I recently added a lot of new songs.. over 2000 songs from about 120 albums. The problem is that listen to and rate all those songs - while keeping one's sanity - becomes an almost impossible task. I found a trick that really helped me out along the way.
My 'Artist of the day' list contains usually one artist or one of their albums (If they have a lot of songs) and that’s it. I don't even know if I should call this a smart play list because it is so basic :)
Artist is Who_Ever
or
Album is What_Ever
I manually change the artist/album about once a day or put 2 artists/albums if I find out I am running out of songs a lot. This step could be avoided but the results aren’t as nice (suggestions welcomed). By changing the play list to:
My Rating – is - • • • • • (no stars)
Limit to 80 minutes selected by Album
The Downside is
1) You always will get more that one album/artist
2) Can’t select what album or artist you’ll listen too (it does it alphabetically)
3) You have to rank a song for it to get off the list (though you could make it Play count based)
Which ever way you choose, this helps take small chunks out of those new songs without you becoming overwhelmed. I’m sure this has other applications but it has made listening to and rating a more enjoyable task for me :)
Being a perfectionist, I like to rate all my songs. I usually do this diligently while using my iPod, but sometimes I forget or can't reach it (eg. while standing on the bus). I've come up with this Smart Playlist to tell me what songs still need to be rated:
Play count -> is greater than -> 1 AND
My Rating -> is -> [empty]
One simply rates all the songs in iTunes (or even on the iPod if you've got the patience to skip through all the songs) until the playlist is empty.
A while ago, due to a hard drive failure, I lost all my ratings and play counts. I started manually managing my iPod and racked up a few play counts. When I got the computer up and running again, it meant that most of my songs now had a play count greater than 1 but were not rated, meaning that the above playlist listed way too many to face in one hit. To combat this, I've added the following criteria:
Date Last Played -> is in the last -> 1 -> month.
This gives me a month's worth. The songs played earlier than a month eventually show up as I relisten to them.
I have a number of compilation CDs which contain songs I know I don't like. As there are so many CDs, I didn't want to selectively import songs, so I just imported them all. When I come across a disliked song while listening to a CD, I rate it as one star. On synchronising with iTunes, these show up in my Smart Playlist:
My Rating is 1
I then look at the playlist and it tells me what songs to delete. Unfortunately, you can't delete them directly in the playlist, so you have to note the song name, then search for it in the library and delete it from there.
Dave adds: If you hold down option and press delete you can delete the file from all playlists and remove from your hard drive.
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