Entertainment For Lively Minds
Rating Music On Your iPod
One of the strengths of a 160Gb iPod Classic is that you can put everything on it. And when it’s on shuffle it might throw up a song that you like, but didn’t know until then that you liked it because it’s by a band you don’t like. Of course the draw back is that it’s just a likely to play a song you don’t like, full stop.
I put my machine on shuffle recently and got two bad songs I had to skip in a row (one of them was by System Of A Down, a band that very quickly lose their charm). I gave up on the shuffle and selected an album to listen to instead. I decided I was going to cross a line that I had drawn in the sand due to the fear that obsessive madness was waiting on the other side – I was going to give my music star ratings.
It was surprisingly quick and fun to do. It only took about an hour and a half at most to do a 140Gb music collection. I just reviewed the music by complete albums instead of on a song by song basis unless I had a strong opinion (ie. Duffy’s “Rockferry” album was all 1 star except for the song “Mercy” which was 5 stars).
I didn’t rate the music on artistic merit. Instead I rated it on how often I would want to hear the music come up on shuffle. 5 stars was all the time, 4 was a lot, 3 was from time to time, 2 was rarely and 1 was never.
I’ve now listened to my 3 to 5 star smart playlist for 76 songs. Only one weak song came up among that lot (“Sweat In Bullet” by Simple Minds). Without the star system about 30% of that would be so-so.
If you haven’t done it yet, I would recommend rating your music.
Anyone know of any fancy smart playlist options I could set up to take advantage of my new metadata?
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Isn't that
a Captain Beefheart lyric?
No, it's a Mark E Smith lyric.
Grrrrrr
"I put my machine on shuffle recently and got two bad songs I had to skip in a row". If you don't like 'em, get rid. The joy of a 160 must actually only be that it takes longer to fill. Add any old tripe, just 'cos you can, and it will be full before you know it. You can keep the dross on your hard copy. You know it makes sense
Zen & The Art of iPod Maintenance
I've a 2 gig Nano. And while sometimes it would be nice to have the 140 or so gigs of music that is on my computer to hand when I'm out and about, mostly I realise that there is only so much time to listen to music and 2 gigs is more than enough for most things. For instance the entire official Beatles output from the 60s fits on there with room to spare.
Forget playlists though, with a small memory iPod the whole thing becomes one big 24 hour long playlist. I theme it; so it has been the iMod at times, when I've filled it with the best Mod music from the last 4 decades. It's been Eighties pop, 90s dance and sixties folk. I've had only soul on it more often than not (which is a great way to work through my collection of soul, like a giant compilation), or a selection from the 11 gigs of Lee Perry that I own. You have to think about it and what you want to listen to. You lose some of the shuffle when the choice is coming from limited choices but otherwise I don't see how I'd be better off with more memory.
If it's Zen
you need to be more Creative (arf!)
Some other tips...
Wow, I've done exactly the same thing. Rating is so useful once you get the idea that it's desired frequency of play you're rating on rather than quality. As I've put it to people I've explained this to: I love Hissing of Summer Lawns and MSP's Holy Bible but they're not exactly the sort of thing I want to listen to on shuffle while I'm doing the weekly shop in Morrisson's.
1 Star Ratings
I quite like to set stuff I don't want to listen to on shuffle to 1 star. This can be a useful way of excluding stuff from your smart playlists.
Unrated Smart Playlist
It's useful to have an Unrated smart playlist just so you can keep on top of any stuff that hasn't been rated yet. Just set the filter to Rating less than 1 star.
Shuffle
Some people don't know that there's a shuffle option in settings. Once you switch this on then anything you play will be shuffled: albums, artists, playlists. I mention this because that suddenly opens up loads of options....
Listening to new stuff
The biggest problem with having so much music available is that you never get around to hearing the new stuff. Here's a couple of really basic strategies.
I usual add about 50-100 tracks per month to my library. Because of this I use the Recently Added playlist a lot. I've modified this playlist in iTunes so that it picks up everything added in the past two months. With shuffle switched on it's randomized giving me a nice introduction to all that new music.
Quick sidenote about the Recently Added list: it's worth adding an extra rule that excludes Podcasts. Edit the playlist, click +, select "Podcast" and then select "is false".
Here's another thing I sometimes do when listening to new albums: I'm not so sure I like the new A C Newman album as much as the last one. With shuffle switched on I can select A C Newman from the artist list, hit All and I then get a shuffled selection of both albums which gives me the chance to ease into the new album alongside the more familiar old stuff.
