I had written about the usefulness of dynamic playlists, ratings and tagging for organizing music on my iPod last year. Since then, I have loaded more music onto my iPod, and I was looking for ways to play the recently loaded music. In addition, I also found that just relying on the genre and ratings of songs to create dynamic playlists (the option can be found under the file menu) is not sufficient.
Looking at the play count of the files in iTunes, I found that over 2500 songs have never been played. So, I went about creating some more dynamic playlists. One had to be for songs that I have not yet listened to, while another for recently loaded songs. So, now I have the following dynamic playlists on my iPod:
- Top rated songs – for songs with a rating of 5 stars
- 4 stars – for the next best songs
- Recently added – for songs added in the last 60 days (this filter can be set in different ways)
- Low play count and unrated – for songs having play count of less than 2 (unrated songs is mainly to decrease the size of the playlist as high rated songs will feature in other lists) – useful for rating songs too
- Top rated Hindi songs – for songs having “Hindi” in the genre tag and rating >= 4
- Top rated Bengali songs – for songs having “Bengali” in the genre and rating >= 4
- Top rated Western – songs not having “Hindi” and “Bengali” in their genre and rating >=4
Now I find that the music is fairly well organized and I can listen to the types I want quite easily. Also for those looking to backup the contents of the iPod, there are some free alternatives like iDump. Also, the new versions of Winamp (5.3 onwards) also include plugins for backing up music from the iPod.
