The last thing I forgot from my previous post is unfortunately pretty lame by itself, but i’ll forget it otherwise.
I may have mentioned it or not, but when iTunes 3 came out, I went through and used the “My Rating” feature on all my music. I didn’t do much with it until recently, when I made Auto-Updating playlists that restricted random play to certain ratings. To give an idea:
| Ratings | Songs | Size | Play Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-5 | 5460 | 14.88GB | 11.4 days |
| 3-5 | 3725 | 11.32GB | 8.7 days |
| 4-5 | 909 | 3.07GB | 2.3 days |
| 5 | 103 | 350.1MB | 6.2 hours |
I didn’t bother making a 2-5 playlist, because I don’t have many 1 star songs anyway, and those I do are marked “don’t play” in the library. I keep them in there because sometimes I want to listen to an album in its entirety, no matter what the rating of the song.
The nice thing about this system is that my default playlist (3-5) is long enough to not repeat in a long time, if I only listen a few hours a day… and if I’m in a particularly bad mood, I can bump it up to 4-5 and only get “really good music”. So far, a day hasn’t happened where I’ve needed the 5 only setting, but who knows…