the hot side is hot

the biggest surprise i found is that, i had music in my library on my desktop, that i liked, but i had never listened to in itunes. it just didn’t show up in the colossal shuffle before. what an awesome surprise to re-discover tracks you like, AND make sure they get included in your ipod sync.

the cool side is cool

a lot of dusty, crusty, and musty stuff that actually WAS getting synced to my ipod, i never listened to anymore. since playing my <1 play, <1 skip playlist until it was empty, i registered skips for the stuff i no longer care for.

when it comes together

the statistics for how this changed the portion of my library that gets synced to the ipod: i now have 2.71GB free on my 20GB ipod. (previously: ~35MB free).

what this means

who knows what this means? other than, i can now dig up old CDs, rip more, sort more, rip more.

it should be a little while longer now that i’ll require a bigger ipod. i hope.

the problem: running out of space

for a while, i’ve been trying to figure out a clever way to sync only the music i do or would listen to (i keep the rest around on the computer for posterity, or in case i change my mind in the future.)

part of the solution: ‘smart’ playlists

i have a playlist called “big master playlist” that matches all rules:

• less than 5 skip count
• any rating at all

that’s worked pretty well, but i’m starting to run out of room again. i need to exclude more, but i don’t want to shun tracks that i perhaps haven’t listened to because they just don’t come around in the shuffle too often. so to those ends, another playlist.

you’re in, or you’re out

i have created another smart playlist to find all the stragglers. match all the criteria:

• play count is less than 1
• skip count is less than 1

therefore: i have never played this song before. and now i’m listening to that playlist, exclusively. when i make it through a song successfully, it drops off the list. when i skip a song i don’t care for, it drops off the list. i will listen to it until it’s empty. (if you want to be more forgiving, you can increase the numbers to 2 plays or 2 skips, etc.) this will allow me to improve my master playlist.

make the smart playlist smarter

then i can add a rule to my master list that requires a track to have a play count greater than zero. that means, sometime, somewhere, i listened to that song, so it can be considered (against the other rules in the set).

obsessive?

yeah this is way too much thought and worry. but thinking is cheaper than a new ipod. and if you had more than 16gb of music, and you purchased one of those snazzy new iphones, you might need a strategy like this, too.

…over a cookie