Art La Flamme

OK, so I’ve talked about how to build a base radio station, and how to filter stuff out. Now it’s time to filter stuff in.

Why filter stuff back in? For every rule, there is an exception.

I filter out country music. 9 times out of 10, something with a genre listed as country is something I don’t want to hear. Except for some Johnny Cash.

Create a new smart playlist. Match all of the rules:

• Artist is Johnny Cash
• Rating is greater than 3 stars
• Playlist is baseradio

Limits items to 10 items, based on least recently played.

This lets you filter back in, in limited manners, things that you filtered out. Since we’re going to run the music through these filters after we filtered stuff out, this stuff will make it through to the end. Think of it as a last minute pardon for music that otherwise would be barred from your iPod.

Click OK. Call is CashFilterIn. Do it again as many times as you need — 10 songs from Rod Stewart, based on highest rating. Have songs that you never want to leave your playlist or iPod? Make a smart or regular playlist with those songs, so that they can be filtered back in.
When you’ve got all of those filter-in smart playlists (or non-smart playlists) done, make a new smart playlist, and match any of the conditions:

• Playlist is BaseRadioFilterOut
• Playlist is CashFilterIn
• Playlist is AmericanEdit
• Playlist is GottaHaveFunk

Click OK, and call is @YourNameForIt. Mine is called @Art, because putting the @ symbol up front move it to the top of the list in iTunes and on my iPod. That’s it. That’s the Smart Playlist you’re going to listen to, all the time.

Oh, yeah. Have more music that your iPod can hold? In your @Radio playlist that we just make, at the bottom, select “limit to” and then a size that is smaller than your iPod by a little bit, and then either MB or GB. I have a 2GB iPod, so I limit it to 1700 MB. Selected by highest rating works well for me.

One last thing. Go up to file, and make a new holder. Name it something like hidden. Drag the playlists you made into this new folder, except for @YourNameForIt. You’re not going to see or need them on a regular basis, so you might as well clean things up and move them out of view.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.