| Tuesday, June 8, 2004 |
11:11 - Hey, I've got an idea! ...Wait, never mind
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iTunes' "Smart Playlists" are what amount to SQL queries into your music database, allowing you to specify a list of songs that match certain criteria (like, for example, songs where the Genre is Rock AND the Year is greater than 1960 AND the Year is less than 1974 AND the Artist is not Steve Miller AND the last-played date is earlier than one month ago). It's very handy for making live-updating lists of, say, all your 60s music, or all the songs you've never listened to, or all your top-rated songs, or any number of other combinations yet to be dreamed up.
However, one thing it doesn't allow are what in SQL would be parenthetical clauses within the query. You can specify as many or as few criteria as you want; but the criteria list only allows you to select between matching all of the criteria (a logical AND) or any of the criteria (a logical OR). You can't, for example, specify a playlist with criteria like: (Genre is not Comedy AND Genre is not Books & Spoken) OR (Artist is Monty Python), to get a list of music or Monty Python, but no other comedy or spoken-word stuff. Or you can't do Songs where (the rating is greater than 3 stars OR there is no rating at all), AND the Genre is Rock, to get Rock songs that are either rated highly or you haven't gotten around to rating them yet.
Bummer, I thought. That would be really cool, wouldn't it? I wonder how you'd go about transliterating that kind of query structure into an easily understandable user interface, though.
Wait! I know! What if you could specify, as one of the criteria in a Smart Playlist, membership in another playlist? That way, you could specify one playlist that matches a bunch of AND conditions or a bunch of OR conditions, and then you could further filter those songs by making their playlist a criterion in a second Smart Playlist! Huh? Huhh?
...Wait, let's see if maybe that feature is already there, before I go sending off feature requests...
Agh! Blast! That darn Apple is always two steps ahead of me!
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Brian Tiemann
