| Saturday, November 8, 2008 |
06:40 - Making a playlist, checking it twice
http://vodkapundit.com/?p=10626
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"For music fetishists only," warns Stephen Green. That's okay, do go on.
He's got a nice system for developing a set of playlists for the car or wherever you take your iPod. It's pretty similar to my own system, as a matter of fact; I don't just exclude Christmas Music and Children's Music from my "this is actual music" pool, but also audiobooks, comedy, 8-bit video game orchestrations, and Rush.
Other than that, much of the same principles apply. My music library is pretty extensive and spans genres that I wouldn't even have chosen to own of my own free will, since this pool is what we draw from when loading out customers' iPods full of whatever music they request, be it jazz or classic rock or modern Top 40 (I tell you, I had no idea Top 40 music had become so filthy; for God's sake, there's a song among the big hits of the last couple years called "I Wanna Love You, only the word they sing isn't "Love". So a lot of use has been made of the little checkboxes that exempt songs from getting included on iPod loadouts.) So I will typically create several Smart Playlists that build various genres out of the general pool, selected by star rating, and then an overarching playlist of playlists (the name is always the same, so synching the iPod doesn't require any extra reconfiguration—I just redefine the collective playlist's criteria each time) that selects which of the genre collections to use. It works out pretty well.
Stephen's playlists, for the geeky, are formalizations of well-understood database querying language. In a given Smart Playlist you can only choose to AND or OR all the clauses you specify (i.e. "match all" vs. "match any" of the criteria); but you can make a query (e.g. Smart Playlist) as complex and heterogeneous as you want to by just including other playlists (e.g. other parenthetical clauses) in the larger one. So underneath, in the engine, it looks something like:
SELECT * FROM Music WHERE (star_rating > 3 AND lastplayed NOT within last two weeks) AND (genre = "Rock" OR genre = "Pop");
But since you can't do something that complicated in a single playlist, you end up making playlists out of the parentheticals:
Playlist_A = SELECT * FROM Music WHERE star_rating > 3 AND lastplayed NOT within last two weeks;
Playlist_B = SELECT * FROM Music WHERE genre = "Rock" OR genre = "Pop";
And then combining them together like this:
SELECT * FROM Music WHERE song is in Playlist_A AND song is in Playlist_B;
It doesn't give you all the flexibility of true SQL, but for the purposes of organizing your music into listenable chunks, it gets the job done.
Actually where I use more of the techniques Stephen describes is in my video playlists that fill up my iPhone with TV shows. As it happens, my TV Shows collection has a total of one genre in it (Comedy), which I guess shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me; it encompasses everything from Space Ghost to Reno 911! to the Venture Bros., but they all fall into the same overall genre. But some shows I will watch under just about any circumstances, and some I really have to be in the mood for. Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Tom Goes to the Mayor and Home Movies, for example, are in the "any old time" category; the latter is what I cue up to fall asleep to every night, perhaps because I've come to associate it so heavily with "the end of the late-night marathon" based on its position in Adult Swim's lineup in the 2003-2005 timeframe. South Park and Drawn Together are the kinds of things I like to watch only if I'm more alert and in an active viewing mood, because I feel like they demand more of my attention to appreciate properly. And others, like Reno 911!, I have to really be in the mood for, like if I'm at the gym and need something to keep my mind occupied but don't really care about catching every line, it does the job.
So what I do is very similar to Stephen's technique: I rate the shows based on how frequently I feel like watching them, and then create a Smart Playlist that selects them randomly, weighted by rating, and excluding anything I haven't seen in the last month or so. (I'm still fine-tuning the interval.) I also preferentially weight them toward shorter episodes, so that things like Space Ghost and ATHF are overrepresented. The result is a pocket full of TV shows that can fill up any chunk of time I find on my hands, from a lunch hour to an airport layover to a walk down the street to get sandwiches.
Stephen's technique is pretty well formalized, though, and worth looking into for anyone who wants to really make the most of iTunes' ability to query together the contents of this hugely rich database schema that everyone has on their desktop.
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Brian Tiemann
