Some Playlists for iTunes and iPod

Summary: If you follow my tagging scheme or an organized one of your own, you can improve your listening experience with some standard playlists and smart playlists. Setting up playlists is very much a matter of personal preference. I offer these not because you shoud necessarily use the same ones, but just to start your thinking about what’s possible.

See also: Taming iTunes & iPod for Classical Music

Playlists in Folders

You might not know that iTunes lets you organize playlists in folders, and iPod uses those folders as a submenu in the Playlists menu.

Creating and Arranging Folders

To create a folder, select File » New Playlist Folder and give it a name. Folders are arranged alphabetically in iTunes and in iPod’s Playlists menu, followed by any playlists that you haven’t assigned to a folder. (You can create a playlist folder within a playlist folder, but I haven’t found a use for that yet.)

A folder can contain plain and smart playlists. Within each folder, iTunes shows all the smart playlists alphabetically, followed by all the plain playlists alphabetically. On iPod, however, all playlists within a folder are alphabetized in one sequence, though iPod displays different icons for the different types.

Here’s how you can assign playlists to folders:

• To create a new playlist within a folder, click on the folder name or any playlist already in the folder, and then File » New Playlist or New Smart Playlist.
• To create a new playlist that’s not within any folder, if all your existing playlists are in folders, first double-click PLAYLISTS to collapse the list, and then create the new playlist.
• To move a playlist into a folder, either from another folder or from outside all the folders, drag it onto the folder name. Careful! Don’t drag the playlist onto a playlist within the folder. That may add its contents to that playlist, which probably isn’t what you want.
• To move a playlist out of a folder without putting it in another folder, drag it onto the word PLAYLISTS or past the contents of the last folder.

Finally, to rename a playlist or a folder, select it and then press the F2 key. (This works to rename most things in iTunes as well as in Windows.)

My Playlist Folders

Obviously this is personal preference, like all my recommendations, but I have four folders of playlists, numbered in the order I want to see them in iPod’s Playlists menu:

• 1-Non-recent contains smart playlists for music or other media that I haven’t listened to recently.
• 2-Binges contains mostly plain playlists for all of something—all the Haydn symphonies, all the Gilbert & Sullivan overtures, everything written by Noël Coward, everything sung by Michael Feinstein, all my Christmas music, and so forth.
• 3-Specialties contains, erm, special playlists like my favorite pieces, music for going to sleep by, and favorite Piaf songs.
• 99-Maintenance is where I dump “Recently Added”, “Recently Played”, and other maintenance-type lists.

Some Sample Playlists

Here’s a sampling of some of my playlists. Again, I don’t expect you will want to copy them as they are, but I hope they give you some ideas of how you can create your own playlists and make the most of your iPod.

Playlist Folder: Non-recent

The playlists in this folder account for most of my listening time. I like to shuffle by categories, while ensuring that over time I listen to my whole collection—well, almost my whole collection; more about that below.

All the playlists in this folder have Last Played » is before the date I started my current listening cycle. All have Live updating checked, so that whatever I listen to is removed from the playlist whether I listen to it in the playlist or select it specifically through browsing. Eventually these playlists empty out—it takes six or seven months— and then I change the date and start again.

By the way, I discovered that live updating sometimes didn’t work on iPod if Last Played wasn’t the first condition, though it still worked in iTunes. So now I always have Last Played first.

All the playlists in this folder have Rating » is not » ★; I use a one-star rating to mark the pieces I don’t want coming up in the shuffle. (For more about my rating system, follow this link.)

Playlist: Art Music

Here’s an example: art music (“classical”). The last time I got through my whole collection was in April. So the current version of the playlist selects art music (genre beginning with A) last played before 18 April 2012:

I’ve already explained most of these settings. I exclude AV/Instructional because that’s rehearsal CDs, which I don’t listen to for pleasure.

