Music Genres - The iTunes Smart Playlistining

ocious

Hello. I'm Ocious at last.fm. I have a decently eclectic collection of music and a itty bitty tiny 4gb Nano. I have this thing with me every moment of everyday. I love the interactivity of rating all the songs on my ipod. Using these ratings I come up with smart playlists to choose all the songs of each genre that are rated 3 stars and higher. I also have one that has every song, except spoken word and classical, of 4 stars and higher.

My question to you relates to how you choose genres for your music in iTunes. I like to keep it as broad as possible. As in James Brown is listed as R&B instead of funk, so I get more than just funk in my playlist. Something about this irks me though. I want to figure out a way to have all my music in discrete genres but have several of those lumped together in Smart Playlists. How can I make a playlist that has all the music from several different genres with a certain rating?

ben0207

This is sort of the idea, I think. I wish you could do a further sub-smart-list of a playlist.

ocious

Yet that will result in all the music from those genres being in the playlist. I would like to add another criteria of being rated 3 stars and up.

Here is a more complicated method. I create one playlist with all the genres collected.
Click for full size - Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Then I make another smart playlist from that playlist and the high rating.
Click for full size - Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Is there another way to do this with the comments column or something?

ben0207

What' swrong with your solution?

ocious

Nothing really, I just figured it out after playing with it. Was kinda hoping to see how others have their smart playlists set up.

EggyToast

Yeah, that's kind of the only way to do complex boolean-type stuff. It would be nice to do and/or in the same playlist but it's not set up to do that (yet?).

You could use more explicit genre groupings and add the "sort criteria" to the commends, grouping, etc., as well. However, in my iTunes I essentially have 3/4 genres -- Rock, Electronic, Jazz, and Classical. Classical is always excluded, and the other 3 weighted. If I need something more specific, it's usually by artist anyway. The advantage to iTunes, and any catalog system, is that you can define bits yourself, so if you want to call James Brown R&B, you can. Or change it all to be Funk, or "70s" or whatever. I've got a buddy that adds "live" to the comment section for any live music he has, so he can exclude it from "normal" playlists.

ben0207

I have the comments field used for where the artist is from.