I might try the contiguous subsets approach...I think my preference is not so much "full album" (i.e. I often don't get to the end) and more that I want to hear a series of songs from the same album until I change my mind. I like the suggestion of using a smart list to monitor a dumb one for the core - thanks!
If you want to always listen to full albums, I don't think smart playlists would be very useful.
I'm swaying back the other way on that after I tried the suggestion in the link I included above - for the record it works. If you first create a way of tagging all tracks that are part of full albums (I just tried it using the "Sort Show" tag under "Sorting", which I have never used for anything else, inserting "FullAlbum" in that field) then you can use that to exclude single tracks. If shuffle by is then set to 'by album', a smart playlist that is set up to fetch from files with that tag and select by random with some preset limit pulls a random set of full albums.
The work is going to be in creating and maintaining that tagging system, but it might be worth it. It might even have other uses - suppose I use that "Sort Show" tag (there are other possible tags that could be used, including "comment" and "grouping") to insert either FullAlbum or SingleTrack or PartAlbum...then I could use it to pull up all those albums where I only downloaded some of the tracks (e.g. at the end of an emusic month) and see if I want to complete them (e.g. at the start of an emusic month - or this could be useful for keeping track of guvera). It should also be fairly easy to track which albums/songs need adding to the system once it's set up - just create a smart playlist for "Sort Show" + is + [leave blank]. Maybe a fourth category for deliberately partial - where I know I don't want the rest of the album? Maybe that's PartAlbum and the ones still to complete are UnfinishedAlbum. Hmmm.
I haven't very actively used iTunes in the past for tracking my music, but I am starting to see the possibilities could be quite powerful if one starts colonizing the spare tag fields systematically.
Karg, for the record, I checked on my iPod classic, and a smart playlist based on a dumb playlist not on the iPod is working fine (though of course it can't live-update).
Prof, while it's true that I get some partial albums with my system, they seem to show up eventually. It helps that many are jazz albums with relatively few tracks. I should add that my smart playlists select by last play date, so things I haven't listened to in a while cycle in.
I'd also like to do things with sorting and grouping, but can't imagine when that's ever going to happen!
Doofy, all my playlists *play* fine - my question is specifically about live-updating. ("Screwed" in my parlance means I can't rely on those playlists to not repeat tracks I've heard.)
@germanprof Am I right in assuming the selected by > album option means it will pull the fist X albums alphabetically? (which is not so good)
You can sort smart playlists by any column you want. Then right-click that playlist, and choose "Copy to Play Order" and it will get put on your ipod in that order.
edit: so in your case, you'd want to sort on the album column. In case you weren't aware, you can click on the album column header, and it will cycle through 3 choices: album, album by year, album by artist/year
@kargatron It might be ipod-model dependent though, I don't know. It's not hard to check - go into a playlist-referencing smart playlist that ignores recently played songs, play one, back out and play another song or playlist, then go back to the first - see if the just-played song is gone. It should be, but for these referencing playlists, it's now broken on my nano 2g.
Yes, it's been broken for years, when the smart playlist uses another smart playlist. I actually didn't know my 2g nano was supposed to do this. Some people have said they get it to work if they go completely back to the main music menu and go back in, but that never works on mine.
My ipod is now fairly ancient - about 5 years old with only 30GB of memory with about 90 GB of music on itunes. Everything I permanently want I've given 5 stars. I have that as a smart playlist so it is automatically updated if I add anything else I want permanently. I then have a number of other smart lists that circulate in and out things I haven't played in various time limits in a range of genre. I'll try and do this as an album smart list, as currently they can be all over the place. The advice above will be helpful - thanks
Yes, it's been broken for years, when the smart playlist uses another smart playlist.
See, that's the puzzling part - I chiefly use such playlists on my ipod, have for years, and all of a sudden I noticed it obviously broken within the last two weeks. It's not impossible, but would strike me as exceedingly odd that I never noticed live updating wasn't working in all that time.
I honestly thought 2nd gen nanos didn't have this feature. I could have sworn "live updating on the ipod" was a feature that came out around the time iTouch was introduced, adn reading that only newer models could do it, but couldn't find anything about it on the web. I've always had to sync my nano to get my ~Fresh Mix updated.
