Smart playlists that truly follow your mood

May 06, '04 09:31:00AM

Contributed by: lagroue

With thousands of tunes in your iTunes library or in your iPod, it's high time to consider using it as the radio you've always looked for: the one that delivers only tunes you like, and that fit your mood in a unheard of way. The idea is to extend objective parameters provided by iTunes, like last played time, genre, etc. with subjective parameters like warmth, violence, restfulness, modernity, whatever you want. Then, you build smart playlists upon these parameters, regardless (or not) of genre. iTunes will mix your songs in sometimes unusual ways, but always relevant, and sometimes quite stylish!

For example, a "Soft" playlist contains all tunes that are both warm and restful; the "Well Awake" playlist contains tunes which are not restful, and not too violent; "Pop" playlist contains tunes which are popular but not too much main-stream; "Pop++" contains only (assumed) mainstream popular tunes, etc. I'm happy with a system of tagging which works quite well after months of usage. Read the rest if you'd like to see it.

For each dimension, I give a note to each tune, within "irrelevant," "not at all," "yes," and "yeah, definitely." Those four steps seems to be enough. And more steps would make smart play list hard to design. For example, let's take violence. I add in the comment (the grouping field may be preferred) of each tune "Violence-," "Violence=," or "Violence+," depending on its violence. Violence- means calm, Violence= means violent, and Violence+ means ultra violent (God knowns that some songs are). If a song is not tagged Violence, it is considered not violent, and not calm, let's say, normal. Here are examples, on a few tunes that many of you may know:

With two conditions maximum, you are able to precisely target your tunes: Now here are a few of my smart playlists : This may look over-complicated - and it is a little. When Apple gives us the ability to really play with the iTunes database, things will change. I also admit that I spent a long time tagging tunes. Some albums are easy to tag, but those which contain very different songs require more time to be well tagged.

Anyway, now my iPod is my favourite companion within the non-humans -- it never fails giving me what I want to hear. This is completely new to me -- like, er, I live in the XXI century?

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