Effective November 1, WebGenii Consulting Ltd will be
My TechGenie Ltd.
This name change means less confusion over the services we offer.
Services include:
* Office template design and programming
* Presentation design; templates and existing decks
* Software reviews and recommendations
Over the next while, I’ll be migrating some of my most popular posts over to the My TechGenie blog.
So change your bookmarks!The new logo for My TechGenie
I have an intense dislike of iTunes. I used to think that it was deliberately lousy on Windows machines. Then we got a Mac and I found it was just as terrible on it as well.
But there is one thing that I like about iTunes, and that is the ability to create a Smart Playlist. A smart playlist is one that adapts; automatically adding songs based on the criteria that you set. Right now, smart playlists can only be created through iTunes but I have hope that soon I’ll be able to create them through the music app on my iPhone.
iTunes Smart Playlist
To make a smart playlist select the File, New, Smart Playlist menu choice
from within iTunes.
My favorite smart playlist is one that finds songs that I haven’t listened to in the last month and plays them for me. It’s a great way to keep from listening to the same music over and over again. As songs are played, they are removed from the playlist and new unplayed songs are added to the playlist.
Smart playlist settings
Here are the settings that I use to make my Not Recently Played playlist. The most important setting is to ensure that song has not been played in the last month. The rest of the filters remove holiday theme music, videos, audiobooks, podcasts and any music I’ve given a 1 star rating to. Right now I’m limiting the length of this playlist to 30 songs. The random selection option, is acting more like an alphabetical selection right now. Previously it was truly random *shrug* (the oddball behaviors of iTunes are nothing new). I’m hoping that this will repair itself with the next version of iTunes.
When you sync your iPhone with iTunes be sure to select your Not Recently Played playlist, so the playlist is pulled over to the phone.
Smart playlists have a different icon than regular playlists
In the new music app, this is what your playlist will look like. These playlists have a different icon, and of course you can’t add songs to them manually. You can see from my list that I also have a smart playlist looking for the word “happy” in the song title and playlists looking for recently added music on the basis of musical genre .
Those playlists are a little less successful because genre tags are not always applied consistently. Or at least music is not always classified the way I would classify it. Again, it would be great to be able to add metadata to songs from within the music app on the phone. But that type of editing has to be done from within iTunes on the computer. So I usually don’t bother. Nevertheless, I really like my Not Recently Played playlist since it does find gems that I would otherwise forget are in my music library.