I wish I knew - all I can say is that I'm very anal about these things, and this last event was my noticing "hey, I heard this yesterday; hey, I heard that 2 days ago", and it continued, with many WTFs. To miss those repeatedly over a long period doesn't seem plausible to me. Perhaps it's one of those iTunes bugs that's system-, hardware-, and situation-dependent.
Well, after a couple of days of working on my music, in case anyone's interested, here's what I've come up with for now for smart management of a too-large music collection on a 64GB iPod Touch.
1. Preparation. (a) Drag all complete albums to a dumb playlist called "Full Albums". (Also, for future flexiblity when building smart lists, use this list to tag them all "FullAlbum" - I used the otherwise redundant "Sort Show" tag field). This combined with the shuffle by album setting below makes smartlists compile with full albums when used as a criterion. (b) Go through all full albums and give them an album rating as follows: 5 stars for "essential - always want with me"; 4 stars for "currently of interest: want with me for the immediate future" 3 stars for "good, bread and butter albums but I don't care if it's a few months till I hear them again" (2 star means "exclude from system" and 1 star "tag for likely deletion"). These two steps took quite a few hours, but it was worth it and actually reintroduced me to quite a bit of my music - and it's a while since my library has been in such good shape. (c) set iTunes to shuffle by album.
2. Smart lists:
(i) Rating = 5 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, (This one keeps all my essential albums on the iPod all the time; I'll monitor the list from time to time; it's about 10GB)
(ii) Rating = 4 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, last played is not in last 2 months, play count is less than 3, size limited to 14 GB, random. (May have to tweak this one with experience - it should slowly cycle my 4 star albums on and off the iPod - might have to add conditions to force it through all of them; we'll see. Limiting the size is based on my realization that having more music on the iPod actually means that a bunch of stuff is less likely to get listened to because it's just hanging around - I hope having a subset with me will focus me more)
(iii) Rating = 3 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, play count is zero, limit to 4 GB, random (This more rapidly cycles an ongoing selection of the bread and butter albums; I'll change the play count criterion once I get through them all)
(iv) Sort Show does not contain FullAlbum, playlist is not any of the above, last played is not in the last month, size limited to 1 GB by random, couple of genre exclusions - e.g. 'podcast', 'speech'. (This will quick-cycle all the tracks that are not part of albums.)
(v) Date added is in the last month, playlist is none of the above, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, genre exclusions. This will make sure any new purchases get on the iPod for at least a month even if I don't rate them.
With this setup I should be able to easily intervene to speed up or slow down the transience of a given album (or make it "sticky") just by giving it a star more or less - and I can do that on the PC or the iPod. So far I am liking this better than the previous great mess of things I decided some day or other to throw on the iPod (with forgotten gems languishing on the PC). And it works with my mostly full-album listening habits, and leaves me with semi-manual control over what iTunes gives me. Third party apps will load quicker with a smaller music library on the Touch, but I still have over 12 days of music on there biased to what I like. Also once it's set up it's easy to use diagnostic smart lists to check if it's up to date (e.g. search for albums without ratings).
While I'm at it, I wonder if folk have seen this method for automating the discovery and deletion of dead file links in your iTunes library - I wish I'd found it some time back; very useful.
I've seen similar methods to find lost tracks & delete them. Mostly, I just run the "Dead Tracks" script from this page every now & then.
That same page has the original script from Apple to delete dead tracks.
Even better - thank you!!!!!!!!! (If it's this easy, why oh why have they not made this a menu command in iTunes???)
(edit) Might be news to me alone, but there are some more here.
Oh yeah, if you have a Mac there are oodles of things you can do with itunes. That Doug's Apple Scripts is super for Mac owners. Too bad some of the more fun stuff hasn't made it over to Windows users.
Btw, my playlists are mostly back to working (i.e. live-updating). After isolating that the criteria-based (not playlist-based) smart playlists "worked", I then found that my playcount=0 one didn't. That playlist had pc=0 + kind = ''audio" + not-a-podcast (notice not playlist-based, but still didn't work!). I switched that to pc=0 only, and then most of my playlist-based ones started working again. Plainly iTunes-bug crap, I dunno. I still have a couple playlist-based ones that don't work for mysterious reasons. But I'm not suffering the previously mentioned widespread problems, though I fear my example might not be widely applicable.
