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July 4, 2005 / Filed under: iTunes, Music

My iPod has storage for my entire music collection, which, as it stands now, is somewhere over 3,000 songs.

But who cares?

It really doesn’t matter how many songs you have. What matters is how you effectively listen to your music. A system is needed – and thankfully, iTunes allows for some excellent playlist capabilities (called Smart Playlists) to aggregate your music library, for effective music listening.

What do I mean by all this?

An iPod may hold all of your songs, but you still have to decide what to listen to.

I have gone through this too often.

I get in the car. I grab my iPod, and start scrolling through the artists to find one that stands out, in relation to my mood at that current point in time. When I find an artist that reflects my current mood, I select them, and start scrolling through all of their albums.

The point is... this selection process is often unwieldy, especially when my iPod is in use for most of my day. I always found myself having to decide what to hear next.

Thanks to iTunes Smart Playlists, you can leave the decisions up to the software, and just focus on hitting "Play."

Smart Playlists: sift, channel, aggregate

My iPod can hold over 3,000 songs, but I don’t need all those songs on my iPod. All I want are the most recently added albums, from recent years.

In other words, I like new music. I like the latest artists, albums, and songs. I want fresh variety.

My computer hard drive holds all of my 3,000 songs – but my iPod only holds new music, despite the fact that I am only using 10% of my iPod’s storage capacity.

This way, I don’t have to decide what music to play... I already know that the only thing I can play is the latest new music.

I have come to this decision to only put new music on my iPod by realizing the fact that the iPod is simply a temporary music holder. It’s only needed when I am away from my computer.

My computer contains my entire music collection, and with Smart Playlists, I can sift, channel, and aggregate through my music, in any way I desire.

Here is my Smart Playlist, which generates all the songs that are transferred to my iPod. Nothing else is transferred to my iPod. I keep it clean and simple:

This Smart Playlist grabs only songs that have been added to my music library the past three months. This means any album or song that I import to my hard drive, either by purchasing from the iTunes Music Store, or by ripping from a CD that I already purchased, will be included on my iPod.

This Smart Playlist also checks the year that each album/song was released – since I want the most recent. So, I inserted 2004 and 2005, respectively. (Some albums were released late 2004, and I still consider them somewhat "new")

And that’s it. Nothing else gets transferred to my iPod, and therefore, I no longer have to decide what to listen to, while using my iPod. The decision has been made, and I can just enjoy the new music.