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"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists
Merlin Mann | Nov 9 2006
New for Friday 11/10: In my MacBreak Weekly capacity as Vice-President in Charge of Digging Pointless Ratholes™, I recently mentioned some tricks that I use to create better playlists in iTunes. One of these tricks -- which is an oldie, and which I'm certain I yoinked from some uncredited smarter person out in the blogtropolis -- is to create a "Music Only" list. So you know how you have increasing buttloads of non-music (podcasts, audio books, etc.) in your iTunes library? It's really annoying to throw on one of your sexy Smart Playlists or the Party Shuffle, only to have a 20 minute nap or a Noam Chomsky lecture kick in. I get around this by basing almost all my Smart Playlists on my one canonical "Music Only" list, which currently looks like this:
Yes, it's very hacky, and yes there's probably a more elegant way to accomplish this effect, but so far it's been a handy jumping off point for my favorite Smart Playlists. This helps me build stuff like... New and unlistened-to
My neglected lovers
If you're even a casual iTunes user, it pays to spend some time rating your songs (no they can't all be "5 stars"), adding rich metadata, and building Smart Playlists. So powerful. And it you're using a (GUI-free) iPod Shuffle but not Smart Playlists? Man, that's just nuts.  Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users
By popular demand, here are five more Smart Playlists, designed to help you manage very large libraries and bubble up interesting tracks (that you may not realize you like). (more ») 50 Comments
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 I do a variant (pretty...Submitted by TommyW (not verified) on November 9, 2006 - 3:33pm.
I do a variant (pretty similar really) after my wife kept rolling her eyes anytime a TWiT intro theme rolled around the living room. I do filters on podcasts to keep them from filling up my HD. I have a smart group that traps any which are: - Podcast is true - Date added, not in the last 21 days - unrated Unfortunately iTunes marks any playing as a 'played' podcast, so using Played as a marker isn't really useful. I wish it was 'fully played'. This particular smart group... It's simply a list of podcasts that are three weeks old, do I want any? This particular method forces me to rate podcasts I want to keep. Rate it and it disappears off the list. The rest - straight to trash. » POSTED IN:
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