Hey, that's good news!
I'm not sure mine are really working correctly. Maybe it's something like you found, or maybe it's something about using the "selected by random". A few weeks ago it kept serving up WAY too much Romeo Void which is one of the first CDs I ripped and not played for a while.
I was looking at all of it earlier this week, and found there are still a LOT of albums from the Mordac crack card days that haven't even been touched. The 'selected by random' seems to get 'selected by album'. I think it should have been giving me at least one track from some of those unplayed downloads, but a bunch of them are still sitting at zero plays.
I've been okay with using the smart sync options so far on my Ipod Touch, especially being able to tag certain albums, tracks, and artists as keepers. I would though sometimes like to be able to not have certain albums and artists on it, so i might try this tips sometime.
Katrina, does your master shuffle reference a pc=0 playlist? If not, throw it in the mix, just limit it to N tracks, a number that mixes a desired proportion in. That way a steady stream of unheard tracks eventually gets heard.
If your 'random' selection looks like 'album', that could be because your iTunes is set to shuffle albums in Controls -> Shuffle.
Well, instead of "playcount is 0" I had "playcount < 1" so I changed it to "playcount is 0". Maybe that will make a difference. I have it limited by MB on the feeder lists and by items on the master.
Thanks for the idea about shuffle. I checked, and it's by song, so that's not it.
Well, the playlist contents and "usage" should be easy to check: visually inspect the contents of the pc=0 playlist ("< 1" should be exactly the same) - what looks odd about it? You can always "refresh" it by unchecking/OK the 'limit to' checkbox, then rechecking it. You can also look at all the stuff pc=1 in the last couple months, see how much progress your making on the unheard pile. If not enough, just change the proportion of that playlist that occupies the master.
I make full use of the genius function on the ipod and I really love how it could come up with a smart play list consisting of the song genres I really like. Though, this would not pave way for discovering new tracks just sitting in your library. It's good to listen to what you love and familiar with but it is also feels great to hear a new song that you will appreciate.
I still haven't completely figured out what the iPod genius function needs to work - when I try it I invariably get a message saying that this song does not have enough songs connected with it ti form any recommendations. I am guessing this is because most of my music is obscure? It's not because I only have a few songs in given genre. How is the iPod genius function looking for connections?
While I'm writing about iTunes, do any of the iTunes experts out there have any ideas on the following problem? LLike many people (I've read various boards) I regularly get a problem with the iTunes library splitting the songs from an album into multiple album entries. The solution for this is usually to harmonize the tags (especially the "disk 1 of 1" tag) and art work. But I run into a few cases that are resistant to this, and they always involve the first track of the album being split off. Here is s concrete example from yesterday:
I added the new Explosions in the Sky album to the library. It showed correctly as a single album. Then I realized that the downloaded version was tagged as Explosions In The Sky and so created a new artist entry because of the capitalization. So I selected all of the tracks, went to get info, and manually changed both Artist and Album Artist to Explosions in the Sky (lowercase for the middle words), in keeping with other entries. On closing the dialog, suddenly the first track is split off into its own, identical -but-separate album entry. I go back into get info and place a check mark next to every tag on every tab, just to cover the bases. So the songs should be identically tagged now. No effect. So I delete the album, and, without doing anything else, drag the files back into the library from Windows Explorer. Now it displays correctly as a single album.
I find that when I get this first-song-split problem, the only fix seems to be deleting and re-adding. But the nuisance there is that if it is not a newly downloaded album, it resets the date-added tag, which is not editable. And some of my smart playlists function by date added, so that I catch new additions to the library. Is there any other cure? (I might not be able to test it until this happens to me again, but I'd like some options).
Track numbers are one placed to look. Eg, if the first track says "1 of 10" but the second track says "2 of [blank]," those are going to read as separate albums. However, not sure that 'splains you EITS experience...
