ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

My Obsessiveness About iTunes

Yesterday at lunch after church with some friends, we started talking about how obsessively I rate songs in iTunes.

My wife thinks it's crazy that I have a smart playlist set up for songs that I haven't rated and even crazier that I take the time to listen to all the songs and rate them based on how I'm feeling at the moment. Yeah, my likes and dislikes change over time, but I have no aversion to changing a song's rating that I feel is no longer appropriate for my tastes or mood.

I actually have a really logical (go figure, I'm a programmer) reason for doing this. I spend far less time organizing my 16.5+ gigabyte music library and finding things I want to listen to by having iTunes do the leg-work for me. I tell iTunes how much I like the song and it knows the last time that particular song was played, skipped, and how many times it has been played.

Here's how my playlists keep music pumping into my ears that I both like and haven't heard in a while. These playlists keep my library rotating in such a fashion that I hear almost the entire gamut of my music. (Note: I name "utility playlists" starting with a "z" so they show up at the end of un-grouped playlist listings. These playlists all know to automatically exclude things like holiday music and audio books.)

My Utility Playlists:

• z2_7_Wks: 2-star songs I haven't head in 7 weeks or skipped in 14 weeks
  Max: 5 songs selected at random.
• z3_6_Wks: 3-star songs I haven't head in 6 weeks or skipped in 12 weeks
  Max: 10 songs selected at random.
• z4_4_Wks: 4-star songs I haven't head in 4 weeks or skipped in 8 weeks
  Max: 10 songs selected at random.
• z5_2_Wks: 5-star songs I haven't head in 2 weeks or skipped in 2 weeks
  Max: 20 songs selected at random.

These all feed one main playlist: "Clever Mix". Clever Mix then gives me 45 songs selected at random from all 4 playlists.

Ingenious, huh? Maybe I am a bit compulsive about rating my music, but It keeps me from searching for good things to look for in my library. If I don't like the song it gives me, I simply skip it and the playlists exclude it for the specified period of time.

Am I the only person that does things like this? I'm really impressed by iTunes' ability to do this so I want to take advantage of it!