The Perfect iTunes Set Up.

Great, Just what the web needs, another damn iTunes Smart Playlist guide. But before you leave, I promise you, this is the best damn iTunes set-up you’ll ever need. I know thats a big call, but read on my friends.

A few weeks ago i lost my iTunes library file.

I was devastated. 60gigs and about 13,000 songs had lost the ratings and playcounts I had spent the last few years creating. But you know what? It was the best thing that could have happened to me. God thats pathetic. I mean it was the best thing that could happen to my iTunes/iPod experience…

You see, when I first discovered the power of smart playlists designed by ratings, it was about two years ago. The problem? A 4gig iPod with (at the time) 20gigs of music. At first i thought, no problem, I’ll just fill my pod with all my favourite tunes. But as anyone who has a smaller pod will tell you, your fave tunes start sounding pretty old after a few weeks.

So i started rating my songs and making smart playlists based on those ratings. (The Smart Playlists were designed to cycle through my songs- ie Last Played was not in the last month). This seemed great for a while, but as my iTunes library grew it became very lopsided. I had about 1000 songs rated 4 or 5 stars, and 12,000 songs with no ratings. Soon my iPod was filled with about 50% of the same old faves, and about 50% of stuff i didn’t even know or like. Credit where its due, my first Smart Playlists were based on suggestions from iLounge, Smart Playlists, and 43 Folders. I thought each method was pretty good, but every few weeks i had to tweak the playlists because i was getting bored with them. That kind of defeats the purpose of a “set it and forget it” playlist.

It sucked. My pod was soon used only for Podcasts, because the thought of trawling through my music collection seemed too painful. Thankfully, I then experienced what the Chinese call “Crisitunity”. I destroyed my iTunes Library file. I believe thats where you came in…

So there i was, 13,000 virgin songs. I thought about how i was going to tackle re-rating 13,000 tracks. 5 stars was easy. A song had to be damn near perfect to get 5 stars. But what about the rest? I thought for a while and here’s what i came up with:

5 Stars = Damn Near Perfect
4 Stars = My Favourite Bands/Albums that don’t classify as 5 stars.
3 Stars = Artists I Appreciate, but don’t necessarily love.
2 Stars = Guilty Pleasures and One Hit Wonders.
1 Stars = Shit I Cant stand, Ready for the bin.
0 Stars = Undecided.

First, i went through my library and selected all the artists and albums I loved the most. Using the Browser View of iTunes, you can do this relatively quickly by holding down the command key while clicking. How do you do it on a PC? Fucked if i know, and fucked if I care. Get A Mac. Soon I had selected The Beastie Boys, REM, Radiohead, Pavement, Massive Attack, De La Soul etc etc. Then you hit Command I to edit the info (PC users, at this point you probably need to hit control-alt-delete) click Yes when iTunes asks if you want to edit multiple files. Then give all these artists 4 stars.

Next create a smart playlist that looks like this:

Then go into that playlist and search through the artists to find the Damn Near Perfect Songs of those artists. Every time you rate a song 5 stars, it will automatically be removed from the playlist, so you dont get confused. (By the way, you can hit command B to bring back the Browser View to make this process faster. PC users, “Your computer may already be infected with Spyware, so you should probably click on that lovely pop-up window at this point).

So there you go, two stars already accounted for. Next, we go back to the library, and using browser view select all the artists you have that you appreciate, but don’t necessarily love. For me it was artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Blackalicious, etc. These are the kind of bands I would never sit down and listen to a whole album of, but i certainly respect them, and could never delete them from my library. Command I again and rate these bad boys 3 stars. Then set up another Smart Playlist like the one above, only this time for 3 stars. Enter this playlist and find the gems from each artist. (Tangled up in Blue by Dylan, A Day In The Life, The Beatles, God Only Knows, The Beach Boys etc) and give them 5 stars.

Phew, you’re almost done. Now make a smart playlist that is set to :

This will ignore all of the stuff you’ve already rated. Now go through your library and find all the little gems like Things That Make You Go Hmmm, Girls On Film, Ice Ice Baby, etc, and rate those 2 stars.

All of this should take you maybe 20mins to an hour depending on the size of your iTunes library. But hang on, i hear you ask, what about 1 star? Well, 1 star is for you to zap a song you didn’t know you had but you really cant stand. Why is it not Zero stars then? Because in iTunes you can’t rate a song Zero Stars if its already been rated before…

OK, I promise you’re almost done. Now make new smart playlists limited to 50 songs each based on a star rating, like this:

Finally, create a smart playlist that feeds off the playlist you just created, like this:

I call mine *Radio Pod, i use the asterisk so the playlist will always be the first playlist alphabetically in my list. But you can call yours whatever the hell you want. (In this example, “Guilty Pleasures” are 2 Stars.

The final Playlist you keen eyed kids might have spotted is a regular (or dumb) playlist called pod. I have that playlist so i can drag any songs i want onto my iPod while still keeping my pod set to Automatically Sync.

So there you go. A geeks guide to iPod lovin’. And if you don’t believe how good the mix is, check out what my iPod served me this week:

And Since I’ve been using this new playlist overall:

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Enjoy,

Pete.