electric relaxation

[While I'm nerding the f--- out...]

I really like using playlists to keep an arbitrary subset of my music sync’ed to the iPod; it’s the only sane way to deal with, for example, a 20GB iPod and a 45GB music collection. So conceptually what I want is the following:

1. The ability to keep a subset of my music tagged for iPod use
2. Easy addition and removal of music from the subset in (1).
3. A singles playlist suitable for use with the various shuffle modes, with no more than one entry for each song I’ve deemed “single-worthy”.

As an aside, my definition of a single is essentially a song that I really like – that is, one that I have at least at some point played many times on repeat.

Anyway, while these requirements seem simple, they’re actually quite hard to achieve with standard playlists. For example, using a standard playlist, you can only remove music by actually operating on the list, rather than your complete collection. Moreover, since standard playlists are just lists, there’s nothing stopping you from accidentally adding the same track multiple times – easy to do once the singles list gets large. Now you’ve screwed up the shuffle situation, and it’s really obvious since if you shuffle by artist, you’ll end up playing the same song multiple times.

So what I use instead are smart playlists, keyed off two pieces of metadata. The “Grouping” field in the iTunes tag is a free-form text field not really useful for anything else as far as I can tell, so I hijack it for this purpose. I got this part of the solution from Doug’s Applescripts for iTuneswebsite; I adopted and chopped apart the Add/Remove groups scripts.

So I create two smart playlists, iPod Albums and iPod Singles, each populated with music that has the corresponding tag present in the grouping field. To add and remove the tags, I use the scripts to operate on the current selection in iTunes.

Since my Mac died, I’d been doing the Grouping metadata management manually via the track info editor. This eventually became tedious enough that I rewrote the scripts in VBScript for use in Windows.

iPod Playlist Management Scripts

The file is a tarball rather than a zip because Gmail refuses to let you upload a zipfile with VBscripts in it for “security reasons”. I figured they just didn’t bother scanning tarballs at all, but it looks like they still check them on download. Weird.