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Tunequest Topic: playlist

Smart Playlist Idea: The Anniversary Playlist

March 28th, 2009

Ever wonder what you were listening to three, four, five or even ten years ago? Or maybe you want to look back and wonder "have I really been listening to this album for that long?". Enter The Anniversary Playlist. By setting two simple Date Added parameters in a Smart Playlist, you can make a self-updating playlist of all the music you were listening to a given number of years ago. ...

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Smart Playlist Idea: My Favorite Nostalgia

November 19th, 2008

This is an iTunes Smart Playlist idea that I came up with last month and I am having so much fun with it I've just got to share it. The basic premise is to relive my entire musical history in rough chronological segments. The goal is to slowly drift and gradually segue through the highlights of the various eras of my musical life so that contemporaneous songs are grouped ...

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Smart Playlist Idea: Eldest Tunes (that need attention)

August 8th, 2008

This is a fun little playlist. In my last Smart Playlist example, I showed how to create a list of the most recently added songs that had not reached a certain play count. Today's list takes the opposite tack: what are the oldest songs in the library that haven't been played a certain number of times. I call it "Eldest Tunes" and it is a great way to give ...

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iTunes Tip: Back-date the songs in your library

July 8th, 2008

I've mentioned before that one of my standard library organization procedures is to back-date the "Date Added" field for all the songs in my iTunes library. That is, if I originally received an album for my birthday in 1999, I make sure the Date Added field in my library is my birthday, 1999. Same goes for every CD I've bought or mp3 I've downloaded. Unfortunately, Apple for whatever reason, has ...

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Smart Playlist Ideas: Master List and Newest Tunes

June 1st, 2008

With more than 16,000 songs to manage, there is no more essential a tool in my library than iTunes' Smart Playlists. From building simple playlists for listening to creating complex queries for examination, Smart Playlists turn what would be a tedious burden into a trivial task. At the moment, I have more than 50 of them slicing, organizing and corralling my expansive collection of tunes into an easily navigable, ...

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Nine Inch Nails[remixed]

December 14th, 2007

For nearly as long as there's been an Internet, fans have been contributing to the nine inch nails experience. There's something about the music that seems to inspire a devotional following (probably has to do with expressions of angst, contempt and alienation wrapped appealing pop sensibilities). Youthful rebelliousness and antiestablishmentism runs deep through both camps. Indeed, the rise of nin and the net seems to have coincided perfectly with ...

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Thoughts on an iPod Shuffle

October 27th, 2007

Thinking of an iPod Shuffle? Find one on Amazon. Birthday season is in effect around the tunequest compound and themodernista kicked off the festivities by presenting me with my long-desired orange iPod Shuffle (2G) (which I have dubbed "Shuffleupagus"). I had been struck by the orange model since they were announced this past January, but despite its relative inexpensiveness, I could never justify purchasing one; I'm a fairly austere guy ...

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8 Ways to Improve the iPod (and could be done with a firmware update)

May 11th, 2007

The iPod is supposed to be "iTunes to go" but as the little music player has advanced over the years, it still lags behind in some relatively basic features, features that have been a part of the desktop program for some time. iTunes' capabilities seem to be constantly improved and refined; its portable counterpart's behavior has remained relative unchanged, even as it has gained photo and video support. Forget touchscreens ...

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Speeding Up Podcasts part 3: Make Yourself an Audiobook

April 23rd, 2007

This instructional is nearly two months late. Sorry folks. I know you've been dying to find out the quick and dirty way to add acceleration to your podcast listening. Onward, then. A note before we begin, these instructions are for Mac users only, as they require the use of an AppleScript to modify audio files from within iTunes. Windows folks, however, can try a variation on this method. So without further ...

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