SmartPlaylists.com in the Wall Street Journal

Original article content:

iPod Tricks Music

Getting your MP3 gadget to play the songs you want

Tired of your mp3 player interrupting your party mix with a chapter from your “Tuesdays With Morrie” audiobook?  There’s a fix.

With iPods and other MP3 players so prevalent, more music fans are looking for help on getting their devices to play the music they want. On Web sites like smartplaylaylists.com, users are trading tips to organize their music collections more efficiently.

Some discuss combinations of iTunes settings the’ve discovered to play only songs that haven’t been played in the last 30 days, songs they’ve bought but never listened to before or songs from a particular year. Others describe their methods for downgrading songs they frequently skip over, so that duds are left out of random shuffle mixes, or ratings that they assign, to each of their songs that help determine how often their device plays them.

As people’s digital collections grow to include thousands of songs. as well as podcasts and audiobooks, they’re increasingly looking for ways to stay on top of them. As of last week, 479.9 million digital tracks had been sold in America this year, compared to 285.8 million last year at this time, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Although Apple has included a “smart playlist” feature in its music software since 2002, David Bills, a 30-year-old Webmaster in New York who founded smartplaylist.com, says many people are just discovering the function. The changing nature of the digital content in people’s collections also often fuels new questions.

In a recent post to smartplaylists.con, auser describes how he’s created a “kid-friendly” selection of his songs that he can play out loud through his new Xbox 360 console while his children are in the room.

Mr. Bills says he has more than 50,000 mp3s in his collection but has only listened to about half of them. “It’s a challenge getting through everything,” he says. His favorite playlist is one set up to let him find music from his college days.  He’s also set one up for his mother. 
“Now, she can hear all her favorite hits from the ‘60s,” he says.

-Jamin Warren