Monday, August 12, 2002

Smart Playlists Redux Toby Paterson (@ apple.com) wrote to say: Create a playlist "Last Played" "is not in the last" "days/weeks/months". Limit to "1.5" "GB" selected by "random" and that should do everything you want. As songs are played, they are rotated off the list and new songs pulled in to fill the gap. Wow! Very cool! I'm going to configure my "Random Stuff" playlist to automatically cycle out the songs that have been played in the last two weeks. Thank you, Toby! I have a feeling that my "Random Stuff" playlist is going to take over most of the space on the iPod fairly rapidly. Now I just need to grab another 200GB or so of hard drive space so I can encode the other 1,800 or so CDs in my collection. Ideally, I'll re-encode the entire collection about the same time the iPod and iTunes support AAC (if that never happens, 256kbit MP3s will suffice). 6:32:03 PM

Fink Commander 0.3.3a FinkCommander was updated late last week. New fink .info file available from here. cd /sw/fink/dists/local/main/finkinfo curl -o finkcommander-0.3.3a-1.info http://www.friday.com/software/fink/finkcommander-0.3.3a-1.info fink update finkcommander 3:06:46 PM

Smart Playlists I have about 80gb of music on my 'music server' (a B&W G3 running OS X Server) at home. All of it is encoded from my CD collection. Lots and lots of good stuff there. Up until iTunes v3, I would sync two playlists to my iPod -- an "essential tracks" playlist that contains all of the tracks that I simply cannot live without and an "iPod" playlist into which I would manually rotate about 3.5gb of, typically, albums on a regular basis. Recently, my collection had started to sound "stale". It was as if the increased listening frequency of the content was, effectively, causing me to need more variety than the 80GB could hold. As it turns out, the problem wasn't the content, it was me! Apparently, my manual shuffling habits were not really shuffling across the whole collection. Over the weekend, I set up a smart playlist that grabs a random 700MB worth of music from my entire library. This playlist was then added to the list of playlists to be synced to the iPod. Wow! What an awesome change that has made! I'm listening to all kinds of stuff I had completely forgotten that I had. Very cool. When I return home (I'm on site in Pittsburgh), I'm going to bump the 700MB up to about 1.5GB and drop another 800MB from my "iPod" playlist. The only flaw is that iTunes doesn't seem to have a "toss these randomly selected songs and reload the list with a whole new selection of X00MB of random songs" feature and, as such, I have to delete and recreate the smart playlist to get a new set of songs. Easy enough to do that it isn't a big deal, but definitley worthy of a feature request. 3:02:31 PM