Idle Time

All of these are “All” (logical and/set intersection) playlists.

Music only

• Playlist is Music (Library)
• Kind does not contain “URL”
• Kind does not contain “stream”
• Kind does not contain “ideo” [sic]
• Kind does not contain “PDF document”
• Genre does not contain “Comedy”
• Genre does not contain “Spoken Word”
• Genre does not contain “Podcast”

Never played (music queue)

• Playlist is “Music only”
• Play Count is 0

≥ 3.5 stars

• Playlist is “Music only”
• Rating is greater than ★★★ · ·

iPod

The goal of this playlist is a balance between churn (so that I keep hearing music I haven’t heard in awhile) and quality (so that a bad or mediocre song does not take up space on my iPod that could have gone to a great song).

• Playlist is “Music only”
• Skip Count is less than 3
• Playlist is “≥ 3.5 stars”
• Time is less than 25 minutes (25:00)
• Limit to 6 GB selected by least recently played

Customize standards and limit to your requirements.

Classical music (mostly excluded from this playlist by the Time criterion) enters my iPod through a separate playlist: a smart playlist selecting 12 hours of least-recently-played material from my “Programming music” dumb playlist.

Often-played but unrated music

If you’re like me, you have a lot of music that has racked up more than a few plays, but that you never rated. Most of this predates my installation of I Love Stars, with which I’ve rated nearly all of the music I’ve added since then.

By listening to this playlist with I Love Stars running, I’ll be able to rate all of these songs and so give the good-to-great ones a shot at being on my iPod. (I used to have “Play count ≥ 5” in the iPod smart playlist, but not everything that I have that has 5 or more plays merits inclusion on my iPod.)

• Playlist is “Music only”
• Play Count is greater than 4
• Rating is · · · · ·

Some facts and figures:

• I got tired of waiting for music-queue zero and added the SXSW 2010 music to my queue on April 9th.
• My music queue before adding the music was 367 songs totaling 1 day, 4 hours, 17 minutes, 11 seconds (under 1.2 days).
• The 1,038 songs from SXSW 2010 totaled 2 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes, 15 seconds (about 2.75 days—my prediction was 2.5 days).
• My music queue after adding the music contained 1,405 songs totaling 3 days, 22 hours, 30 minutes, and 26 seconds (about 3.9 days) of music.
• I finally started listening to the SXSW music on April 18th, 9 days after adding it. That is, it took me 9 days to listen to the 1.2 days of music that preceded the SXSW music in the queue.
• I have just finished listening to the SXSW 2010 music, early in the morning on May 16th, a month and a week after adding it and 28 days after beginning to listen to it. That is, it took me 28 days to listen to the 2.75 days of SXSW music.
• My music queue, now empty of SXSW songs, has 1,199 songs totaling 3 days, 14 hours, 39 minutes, and 30 seconds (about 3.5 days) of music remaining. This includes 34 full albums, not counting samplers.

Maybe I’m beating a dead horse at this point, but there’s a lot of free music out there.

I’ve started a site cataloging non-obvious, simple, superior ways of performing everyday tasks.

The visual theme is Fluid by Andrew Wilkinson, with a custom background image I made in Pixelmator:

Feel free to use that image on your own site.