to Properly Name

• Joan Jett and the Blackhearts or Jett, Joan and the Blackhearts?
• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers or Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers?
• Rilo Kiley or Kiley, Rilo?
• Ted Leo & the Pharmacists or Leo, Ted & the Pharmacists?
• Biz Markie or Markie, Biz?
• John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band or Cafferty, John & The Beaver Brown Band?
• Camper Van Beethoven or Van Beethoven, Camper?
• Lynyrd Skynyrd or Skynyrd, Lynyrd?
• Rob Zombie or Zombie, Rob?

Bryan has posted an elaborate examination of the “Play Count” metric used by iTunes. I, too, use the “Play Count” metric as a component of many of my Smart Playlists, so I was interested in his research. I agree with one of the comments on his post, though, and think that iTunes really simply considers a song as “played” and increments the “Play Count” about ten seconds prior to the end of the song. (It would be interesting to know if the “Cross Fade” option affects this. Maybe Bryan can investigate …)

In most of my smart playlists, the “Last Skipped” metric is more important than the “Play Count”. I have a “base” smart playlist which I include in almost all my other smart playlists. It contains all the tracks which I do not want to include. If a track is a music video, or holiday music, or from an audiobook or podcast, for example, I don’t want it to play while I’m jogging along Olympic Boulevard or doing the laundry. Consider this my Exclusion list.

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Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

Head coaches in the NFL often “script” the first dozen or so offensive plays of a game. They do this to set the tone and pace of the game, and to try to get their players to understand that they want to dictate how the game will go. With that in mind I have “scripted” the first 3+ hours of the music I’ll hear on my iPod during Sunday’s LA Marathon.

For more than two years now I’ve been aggregating my favorite “running” songs into a discrete playlist specifically geared towards keeping me motivated and moving towards that 26.2 mi marker. Any time I see a song in my 9900+ track iTunes library rated with only one star, I know it means one of two things. Either it’s a crap song that needs to be deleted, or it’s a song that I one-starred while running because I wanted to save it to my special cardio playlist. It’s my own little iTunes lifehack.

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Now that the dust has finally settled, I’m prepared to pontificate on what I consider the top five songs released in 2006. I think last year was kind of a “down year” for new music; there just weren’t that many great new tracks added to my iTunes library, especially compared to the previous two years. Normally I would post an mp3 of each one for your downloading pleasure, but lately whenever I do that my site is slammed with thousands of leeches. (If you don’t have one of songs, let me know and I’ll get it to you.)
So, without further ado …

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You’re asking me, “What are the ten songs you played the most in iTunes this year, David?” Unfortunately I’m not going to tell you that. I’d love to do it, but I can’t. See, the thing is that iTunes doesn’t store meta data in a true RDBMS; it’s just a flat XML file. There’s no way to determine which songs you’ve listened to the most in the last X number of days. In order to do that you’d have to be able to cross-reference the time you heard each song as a separate data point. iTunes only stores the timestamp of the most-recent instance of listening to a song. Bummer.

But I can tell you which songs I added to iTunes in 2006 that I heard the most. And I know you want to know that. And — because I love flirting with disaster — I can also let you download an mp3 of each one. Shhh! Don’t tell the RIAA!

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I have just about 9,000 songs (35GB) in my iTunes library, and I listen to music the entire time I’m in the office every day. I live and die by my smart playlists. I’ve seen more than a few tutorials lately about how to utilize this iTunes feature, so I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring with a few tips on how to make Apple’s killer app work better. Here are five tips to keeping your daily listening enjoyable.

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Remember sniglets? Rich Hall invented the word to describe words that aren’t in “the dictionary”, but should be. It was one of his sketches on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News. It’s very hard to believe that was 20 years ago.

There should — there must — be a sniglet that describes what happens once you have become so used to Tivo that you find yourself increasingly often wanting to Tivo everything else in life. I find myself constantly wanting to pause and rewind the radio, people in meetings, traffic, etc. (I’m guessing this is the main premise of Adam Sandler’s new movie, Click, by the way.)

But that’s not the point of this entry. Sometime in the early 00s I took part in the Neurotic Fishbowl’s “Burn It” blogger CD exchange. One of the songs on one of the CDs I received was The Twilite Kid by The Afghan Whigs, or by Greg Dulli, or by The Twilight Singers (depending upon which web site you believe). I fell in love with the song and listened to it exclusively for weeks. It’s a tremendous song.

(This was way back when iPods didn’t exist yet. There was no iTunes. I actually (gasp!) listened to it on repeat on CD.)

About a month ago Denis Leary was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting the new season of Rescue Me. This has got to be the best show on TV now that the Sopranos has jumped the shark and West Wing has gone the way of the dodo. (Entourage is a close second.)

Towards the end of his interview, Leary flashed a copy of Powder Burns, the latest CD by The Twilight Singers, saying that it’s a great album and everyone should buy it.

I said to myself — after using Tivo to rewind it and freeze so I could see the album again, “Hey! That’s the band that did that great song from three or four years ago!” And it was. Is. Whatever. Anyway. It’s an awesome CD. I fired up Limewire and grabbed it that night. The best song on the album is called Bonnie Brae.

Last night I finally watched last week’s Tivo’ed episode of Rescue Me. Damn! The ending will blow you away (if you haven’t seen it yet). If you’re wondering what the awesome song was at the end, during the climactic conclusion, it was Bonnie Brae.

Of course I’m writing all this while listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, so maybe my opinion can’t be trusted.