I used to play this list on iPod by setting Shuffle » By Albums. But more than once I forgot to change it back after playing pop music shuffled by song, so I got something like the third movement of Beethoven’s seventh followed by “Salgo già del trono aurato”. So now I prefer to pre-shuffle each playlist in iTunes before I sync the list to iPod. Here are the steps:

1. Create the smart playlist and give it a name, or edit Last Played in the definition of an existing playlist.
2. Open the playlist in the browser, and sort by the “play order” column, which is the unlabeled one at the left:

   

3. Select Controls » Shuffle » By Albums. (If you don’t have iTunes 10, the menu sequence may be different.) I shuffle Art Music, New Age, and Shows by album, and the humor and pop lists by song.
4. If necessary, select Controls » Shuffle » Turn On Shuffle, or click the shuffle control at the lower left of the iTunes window.
5. Right-click on the name of the playlist, and select Copy To Play Order. That saves the current order of items in this playlist for use when shuffle is turned off. You can still re-shuffle on the fly, if you want to, by turning shuffle on; but when you turn shuffle off again, the order will revert to this play order.

Playlist: Pop

Setting up my pop list turned out to be complicated because of some special cases, so it might be another good example to look at. Originally I thought of “pop” as the opposite of “classical”. It took me some experimentation before I realized that, in terms of my collection anyway, “pop” really means “music items that can all be played independently”. Here’s what I currently use:

Last Played was explained above, and Rating was also explained above.

The basic selection is Genre » starts with » B, because in my list of genres all non-“classical” music has a genre starting with B. But I exclude B/NA because I have a separate New Age playlist, and Humor and Shows because I have separate playlists for them. There’s also a separate Xmas list, in the Binges folder.

That leaves Wayne & Shuster. You may not have heard of them, but if you like classic comedy you’ve probably heard their Shakespearean baseball game and “Rinse the Blood off my Toga”, Julius Cæsar done like a Bogart movie. They did a series of variety shows on the CBC beginning in the 1950s. Sadly, none of their stuff is on DVD, but you can see some snippets on YouTube. I’ve got eight of their shows on audiocassette, which I digitized and imported into iTunes. I want each show to shuffle as a whole, not each segment separately, so I exclude them from Pop and Humor and include them in Shows.

Playlist: Pop Standards

Sometimes I just want non-classical music, but sometimes I want specifically Édith Piaf, or specifically top 40s, or specifically Big Band and the American songbook. For my subdivisions of pop, I start with Playlist » is » Pop (see above), then add further qualifiers. I use “pop standards” for the pre-rock-and-roll era:

“Billboard” is my compilation albums of the hits of each year in the late 1950s and the 1960s; “Piaf” is obvious. Because of live updating, whichever playlist I’m in when a particular song is played, it’s removed from all the non-recent playlists that it belongs to.

Playlist Folder: Binges

A completist by temperament, I sometimes like to play all the symphonies of a particular composer, or everything I have by a favorite performer. For this I have plain playlists rather than smart playlists.

There’s nothing too mysterious here. The list that you see is just the “completist’s playlists” that I’ve had occasion to construct so far; I’ll be adding to them in the future. There are two Sibelius lists because I love his symphonies and I have two sets, with performances of very different character. In the meantime, if I suddenly want to listen to, say, all the Mendelssohn piano concertos, I can always make an on-the-go playlist.

Xmas is a special case, music that was originally intended as Christmas music or that feels Christmasy to me. It could have a genre of B/Xmas, or another genre but with Xmas in the comments. It was just easier to do that as a smart playlist than a plain playlist.

Playlist Folder: Specialties

This folder is kind of a grab bag, and maybe I should have called it that, because the playlists don’t really have anything in common.

I start with two smart playlists based on ratings, so that when I change my rating of a piece these playlists are updated automatically.

• 1-Star Pieces have been set not to play automatically in any of the non-recent playlists. But occasionally I want to give them a listen to see if my feelings have changed.
• 4-Star Albums are my very favorites, amounting to 80 works and about 50 hours of playing time. That’s too much to play in one session, obviously, so I thought I’d add a Last Played Is After date condition. Much to my surprise, iPod doesn’t update the playlist by removing “songs” from it after they are played. (All the playlists in the Non-recent group update just fine on iPod.) If I sync to iTunes, the playlist is updated on both, but obviously that’s not convenient.

  It turns out this is not only a known bug but a long-standing one. What breaks iPod Smart Playlists? says that iPod won’t update smart playlists that contain Podcast Is, Playlist Is, or Album Rating Is conditions. The last one is what I’m using. In comments following Apple breaks Smart Playlists on iPhone and iTunes alike (yet again), KimH suggests that adding a Playlist Is Music condition solves the problem. But that didn’t work for me or for commenters in iTunes 9 Smart Playlist ‘Live Updating’ bug.

