A Tailored Smart Playlist

Not long after iTunes became a thing, I remember reading an article wherein the author created a playlist that consumed several other playlists, which in turn filtered tracks to be included. The premise was to have a selection of your music that included recently played tracks, tracks that had never been played, and tracks that hadn’t been played a long time. I copied his setup and used it for a long time.

My employer has mandated that those of us who were working remotely needed to return to working in the office, full time. For the past six and a half years I’ve worked from home. Without the distractions and background noises of an office setting interrupting my thoughts, I fell out of the habit of listening to music most of the day.

Sometime I like to listen to an album start to finish, other times I want a random selection. The now defunct “Genius” playlist feature was fabulous for this. Pick a track and select “Genius” and you’d get 25 tracks that complimented the seed track.

Now that I am back in a noisy environment, I expect to listen to music most of the day. So I recreated the filter playlists, and then made a master list to consume the filtered tracks.

The Filters

Here are the filters I set up.

I use the “favorite” feature in Apple’s Music.app to mark the tracks I want to included. Only favorites are included. Each of the filter playlists is set to match all of the rules it contains.

Never played

• Favorite is true
• Plays is 0

Not played in 60 days

• Favorite is true
• Last played is not in the last 60 days

Played in the last 15 to 60 days

• Favorite is true
• Last played is in the last 60 days
• Last played is not in the last 15 days

Last played in the last 15 days

• Favorite is true
• Last played is in the last 15 days

Each of these filer playlists are set to limit the number of tracks to 10. (I may increase this.) Live updating is checked.

The Mix

The master, or mix, playlist is set to match any of the rules, and it has live updated selected. No limit is set as the filter rules have already limited the number of tracks

• Playlist is Never played
• Playlist is Last played is not in the last 60 days
• Playlist is Played in the last 15 to 60 days
• Playlist is Last played in the last 15 days

Live updating will cause a track to drop out of the mix playlist after it has been played. Usually, it may now qualify for another list.

I’ve only been using this setup for a day, and so far it is working the way I want. As time goes by I may need to tweak the number of tracks each filter brings in, and I may need to tweak the rules too. For now I’m enjoying a nice cross section of the music I have on my computer.