{"id":1795,"date":"2003-10-01T18:59:27","date_gmt":"2003-10-02T08:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/10\/02\/meme-2-itunes\/"},"modified":"2019-12-06T08:17:28","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T16:17:28","slug":"meme-2-itunes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2003\/10\/01\/meme-2-itunes\/","title":{"rendered":"Meme 2: iTunes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"iTunes Folders\" src=\"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/graphics\/2003\/10\/itunes.jpg\" width=\"175\" height=\"444\" align=\"left\" \/>Another meme that Kottke pointed out &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.superdeluxo.com\/blog_archives\/2003\/09\/27\/itunes_usage_methods.html\" title=\"iTunes Usage Methods\">iTunes usage methods<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes <em>extremely<\/em> important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn&#8217;t heard in a while (and at times, didn&#8217;t remember that I even had).<\/p>\n<p>One of the godsends of iTunes is the &#8220;smart playlists&#8221; feature &#8212; I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they&#8217;re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: &#8220;new additions&#8221;, &#8220;random unplayed&#8221;, and &#8220;random 1gb&#8221;.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Random 1Gb:<\/strong> the single most important playlist, for me. This randomly grabs one gigabyte&#8217;s worth of music that 1) I haven&#8217;t listened to in the past 2 months, 2) is rated three stars or above, and 3) isn&#8217;t in the &#8220;Christmas&#8221; genre. Whenever I listen to a song, it removes it from the playlist, and grabs another one. This syncs with my iPod, and as the iPod tracks what I listen to each day, the playlist is automatically updated at night when I get home from work, and in the morning just before I leave. The end result &#8212; roughly 20 hours of songs that I know I like, but haven&#8217;t heard in a few months.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><strong>Random Unplayed:<\/strong> this playlist grabs one gigabyte&#8217;s worth of music that I&#8217;ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I&#8217;m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) &#8212; as long as there&#8217;s something in this playlist, then I know that there&#8217;s songs that I haven&#8217;t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><strong>New Additions:<\/strong> this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Other smart playlists that come in handy: &#8220;recently played&#8221; (anything I&#8217;ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), &#8220;top 25 played&#8221; (a pesudo-best-of list), &#8220;top rated&#8221; (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).<\/p>\n<p>The only two &#8220;normal&#8221; playlists I have at the moment are one for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vielklang.de\/artists\/poems_for_laila\/index.en.html\" title=\"Poems for Laila\">Poems for Laila<\/a> (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony&#8217;s excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/millennium.sonymusic.com\/\" title=\"Sony Music Soundtrack for a Century\">Soundtrack for a Century<\/a> collection. Other than those two, it&#8217;s all smart playlists for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2039,2035,2043],"tags":[118,80],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}