A while back I posted an Applescript for iTunes which basically took a playlist of tracks, then created a playlist folder which contained a playlist for every album of the tracks in the playlist. It had been a bugbear of mine for a while when I had incomplete albums on my iPod. I would listen to a great song, want to listen to the album, but couldn’t. So I spent a lot of time writing that script, perfecting it, and getting it working.
Now I’m not sure if it could have been a lot simpler all along. The way I track songs I like is using the rating system. A rating of 5* means it’s a great song and it (and its album) must be on my iPod at all times for emergency listening. A 4* track is a great song, but in amongst my library there are a lot of 4* tracks – so I can’t have all 4* tracks (and their albums) on my iPod at all times. Plus I like to leave a few GB available for totally random stuff – tracks I haven’t listened to in a long time, or at all. 3* tracks are generally those that were a 4* or 5* track in the past, but I’ve got a bit bored of them, but I don’t want them to slip away in amongst all the tosh. So I would use my playlist creator script to keep all 5* albums on my iPod, and then run it again on a selection of 4* items. This works really well, most of the time, although technically you need to sync twice every time (first to get the updated play stats off the iPod, then update the playlists, then resync to move new tracks back to iPod).
Now, looking in iTunes 9’s updated smart playlist functionality of which the main feature is to be able to do more complex rules (rather than restricted to ands/ors as before, you can do nested ands/ors… i.e., a and (b or c) or d… etc, I noticed “Album Rating” as a field to select on. It seems that this rating, which you can’t set directly, is actually based on the ratings of the tracks in the albums. So if I want all albums where at least one track has a 5* rating… I just use album rating. This obviously exactly duplicates the functionality I built with my Applescript. And what’s more, you can use the smart playlists built in functionality to limit it to a set size, and previously I needed a handful of different “holding” folders in order to get the right tracks… now I just have a single smart playlist. Which is pretty awesome.
So, if it has always been there, well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wasted my time… but… well, it would serve me right for not doing better research first, but with the updated smart playlist creator, you really can create some cool lists.
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