Smart Playlists: a beginners guide

Question

Hi all!
If you're like me, you probably couldn't wait to load all your music onto your iPod, but you very quickly realized that the twenty odd days of music in your computer will never fit into your iPod. Below is a guide for maximizing your iPod space while minimizing the amount of library shuffling you have to do to get the most of your music.
It's a fair amount of work up front, but once in place I think you'll find it worth the effort. It did take me some time to figure out how to best do this, so I figure some of you might still be in those early stages.
I assume the following:
1. You've got your favorites that you don't want to remove from your iPod because you listen to them often.
2. Your library is dynamic. You add new tunes from time to time.
3. You have much more music than will ever fit into your iPod.
4. You have many songs you'd like to hear from time to time, but not all the time.
5. You aren't 100% familiar with everything in your library (loaded a whole album with which you only really knew one or two songs?)
6. You, like my ex girlfriend, have many moods. And your desires change accordingly.
Here's what I did. (And if you can improve upon this, by all means post how!)
PREPARATION-
First, go to your library. Show the "rating" column so you can see how many stars your songs have. Sort them all by the number of stars. Then see all those ones without stars? Rate them. I'd say give 'em all 1 star if you're not sure what you want to give 'em yet. YOu can change this while listening to 'em in your iPod and you'll see later why that's key. Bear in mind, you can select a huge list of 'em by clicking on the first unrated song, then holding down SHIFT and clicking on the last one. Then you can rate 'em all 1 star in one fell swoop.
Second, check the genre of all your songs. If they haven't got one, consider adding a genre. This isn't critical, but you might find it's easier to build your playlists if you grab everything you might want by genres.
SOURCE-
Okay, create a new playlist. Make it a non-smart one. I suggest giving it a functional name like "SOURCE - Rock & Alterna". When you go to reference these while making smart playlists, you'll find it easier to locate if all your sources are together. This playlist will be huge. The idea is to take everything you might ever want to hear from these genres and toss 'em into this playlist. Now, you can use a smart playlist to do it, but I'm suggesting the regular playlist because you can freely add the occasional non-genre song to it. (ie: the one that sounds rock but is listed as pop.) For now, don't put too much thought into this. Just stuff it all in there. This playlist won't be going on your iPod as is.
Next, we've got the intermediary playlists. These do the thinking that give the playlists their "smart" title.
Make these three new smart playlists:
Rock & Alternative TOP 20
Rock & Alternative MID 30
Rock & Alternative BOT 50
Set the properties for them as such:
Rock & Alternative TOP 20
- songs follow all rules
- Playlist is "SOURCE Rock & Alternative"
- Rating is greater than zero stars
- Playcount is greater than 10 (adjust to suit your needs)
- limit to 20 songs
** Sort by Least Recently Played
Rock & Alternative MID 30
- songs follow all rules
- Playlist is "SOURCE Rock & Alternative"
- Rating is greater than zero stars
- Playcount is less than 11 (adjust to suit your needs, but keep below the 'top 20' playcount)
- Playcount is greater than 2 (adjust to suit your needs)
- limit to 30 songs
** Sort by Least Recently Played
Rock & Alternative BOT 50
- songs follow all rules
- Playlist is "SOURCE Rock & Alternative"
- Rating is greater than zero stars
- Playcount is less than 3 (adjust to suit your needs, but keep below the 'mid 30' playcount)
- limit to 50 songs
** Sort by Least Recently Played
You've now got a total of 100 songs from your "SOURCE Rock and Alternative" playlist. 20 are your favorites. 30 are 'up and coming' or quasi-favorites etc. And 50 are going to be ones you don't know as well. Mind you, you can change the number of each of these. Just keep track of how many you have in each. I chose for the "top" because that's about how many indispensible songs I have for the genre. If you've got 50 that you can't live without, adjust the numbers accordingly. The 'top' ones are the ones you want to keep in your iPod all the time.
Now, the actual playlist you're gonna put into the iPod:
Create a new 'smart' playlist. Name it whatever the heck you want (I'll call it "R&A". And add these rules:
- songs follow any rules
- Playlist is "Rock & Alterna Top 20"
- Playlist is "Rock & Alterna Mid 30"
- Playlist is "Rock & Alterna Bot 50"
- limit to 100 songs
** Sort by Random
It is important to keep the number of songs in this playlist equal to the total number of your 'top' 'mid' and 'bot' playlists.
So here's what you've got now:
A mix of 100 songs in random order. You're going to hear some songs you don't know well. If you don't like them, rate them zero stars from your iPod (center button twice) and they'll fall off the list from then on and be replaced by a new song you don't know well (because it's "least recently played"). As you listen to some of 'em more and more, they'll move their way from the Bot 50 to the Mid 30. Songs in the middle won't move as much, but if you really like them, they might squeeze their way up to the top 20. It's important to keep the "least recently played" option on, because that's the only way to guarantee these playlists update every time you sync up.
I also suggest keeping some empty space on the iPod as the size of this smart playlist will change every time you sync. (because the songs you just listened to will be dropped off and replaced with new ones which are different durations)
At first, you'll have lots of songs you don't know well. But as you rate 'em zeros if you don't want 'em on there, the list will shrink and you'll see some more consistancy.
Also, when you buy new songs, just toss 'em into the SOURCE playlist and they'll work their way up the charts as you listen to 'em.
I hope this multi-tiered smart playlist works out for you as well as it has for me. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.

Answer 1

There is no way on an iPod to say "Oh, I don't like this song. Take it out of circulation." You can do it from iTunes once you get home if you remember which song it was, yeah, but someone like me who has a hard time remembering as far back as the beginning of this sentence will likely forget the song title by then.
If you use ratings as a means of removing the song, then you can do it on the fly.
But you make an excellent point. Why rate songs you haven't actually determined a rating for yet?
It'd make more sense to change all the intermediary playlists to include the rule "Rating *is not* 1 star". That way zero star songs can be played as well as anything two stars or higher, but songs you've rated as bad will be removed next time you sync up.
Thanks for pointing that out.