Meanwhile, on my other machine

Geekery / March 23, 2008 / John / 0

So, you know how it is. You have a CD collection going back god knows how many years, you buy some tracks from amazon or itunes, you have the whole lot ripped on your PC to stick on your portable device.

And then you realise you have over sixty gigabytes of music, most of which you haven’t heard in years and a fair proportion of which you haven’t listened to since it was ripped.

Here’s the downfall. I’d like to make use of the “copy highest rated songs” smart playlists in media players like Amarok and iTunes, but the simple fact is, 99% of my tracks are unrated, and a fair proportion of them haven’t been played.

So here’s what I’ve done. I’ve created a smart playlist called “unrated”, containing the following rule:

• Rating is <nothing at all – no stars>
• Limit to 25 items selected by random
• Live updating on.

Then I’ve made sure that this playlist is copied over on each sync (I have a 1Gb nano so obviously can’t sync the whole collection). This means that every day I have 25 tracks that are unrated and probably haven’t been listened to in years. As the tracks play, I give em a rating on the iPod and it syncs that back to iTunes/Amarok. Hooray for rediscovering old faves!

John

UNIX geek, wannabe cook, musician, book-lover, and all round good-guy.