Obsessive iTunes Post

Yes! Apple just released iTunes 4.5, which includes a lot of new features, the most important [to me] being the ability to make Smart Playlists that include other Smart Playlists.

What I’ve been doing lately is creating two playlists: “Top 4GB of songs, rated 3 or higher, not played in 2 weeks, sorted by rating”, and “Danger!!”, which is 2GB of completely random stuff [and in a library of 18000 songs or more, it’s really dangerous].

Then, on the iPod, I’d use its “On the Go” playlist feature to add both “Top 4GB…” and “Danger” to the main “On the Go” playlist, mixing both playlists.

This setup gave me a pretty decent chance of getting suprised by something I might actually like, but had never given a proper listen.

The addition of Smart-Playlist-inclusive Smart Playlists makes this whole process a lot easier. The only thing I can ask for now from iTunes is a true SQL backend, and a scripting pane where I can enter raw SQL queries.