Smaller iPods and iPhones
Rating is really useful with smaller capacity devices. My iPhone only syncs with two smart playlists: one is a random selection of 5 and 4 star tracks up to two GB and the other is a random selection of recently added stuff up to two GB. This works really well for me.
On The Go
A lot of people don't seem to know about this feature either. It's a playlist that you can add a bunch of tracks or albums to on the fly from your iPod. Once again, run it with shuffle switched on and it can be a pretty good way of getting through long train journeys.
So, some of that's probably really obvious to many of you but people I know have found it useful.
Good stuff!
Ta
How about an As Yet Unplayed playlist
In combination with your star ratings, so that you can get a list of everything, say, rated 3 or above that you've not yet played? For example:
Rating / Is In The Range / 3 to 5 stars
Play Count / Is / 0
If you've already played everything in that category, you could go for a "3-5 star songs you haven't played in a while" list, along the lines of:
Rating / Is In The Range / 3 to 5 stars
Last Played / Is Not In The Last / 3 months
Can you fix it so something NEVER comes up on shuffle?
I've got over 100 Russian Language lessons on my ipod and there is nothing worse than when I put it in the dock in the bathroom, place it on shuffle, get in the shower and hear...
"Lesson 5.1 Lena buys an ice-cream" and then three minutes of "Diety pahzalista eskimo?"
I don't want to get rid of them
Yes
Set up a smart playlist where, besides whatever else you want to include or exclude, you add a rule that says Album Is Not "Russian Lessons", or Artist Is Not "Russian Lessons", etc.. Adapt to taste.
Much simpler
Click on track in iTunes, get Info > Options > tick "Skip when Shuffling"
Having only had my ipod
for a few weeks, i'm only just getting used to the basic stuff and am also in the long process of putting my cds to the library. At the moment i'm just adding stuff that i know i'll want to listen too, and not putting everything on!
There is obviously a lot of things I need to check out. Having never had a good mp3 player before, i'm just enjoying the shuffle feature at the moment.
Thanks a lot for all the tips
My Method...
.. is quite simple.
If a song comes on, while on shuffle, and I don't like it/grown tired of it, I simply delete there and then. By a process of elimination your "shuffle experience" improves with less and less unwelcome songs showing up.
Normally, I'll have the track on cd, or on my computer, if I ever wish to revisit it.
WHEN do you do your rating
I am just curious, WHEN do you guys find time to rate GB's of songs?
When you do your rating, are you listening to the iPod while walking, working, shopping etc.? In that case isn't it cumbersome to keep reaching for your ipod to lock in the rating?
Or do you have the iPod playing in ambient mode (connected to speakers)?
I do my ratings when I'm
I do my ratings when I'm recharging my iPod. Using iTunes on my PC I can rate multiple songs at a time.
I have a smart playlist for songs I haven't rated. So eveytime I plug in my iPod I go through that short list and rate stuff I've now got an opinion on.
The rating of the songs is not an exact science and without doubt I have given the occasional wrong rating, but as I'm dealing with Gb of songs the little mistakes are invisible in practice. And I decide on the star ratings from memory, I do not review each song in turn by listening to them.
I find it easier to rate by
I find it easier to rate by rating through iTunes rather than rating straight on the player. Like LOUDSpeaker indicated, it's quicker to rate music than you think. I sat down with the intention of just rating some songs and ended up going through my whole collection in what was probably less than an hour (I "only" have 24GBs of music currently on my Touch, primarily because I don't load full CDs onto mine like, apparently, a lot of people do and wouldn't even if I had more than 32GBs). I just did it while I watched TV.
I recently found online that rating songs is the key to getting a better shuffle. Yet, I have found that without smart playlists, my iPod Touch seems to primarily play 4-star songs and sprinkles in everything else. I know I have more 4-star songs than anything else, but I still feel there should be more 5-star songs getting played. As someone who manually syncs their iPod, smart lists are more of a hassle for me just because manually syncing playlists often results in songs syncing to my iPod multiple times and then I have to go through and delete. The more songs I try to put/update on a playlist, the more I will have to go back and find repeats to delete. Apparently, if I want even better shuffle than I've found with rating, then I'm going to have to deal with smart lists.
I did see some people going all out with creating smart lists, though:
http://www.maximumaardvark.com/archives/2005/04/22/making_the_ipods_shuf...
And I'll say it again...
I agree with the above, assuming that the reasoning is around what is the point of i-podding anything that isn't at the very least 3*. Why listen to filler? That's what the hard copy is for. There are few CDs that make the 100% shift to i-pod in my collection. I like shuffle to be unmarred by songs I don't actually like all that much. It also means that there is a lot more room for future additions. I don't bother rating music, it is either on the pod or off. Easy.