  <rant> These threads go back years, but unfortunately Apple has historically been more interested in adding “kewl” new features than in fixing bugs. This is just one of many, but I’ve been lucky that none of the others have affected me personally. I’m generally happy with my iPod, but this kind of stuff is just bush league, unworthy of a corporation with Apple’s resources. And of course dumping iTunes, as many people do, wouldn’t help because this is a bug in the software running on iPod. </rant>

There are also some special plain playlists. Obviously these are highly dependent on my tastes, and your list would probably be considerably different, but here’s mine for what it’s worth:

• Bedtime Music, music for going to sleep by. Some of the tunes there are the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony, the third movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, some Chopin nocturnes, a couple of movements from Sibelius’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and of course Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll.
• Chenilles Extra, a CD-length playlist of my favorite songs sung by The Chenille Sisters. (The first song of theirs that I ever heard was “Regretting What I Said”, broadcast by Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion, and I was hooked. If you like swing-era music at all, you’ll really like their album Whatcha Gonna Swing Tonight?)
• Pasticci (singular pasticcio) are “produced by borrowing fragments, ingredients, or motifs from various sources”, according to The American Heritage Dictionary. I have a strange fascination with this sub-sub-genre.

  For instance, there’s Beethoven’s Leonore Overture #4 (yes, number four) from the Hoffnung Astronautical Music Festival. That festival series also gave us Reizenstein’s unforgettable Concerto Popolare, “a piano concerto to end all piano concertos”, in which the orchestra begins Tchaikovsky’s first concerto but the soloist starts with the Grieg, and they both end up on “Roll out the Barrel”.

  This playlist also includes The Unbegun Symphony and other pieces from P.D.Q. Bach albums in which Peter Schickele strings together various snippets of classical and non-classical works.

• Piaf Favorites, my 48 favorite Piaf songs.
• Twists and Turns, pieces with a surprise. The second movement of Haydn’s 94th symphony is too obvious and is not included. I started this playlist with the second movement of Brahms’s sextet opus 36, which noodles along quietly in a minor key in 6/8, then suddenly transforms into a joyous dance. Other fun surprises are the last movement of Mozart’s G-minor string quintet (another minor-major transform) and the slow-fast transitions in the first movement of Haydn’s 86th and the sixth movement of Beethoven’s E-flat piano trio (the same tunes as his septet, but I like the sonority better).

Playlist Folder: Maintenance

These playlists are for managing my collection, not for listening to, so with one exception I have them marked not to sync to iPod. I’ll just hit the high spots:

• Missing Data assembles pieces that I haven’t fully tagged yet: missing genre or album, or Name set to the default “Track” and a number. In theory I tag everything as soon as I import it, but in practice I sometimes defer that, so this is how I come back to those later. The condition Playlist » is not » zz_Checked Items includes unchecked items. Mostly those are files from audiobook CDs that I haven’t yet converted into an iTunes audiobook.

  
  (Ctrl-click the screen shot to enlarge it.)

• Recently Played is just Last played » is in the last » 7 days, and I sort by Last Played.

  What good is it? Sometimes when I’m in the car playing one of my Non-recent playlists, I’ll hear something and not recognize it. But of course I can’t fiddle with iPod and look at the screen while I’m driving; and even if I could, iPod’s screen doesn’t show enough information. So when I get home I sync and then look at this playlist in iTunes to find out what I was listening to.

• Unplayed is “songs” I have never played, or haven’t played in years. My original idea was that I would look at this playlist periodically and delete the items I thought I’d never play again, but in fact it’s just electrons, and storage capacity isn’t a problem, so I’ve had no real incentive to weed out my collection.
• zz_CheckedItems is, of course, checked items. Since I have iPod set to sync only selected playlists, I needed a playlist that contains all checked items, so that all of them would stay on iPod; hence this list. I named it back before iPod could handle playlist folders, so that it would be at the end of my list of playlists.

Conclusion

There you have my ideas. It’s probably too much information already, but if you have any questions or suggestions, or just want to share some ideas of your own, please get in touch.