Thankfully, the majority of my day-to-day activities can include background music, and I make the most of that at every opportunity. I use Last.FM quite a lot — but mostly I just listen to my own music from iTunes.
I don’t spend a great deal of time making playlists. I prefer to be surprised. My tastes are eclectic and the acoustic properties of my day tend towards a sort of genre soup. It’s all one giant shuffle, with a few tweaks to avoid the really startling, over-long, or inappropriate work-along music.
However, it’d be really nice if I could work some kind of New Zealand music content quota into that mix. Seems that it be a clever addition to the smart playlist facility, and I think I’d feel good about immersing myself in a mix that featured a 30% taste of home.
All of my New Zealand music has been tagged as such. There’s a tag field called ‘Grouping’ and I’ve put the initials ‘NZ’ in that field — so it seems like a simple problem of database management. However, the challenge is to do it all from within the iTunes software.
Any clever coders out there want to give this a shot? Or is there a workaround of some kind that I haven’t been smart enough to work out?
I’m sure there are other practical applications of this — and it wouldn’t just appeal to us parochial Antipodeans. Anybody?
“itunes smart shuffle priority” found this:
http://www.maximumaardvark.com/archives/2005/04/22/making_the_ipods_shuffle_function_work_better
Sounds to me like mega-pi**ing around and a good internal application of Vegemite might solve the root cause of the issue…
It’s a bit awkward but you only need to do it once.
Make a folder called “30% NZ”
Inside that, create two smart playlists … one is limited to 30 tracks and grouping contains “NZ”, the other has 70 and grouping doesn’t contain “NZ”. Both playlists should be random, have live updating enabled and have another rule that it hasn’t been played in the last hour.
The folder is your playlist (you can select it in Party Shuffle etc).
Many thanks, Tuatara – that works like a dream. And 30/70 seems to be just the right balance too.
Couldn’t do the ‘not in the last hour’ rule, but it was fine with ‘not in the last day’.
Stylus 77 after Thom Yorke was good – and Party Shuffle decided that Brunettes should follow Raveonettes.
I sometimes wonder if it’s really random, or if there’s a little man in there making jokes.
Can’t you just listen to Neil Finn and be happy? again, and again and again and again?