That bug with caps/lower case is sure annoying. The only way I've found around it, is to rename all the tracks something completely different, like "testing", save it and then change it back.
Sounds like you have covered most of the bases, esp the Artist & Album Artist fields. Next up are the track x of y and disk x of y. And finally, have a look at the options tab and make sure "part of a compilation" is set to NO. I cannot stand that stupid Compilations folder.
If you want an article that will make your head spin, read this one. His method is to add a trailing x instead of renaming it something entirely different.
Well it took a while, but I have discovered a flaw in my wonderfully interlocking smart playlist setup for populating the ipod touch. I have a 5* list of stuff I want available whenever because it's really good. A 4* list that rotates from a large pool of stuff that I also rather like. I have a 3* list that rotates more slowly items that I might want to hear again every now and then. The flaw is psychological, not structural. I have realized that I have spent most of the past month listening to 3* music, and that this is a big part of why I'm feeling a bit fed up with listening. The reason is that I set a goal of listening to everything on my hard drive once (and am 400 tracks from being done); as I got closer to the end, listening to 3* albums rewarded that part of my psyche that likes checking off albums and seeing them rotate off the ipod and the overall task get smaller (while not rewarding quite as much the part that likes listening to really great music). It's been like collecting points in a video game that you know on one level is kind of wasting your time, but hey, in a few more minutes you'll hit 10,000. Whereas the 5* stuff is always there, so nothing changes when I listen to it (except play count of course), no old music cycles off or new music on. Just recognizing this might help. Or maybe I need to build in some kind of incentive that keeps me focused more of the time on the stuff I like best. Or maybe I just need to finish out this "listen to everything once" quest and balance will be restored to the force.
Gp, do you use the "limit to N tracks" option for those playlists? That lets you balance the playlists at whatever relative proportions you prefer. Combine that with some last-played constraints, and I'm sure you can fine-tune pretty quickly. My master playlist relies on all of those criteria.
Yes, I usually limit by GB. The issue the last month or two has not been so much the relative size of the different lists (that's about right), it's been that the 'checking things off' impulse has favored the 3* rotation method (=one-listen-and-off). I don't listen to playlists, just use them to stock the ipod and then select whole albums to listen to when I want to listen, so playlist balancing does not determine listening habits directly.
When I first had my ipod I decided I would play everything at least once in the first year. That worked fine. Then I tried it again the following year, and had to extend it to two years with much more music, which I did. That was at the end of 2009. I've not tried since. Towards the end I was playing music for the sake of it just to meet my target and it wasn't really related to what I wanted to listen to at the time. I've added so much since then that even two years would be unrealistic to play everything once. I do try to play new music at least twice, and I also use a star system. Sometimes when I want something to play I'll check through 4 star to check if there are any recently unplayed albums. I do wonder about some of the music that I never play, and it's not on my ipod,only itunes. Why am I keeping it? But it is only taking up memory, and I still have plenty on my computer. Eventually I might move some just to my external drive - it is there already anyway as a back-up. Much of the music I don't play tends to be singles and albums from the sixties and seventies and also some classical music that I rarely play.
LOL, I've just recently put a playlist on my ipod that is named "unlistened eMusic". It has tracks going back to 2006. (shameful, isn't it)
The tracks are selected by "least recently added".
I've limited it to 150 songs at a time. Some days, I am just not interested in listening to it, because I *do* want to rate the stuff I think is good. Some songs just make my ears perk up. I'd tried this playlist while making dinner and other messy tasks a few times. My hands wouldn't be free to rate things in time, and I'd get annoyed. After taking it off my ipod for a few years, I limited it to less tracks and mainly listen to it at work, now. I wonder how long it will take me to get through it?
I was listening to it tonight, and some vaguely filthy songs came on from "Ecko Records Sampler 2006". They cracked me up. "Private Fishing Hole" by Sheba Potts-Wright and "Lick It Before You Stick It" by Denise LaSalle. So glad I didn't miss these pearls! But then again, I was in the mood. If I'm not in the mood for something, I skip it. It will stay in the playlist and maybe I'll want that head-banging metal track the next tie, or that dreamy classical piece.
