Underappreciated Music Revealed
nerkles May 28th, 2007
Here’s a hack to help you to appreciate good music you’ve been neglecting.
Prerequisite: this won’t work unless you have most or all of your music in iTunes, you’ve rated most of your collection, and you use iTunes and/or an iPod to listen to it most of the time. Otherwise move along, nothing to see here.
Create a Smart Playlist (option-command-N).
Here’s what mine looks like:
(click the image to see it full size)
You’ll need to make some adjustments to Play Count and Skip Count, since your counts are surely different from mine. Depending on how you use star ratings, you might want to adjust that part, too.
The Skip Count is a fascinating way to study your own taste. It helps you find those songs that you aren’t ready to admit you dislike, and the songs that you only like when you’re in the mood for them. My favorite use of Skip Count is for uncovering songs you feel compelled to like for some reason (such as their popularity), but you don’t. Deleting them is fun.
I have a regular (not “Smart”) playlist called “Worn out for now” where I put songs that I don’t want to overplay and ruin (I have lots of music that I loved and now can’t bear to hear because I overplayed it back in the day, so this is my weird way to prolong my ability to enjoy great music). I exclude any song on that list, because it’s already overappreciated.
It’s a good idea to exclude non-music Genres, or ones you don’t really want popping up randomly.
So once you’ve done that, go to Party Shuffle and select the list. Go back and tweak the numbers until you find the sweet spot.
Enjoy the songs you’ve forgotten!
- General , Hacks , iTunes , music
- Comments(0)
