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I've gotten iTunes to bend to my will in some complex and interesting ways before, but the best trick I still use to this day is how to make even smarter playlists. So here's how it works. How to make complex smart playlists: Every now and then I'll want to make a playlist that picks music using some sort of complex boolean criteria, because I'm a big programming nerd and I like to make computers do really specific things. Unfortunately, iTunes only allows a smart playlist to match "all" or "any" of the criteria you set, which limits things significantly. Unless, that is, you create smart playlists that references other playlists. That way, you can create a smart playlist that matches criteras A and B, and then make another smart playlist of music that matches criteria C *or* is on the first playlist. The result is you get a more complex boolean playlist "(A and B) or C. Of course, this ends up creating a few extra playlists you never really use, but you can create folders of playlists in iTunes, and I usually create a folder called "extra junk playlists" that I throw all of that stuff into. It's handy too because often playlists I make end up referencing the same extra junk playlist multiple times. Here's some examples: How to make a smart playlist that includes all songs rated 5 stars from multiple music genres: First, make a smart playlist that matches "any" of the criteria, and have them all be something like 'Genre is Rock', 'Genre is Techno', 'Genre is Fusion Funk Disco Jazz' or whatever you want. Then, make a second smart playlist called something like '5 star rock, techno, and weirdo music' or whatever you want, set it to match "all" criteria, make the first one be "rating is 5 stars", and make the second be "playlist is <name of the first playlist>". Presto! This trick is also excellent for creating a smart playlist of a genre of music that's really inconsistent in your library, possibly because it has a stupid number of names for the same sort of thing. For example, that can be a huge pain in the rear end with electronic music, because the songs' genre can be something like "techno", "electronic", "electronica", "idm", "drum and bass", "japanese noise music", or whatever other retarded electronic music genres you have in your library. So just make an 'any' playlist matching all of those genres, and mix and match it with other smart playlists to get it to do cool things. How to make a smart playlist of your favorite music, even if you're lazy and rarely rate your songs: This one only involves one smart playlist, but is intergral for the next thing I'm going to post. Make a smart playlist named "My favorite music" matching 'any' criteria, and set the criteria to 'Rating is 5 stars' and 'Play count is greater than 5'. Obviously adjust those numbers to suit you personally, but the idea is that it not only includes music you went out of your way to rate, but it also includes music you didn't go out of your way to rate but you've listened to it a whole lot so obviously you like it. Here's my all time favorite smart playlist, which expands on the OP's idea of making a smart playlist of music not played recently... How to make a smart playlist of your favorite music you haven't listened to recently: Once you've made the above playlist "My favorite music" playlist, make a new smart playlist matching 'all' criteria, and make the criteria be: - Playlist is "My favorite music" - Last played is not in the last week (or whatever time frame you want) - Last skipped is not in the last 3 days (or whatever time frame you want. This one is optional) Now you have a smart playlist of your favorite music that you haven't listened to in a while, and you haven't skipped. The part about it not being skipped is key, since sometimes when listening to a playlist, especially in party shuffle, a song will keep coming up that you just don't want to listen to. That bit ensures that it won't come up again, but not for too long since it is after all a song you like. This playlist can be expanded even further to include specific genres if you like, using the same technique as mentioned above. I've gotten iTunes to make some sweet smart playlists using this trick. Hopefully one of you reading this is enough of a programming nerd to appreciate this trick.
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Dec 2, 2008 22:44
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Lewk posted:Superb stuff. Can I ask, would both playlists have to be present on the ipod, or just the latter. I'm assuming iTunes and iPods cross talk when synced... I don't own an iPod, so I'm not sure. My guess would be both playlists need to be there, but you can try just syncing one of them and seeing if it works. As for track numbers, I'm pretty sure that when you sort music in any iTunes playlist by artist or album, it'll organize tracks by their track number automatically. If for some reason that doesn't work I guess you can just tell it sort by track number explicitly.
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Dec 2, 2008 23:18
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SmirkingJack posted:The major gripe I have always had about Smart Playlists is that I have never found a way to make one based on the path of the file. Is it still this way, or is this now possible? I don't think there's anyway to do it "the right way", but it's possible if you used an AppleScript or something to put the path of every iTunes song into one of its rarely used metadata fields (maybe 'grouping' or 'comments' or 'sort show' since that'll probably never be used for music) and then making a smart playlist that searches for a path in that field.
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Dec 3, 2008 16:00
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Another thing you could do is change the sort album field of all those songs to "999999" so that they're always sorted to the end of the list. edit: That's a stupid suggestion because it does this already. The above suggestion is much better.
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Dec 3, 2008 19:54
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thegloaming posted:Has anyone tried syncing iTunes libraries across two computers (specifically a Mac and a PC)? I'd really like to do this, whether it's through passing off an external hard drive or using the network (I'd assume the former would be faster). I looked into it a little while ago and I don't think it'll come easy. There might be a program that'll do it for you, because I know there's one that'll sync libraries between two Macs, and maybe there's one that can do Mac / Windows. There's also the tiny chance that if you had a shared network drive between the two computers you could try to point both copies of iTunes to the same library, but I bet that would end up not working at best or having disasterous consequences at worst.
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Dec 4, 2008 07:01
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plastickiwi posted:Let's go over that again: iTunes is probably the worst offender of any of their programs I use. Hell, with each new version, they seem to axe features that were around in previous versions. It's really annoying.