Comments
The work is going to be in creating and maintaining that tagging system, but it might be worth it. It might even have other uses - suppose I use that "Sort Show" tag (there are other possible tags that could be used, including "comment" and "grouping") to insert either FullAlbum or SingleTrack or PartAlbum...then I could use it to pull up all those albums where I only downloaded some of the tracks (e.g. at the end of an emusic month) and see if I want to complete them (e.g. at the start of an emusic month - or this could be useful for keeping track of guvera). It should also be fairly easy to track which albums/songs need adding to the system once it's set up - just create a smart playlist for "Sort Show" + is + [leave blank]. Maybe a fourth category for deliberately partial - where I know I don't want the rest of the album? Maybe that's PartAlbum and the ones still to complete are UnfinishedAlbum. Hmmm.
I haven't very actively used iTunes in the past for tracking my music, but I am starting to see the possibilities could be quite powerful if one starts colonizing the spare tag fields systematically.
Prof, while it's true that I get some partial albums with my system, they seem to show up eventually. It helps that many are jazz albums with relatively few tracks. I should add that my smart playlists select by last play date, so things I haven't listened to in a while cycle in.
I'd also like to do things with sorting and grouping, but can't imagine when that's ever going to happen!
Am I right in assuming the selected by > album option means it will pull the fist X albums alphabetically? (which is not so good)
You can sort smart playlists by any column you want. Then right-click that playlist, and choose "Copy to Play Order" and it will get put on your ipod in that order.
edit: so in your case, you'd want to sort on the album column. In case you weren't aware, you can click on the album column header, and it will cycle through 3 choices: album, album by year, album by artist/year
@kargatron
It might be ipod-model dependent though, I don't know. It's not hard to check - go into a playlist-referencing smart playlist that ignores recently played songs, play one, back out and play another song or playlist, then go back to the first - see if the just-played song is gone. It should be, but for these referencing playlists, it's now broken on my nano 2g.
Yes, it's been broken for years, when the smart playlist uses another smart playlist. I actually didn't know my 2g nano was supposed to do this. Some people have said they get it to work if they go completely back to the main music menu and go back in, but that never works on mine.
1. Preparation. (a) Drag all complete albums to a dumb playlist called "Full Albums". (Also, for future flexiblity when building smart lists, use this list to tag them all "FullAlbum" - I used the otherwise redundant "Sort Show" tag field). This combined with the shuffle by album setting below makes smartlists compile with full albums when used as a criterion. (b) Go through all full albums and give them an album rating as follows: 5 stars for "essential - always want with me"; 4 stars for "currently of interest: want with me for the immediate future" 3 stars for "good, bread and butter albums but I don't care if it's a few months till I hear them again" (2 star means "exclude from system" and 1 star "tag for likely deletion"). These two steps took quite a few hours, but it was worth it and actually reintroduced me to quite a bit of my music - and it's a while since my library has been in such good shape. (c) set iTunes to shuffle by album.
2. Smart lists:
(i) Rating = 5 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, (This one keeps all my essential albums on the iPod all the time; I'll monitor the list from time to time; it's about 10GB)
(ii) Rating = 4 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, last played is not in last 2 months, play count is less than 3, size limited to 14 GB, random. (May have to tweak this one with experience - it should slowly cycle my 4 star albums on and off the iPod - might have to add conditions to force it through all of them; we'll see. Limiting the size is based on my realization that having more music on the iPod actually means that a bunch of stuff is less likely to get listened to because it's just hanging around - I hope having a subset with me will focus me more)
(iii) Rating = 3 stars, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, play count is zero, limit to 4 GB, random (This more rapidly cycles an ongoing selection of the bread and butter albums; I'll change the play count criterion once I get through them all)
(iv) Sort Show does not contain FullAlbum, playlist is not any of the above, last played is not in the last month, size limited to 1 GB by random, couple of genre exclusions - e.g. 'podcast', 'speech'. (This will quick-cycle all the tracks that are not part of albums.)
(v) Date added is in the last month, playlist is none of the above, Sort Show contains FullAlbum, genre exclusions. This will make sure any new purchases get on the iPod for at least a month even if I don't rate them.
