iTunes usage

I was discussing with Nuno how he uses iTunes, and I was amazed that he likes party shuffle…

I don’t use party shuffle, too lazy to pick songs and stuff. So I have a special playlist, a smart one, that I use. This playlist assures me a continuous stream of music with 3.5 days turn around time (assumes you are listening to itunes 24 hours a day, of course, so it’s more like 10 days).

Here is the playlist I use. It assumes you like to rate songs. It will work out-of-the-box because iTunes gives 3 stars to new songs and I only filter those below that:

1. Create a smart playlist
2. Add 4 rules:
   1. Genre is not Spoken Word: remove almost all the audiobooks
   2. Genre is not Audiobook: remove the rest of the audiobooks
   3. Genre is not Speech: IT conversations
   4. My Rating is greater than XX (two stars)
3. Make sure you have Match all the following conditions
4. Don't limit the number of songs. If you do, chose least recently played as selection style
5. if you disable songs with the checkbox, select Match only checked songs. Otherwise clear it.
6. Live Updating on

I also have the prefpane Rating Bar.prefPane installed. There are other options, but I like this one.

So, this playlist makes sure I listen to different stuff all the time, and if I’m listening to a track I don’t like, I just change it’s rating to 1 or 2 stars and it stop’s playing (you must press play after, unfortunately).

One thing I noticed, is that I don’t have enough music: 10 days to rotate my music collection is small. I’ll have to start ripping more CD’s…