http://www.musicip.com/mixer/index.jsp

This has become the ultimate personalized radio station, by genre and easily goes through my full library.

There’s an Applescript an Doug’s Applscripts fot itunes (Google it) that does exactly that: It scans your library for artists that only have 1 song. You can then sort by year or genre

- chrish

In the meantime, I have a couple of smart playlists based on the point in my life that the music is from - eg. “The College Years” and that can be split up by genre easily enough.

I also have a smart Playlist called “Cape Cod 80’s” - popular songs from 1987 - 1989. Great to bring back memories on being on the Cape.

Current Mix: Rating is 3 or greater and limits it to 50 tracks by the ones that I’ve listened to most recently

Right Now: Songs added in the last week that have a rating of 3 or greater

New tunes: Added in the last week and isn’t a podcast

I listen to a lot of remixes so I also have artist playlists that add music by finding the artist name in the track, the artist or the album.

I also have playlists set up to search the comments for names of indie labels.

There my playlists.

Also, the new “Skipped” attributes for smart playlists are useful. For instance, I have a Jazz smart playlist which is only for the super chilled stuff. Sometimes a track pops up which is wrong for the list, but in the future I might be in a different mood and the track will be great.
So I have added “Last skipped is NOT in the last week” as a parameter. This means that I kick the track out of the list for a week when I skip it. Very slick, I think.

And more: Use Tune Tags along with Quicksilver to tag tracks on the fly, and then use those tags to build playlists:

Tune tags’ll build a playlist based on tags too, from QS, but I just use it for Smart Playlists. It stores the tags in the comments field.

- Use the comments tag to indicate cover songs, remixes, mood, playlist, etc.
- Make sure the year tag refers to original album release, not reissue dates.

Personally I resolve the genre issue by using only eight ‘main’ genres: pop, rock, country, rap, r&B, electronic, reggae and classical. I then list the subgenre in the grouping tag. Now I can split the genre’s into ’styles’: Alt-Pop, Alt-Rock, Classic Rock, Traditional Country, Hard Rock, Oldies Pop, Soft Rock, Soul/R&B, Hip-Hop/R&B, and so forth.

I use a rating scheme too; No stars means the song has not been listened to or rated. One star means it is forgettable, and if the artist isn’t a favored one, I delete the song. Two stars means the song is not great compared to other songs, but it is good relative to the other songs in an artists catalogue. Three songs means it is a good song and should be included in the playlists. Four stars represent an artists best work. Five stars represent a song better than 95% of the others in the library. The ratio of five-star songs to 3-to-5-star songs should not exceed 1:4

Now with all the above info, I can use rules to split the genres into years, or the five-star songs into genres. Also, by converting all your regular playlists to smart playlists via the comments field you ensure that your playlists will not be lost, as long as your song files are intact.

Also, since iTunes does not suppory boolean operators, you must use ‘provisional’ playlists to get advanced, e.g. Provisional Pop would include songs whose grouping or genre is pop, and Provisional Pop 2 would include songs that are in Provisional Pop and whose rating is above two.

I’ve now managed to build a series of smart playlists to manage the life cycle of my music. From a brand new song, rated and played, through to old favourites and songs to delete.

Rating is at least 4.
Last played is not in the last four weeks.

Always songs I love, always songs I haven’t heard in a little while.

You can then make a bunch of smart playlists (eg “softness > 2″), and use them as building blocks for real playlists (eg “playlist is `softness > 2` and playlist is `mood > 1`”).

You can get the widget here:
http://gfxmonk.sysprosoft.com/2006/02/my-first-widget.html
- to change what you want to rank your songs on, I’m afraid you’ll have to edit the first line of the iRank.js file inside the widget. But it’s not hard, honest, it looks like this:

var ratings = new Array(”My Rating”,”Pop”, “Mood”, “Softness”, “Hardcore”, “Nostalgia”);

For a lot of albums, the band will put a single or some other popular song first. I rather like this list of mine, you get a high concentration of popular songs.