A smart random playlist
As I've mentioned before, I've been going through my music library in Apple Music and tweaking — deleting songs, fixing album art, tags, etc. — and re-discovered some playlists I made ages ago.
Most of the neat ones are "Genius" playlists, which were introduced to iTunes...I'm not sure how long ago. But it's been at least a decade, if not longer. The general idea is that it creates a playlist based around similar songs to the specified track. Unfortunately when I tried to create a new genius playlist from one of Brigitte Calls Me Baby's songs, it didn't work, even after updating Genius. Apparently that's a common experience with newer songs and it doesn't work very well (or maybe it only works with the actual Apple Music subscription and not local libraries, I dunno).
But the really fun one I found was my smart playlist called, "The Random Playlist". Smart Playlists let you select songs for a playlist based on specific rules. Here are the rules I set up for this playlist:
25 songs are selected for this playlist, at random, based on matching ALL of the following criteria:
- The song hasn't been played in the last 365 days
- The song has been skipped less than twice
- Media kind is not podcast1
It's live-updating too, which means it will change as I play music. The neat thing is that even though the smart rules don't show on my iPod, I have noticed that the songs change depending on what I play. The other day I got to a point where the playlist only had 1 song, because I had run out of music on my iPod that matched the rules2.
I don't know whether I thought of these rules myself or if I read them somewhere but I choose to believe the former. I am quite proud of this playlist! It means that it will bring up music I haven't played in a while, and will filter out tracks that I've skipped too often.
Right now, because I haven't listened to a lot of my library in a while, the "last played in 365 days" rule is going to capture almost all of my library. But that's OK, I hope to change that as I listen to more music from my library more often.
I'm going to try to create some new smart playlists with fun rules to see if I can come up with interesting playlists. I'll share if I turn up anything interesting.
Edit to add: As of today I've started to make sure I rate songs as I listen to them. Apple Music provides a 5-star rating system so I'm using that. No science to it. This might come in handy for future smart playlists.
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This last rule is no longer necessary as Apple Music separated podcasts to a separate application. Plus my library doesn't have podcasts in it anymore, they got lost :(↩
For some reason the playlist as it shows in Apple Music doesn't update after I plug my iPod in to sync...but when I opened it on my iPod to verify all the music I selected was there, the music on the list was different. There must be some sort of delay.↩