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Dec 4, 2008 18:27
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Okay, here's a doozy of a question: How can I synchronize my iTunes Library between my home and work computer over the internet? This is similar to something someone asked earlier, but this time both are macs running Mac OS X, and they're not on the same network. But basically, I would love it if I could get any music added to my home mac to be somehow automatically be copied to or available to my work mac, and any statistics, like play count or last skipped, to be shared between the two computers, because obviously given my last posts in this thread I use that all the time for smart playlists. Here are the ideas I have, but I don't know exactly how well they would work: 1. Set it up so that both macs have their iTunes Library set to the same location, share that folder somehow on my home mac, and then mount that over the internet on my work mac so that the home library appears in the same path on my work mac. Obvious problems with this are that my Comcast internet connection at home (with limited upstream bandwidth) will probably choke occasionally while trying to listen to music, or whenever iTunes decides it needs to load a huge amount of data. 2. Set it up so that both macs have their iTunes Library set to the same location, then set up rsync or something to run automatically and sync the two folders at various points throughout the day. 3. Some other better idea? I'm thinking I might try the second one since that would be the least amount of work, but I still feel like it could be trouble.
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Dec 15, 2008 21:28
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SmirkingJack posted:Lucky for you, SuperSync just released a new version that will do just that. I know nothing about it, other than it is something that I want to check out. So you should purchase it and let us all know how it works out. edit: Actually according the program's faq it doesn't sync the libraries once a song is copied. So if I rate a song 5 stars and listen to it 20 times in library A, it won't have its rating or play count updated in library B. 
GuyGizmo fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Dec 15, 2008 |
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Dec 15, 2008 22:45
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pokeyman posted:Will you ever be using both libraries at the same time? I got it to work! Here's what I ended up doing: I copied the iTunes library folder from my home computer to my work computer, set up some symlinks so that all the paths therein would still go to the right place, and then used MacFuse + sshfs to mount my home mac's music library to the same path on my work mac. Presto magico! Same music library on both computers, and the music seems to stream fine. In a bit I'll write two scripts on both computers to grab the latest version of the iTunes library from the other computer. One question: is there any way to increase the buffer size iTunes uses for playing (what it thinks is) local music? I see there's a preference for streaming music, but it doesn't seem to have any effect when I play my music on the sshfs mount. I don't know if this is true, mind you - all I did was I changed the streaming buffer from large to small and timed if the music started playing any faster, assuming that a large buffer would take longer to fill and therefore take longer for the music to start playing. I ask because my home internet connection seems to have an upstream bandwidth of about 100k a sec, which is more than fast enough to stream my music, but it's Comcast so I don't trust it, and would be happier if I could increase the buffer just to be safe.
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Dec 19, 2008 00:31
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chimz posted:If you could set up sshfs to have a bigger lookahead buffer for files then maybe you could get the buffering that way. I want to keep iTunes working the crazy sshfs way because if I set up a tunnel so I can use it's library sharing feature it wouldn't update any statistics on the song files. Also I couldn't make new playlists or anything.
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Dec 19, 2008 07:25
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INTJ Mastermind posted:How would I setup the following using smart playlists? Maybe this would work: 1. Create a smart playlist of the recently added music and add that to your iPod 2. Create another smart playlist of music not added recently 3. Sort it by playlist order by clicking the column to the left of the track names 4. Turn on shuffle so that the track order is completely random 5. Gradually fill your iPod with it. It might work that if you drag the entire playlist to your iPod it'll start adding the tracks in a random order until it runs out of space, but if not you can drag them over in chunks until its full
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Dec 20, 2008 00:49
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So after I felt very clever setting up my work and home mac to have the same iTunes library, I've run into a snag. For some reason, it takes Party Shuffle anywhere from 20 seconds to over a minute to choose a song when nothing else is queued, making it pretty unusable. Here's what else I know: - It doesn't take nearly as long if the playlist it's picking music from is short - It takes that long per song, meaning if I tell it to refresh the playlist and it's set to display 10 upcoming songs, it takes ten times as long. - Actually progressing from one song to the next in a playlist (including Party Shuffle with the music already queued) takes very little time, so it's not that. Anyone have an idea why? Obviously this means iTunes is doing something under the hood when it's picking music for Party Shuffle - something that requires accessing the music files themselves rather than just the data in the library. (I know this because my iTunes music library is always stored locally. Only the music itself is streamed over the internet.) If that's the case, is there anyway I can get iTunes not to freeze? I love using Party Shuffle so this could spell the end for my would-be-clever solution for having two computers share the same library.
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Dec 22, 2008 23:40
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I'm reposting a question I had from earlier since I'm still struggling with this: ~*~ On my work computer, I've got all my music files streaming over the internet and the iTunes library files stored locally. For some reason, it takes Party Shuffle anywhere from 20 seconds to over a minute to choose a song when nothing else is queued, making it pretty unusable. Here's what else I know: - It doesn't take nearly as long if the playlist it's picking music from is short - It takes that long per song, meaning if I tell it to refresh the playlist and it's set to display 10 upcoming songs, it takes ten times as long. - Actually progressing from one song to the next in a playlist (including Party Shuffle with the music already queued) takes very little time, so it's not that. Anyone have an idea why? Obviously this means iTunes is doing something under the hood when it's picking music for Party Shuffle - something that requires accessing the music files themselves rather than just the data in the library. If that's the case, is there anyway I can get iTunes not to freeze? I love using Party Shuffle so this could spell the end for my would-be-clever solution for having two computers share the same library.
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Dec 29, 2008 21:00
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Strict 9 posted:Is the only way to maintain one library to leave my home Macbook on and connected, and do some kind of network share, playing / modifying that library? This is exactly what I talked about doing earlier in the thread. I ended up getting my music (mostly) streaming over the internet by mounting the folder with my home music library on my computer at work, but it only works okay, and it's pretty obnoxious to set up. And any time my home internet connection hiccups, so does my music, so it's not perfect. So given that... SmirkingJack posted:
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Jan 6, 2009 21:58
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