With this setup I should be able to easily intervene to speed up or slow down the transience of a given album (or make it "sticky") just by giving it a star more or less - and I can do that on the PC or the iPod. So far I am liking this better than the previous great mess of things I decided some day or other to throw on the iPod (with forgotten gems languishing on the PC). And it works with my mostly full-album listening habits, and leaves me with semi-manual control over what iTunes gives me. Third party apps will load quicker with a smaller music library on the Touch, but I still have over 12 days of music on there biased to what I like. Also once it's set up it's easy to use diagnostic smart lists to check if it's up to date (e.g. search for albums without ratings).
While I'm at it, I wonder if folk have seen this method for automating the discovery and deletion of dead file links in your iTunes library - I wish I'd found it some time back; very useful.
That same page has the original script from Apple to delete dead tracks.
(edit) Might be news to me alone, but there are some more here.
I'm not sure mine are really working correctly. Maybe it's something like you found, or maybe it's something about using the "selected by random". A few weeks ago it kept serving up WAY too much Romeo Void which is one of the first CDs I ripped and not played for a while.
I was looking at all of it earlier this week, and found there are still a LOT of albums from the Mordac crack card days that haven't even been touched. The 'selected by random' seems to get 'selected by album'. I think it should have been giving me at least one track from some of those unplayed downloads, but a bunch of them are still sitting at zero plays.
If your 'random' selection looks like 'album', that could be because your iTunes is set to shuffle albums in Controls -> Shuffle.
Thanks for the idea about shuffle. I checked, and it's by song, so that's not it.
While I'm writing about iTunes, do any of the iTunes experts out there have any ideas on the following problem? LLike many people (I've read various boards) I regularly get a problem with the iTunes library splitting the songs from an album into multiple album entries. The solution for this is usually to harmonize the tags (especially the "disk 1 of 1" tag) and art work. But I run into a few cases that are resistant to this, and they always involve the first track of the album being split off. Here is s concrete example from yesterday:
I added the new Explosions in the Sky album to the library. It showed correctly as a single album. Then I realized that the downloaded version was tagged as Explosions In The Sky and so created a new artist entry because of the capitalization. So I selected all of the tracks, went to get info, and manually changed both Artist and Album Artist to Explosions in the Sky (lowercase for the middle words), in keeping with other entries. On closing the dialog, suddenly the first track is split off into its own, identical -but-separate album entry. I go back into get info and place a check mark next to every tag on every tab, just to cover the bases. So the songs should be identically tagged now. No effect. So I delete the album, and, without doing anything else, drag the files back into the library from Windows Explorer. Now it displays correctly as a single album.
I find that when I get this first-song-split problem, the only fix seems to be deleting and re-adding. But the nuisance there is that if it is not a newly downloaded album, it resets the date-added tag, which is not editable. And some of my smart playlists function by date added, so that I catch new additions to the library. Is there any other cure? (I might not be able to test it until this happens to me again, but I'd like some options).
Sounds like you have covered most of the bases, esp the Artist & Album Artist fields. Next up are the track x of y and disk x of y. And finally, have a look at the options tab and make sure "part of a compilation" is set to NO. I cannot stand that stupid Compilations folder.
If you want an article that will make your head spin, read this one. His method is to add a trailing x instead of renaming it something entirely different.
The tracks are selected by "least recently added".
I've limited it to 150 songs at a time. Some days, I am just not interested in listening to it, because I *do* want to rate the stuff I think is good. Some songs just make my ears perk up. I'd tried this playlist while making dinner and other messy tasks a few times. My hands wouldn't be free to rate things in time, and I'd get annoyed. After taking it off my ipod for a few years, I limited it to less tracks and mainly listen to it at work, now. I wonder how long it will take me to get through it?
I was listening to it tonight, and some vaguely filthy songs came on from "Ecko Records Sampler 2006". They cracked me up. "Private Fishing Hole" by Sheba Potts-Wright and "Lick It Before You Stick It" by Denise LaSalle. So glad I didn't miss these pearls! But then again, I was in the mood. If I'm not in the mood for something, I skip it. It will stay in the playlist and maybe I'll want that head-banging metal track the next tie, or that dreamy classical piece.