Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions itunes playlists

What a Rush!! "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" or get some "Help" unless you get "Another Girl" after your wife gives you a "Ticket to Ride" because of "The Night Before". "It Won't be Long", but "Tomorrow Never Knows" if you can "Get Back" to "Something" where she just let's you know "I Feel Fine" then you'll know "She Loves You".

"I Can't Remember" exactly, but in a "Nutshell" it happened like this. I asked my "Sunshine" if she'd like me to put my "Man In the Box" or "Down in a Hole". She called me a "Rotten Apple", told me to "Stay Away" and "Don't Follow", and now I'm living in a "Sea of Sorrow".

Mark, you might want to hold off posting that one until "Saturday Night".

LOL...

In older versions of iTunes, there was a 'Smart Shuffle' setting that let you tinker with the randomness of the shuffle. Its purpose was to avoid the problem you're facing. If your playlist contains a lot of X, then in a truly random shuffle it is entirely possible that X will come up all the time. It's random. That 'Smart Shuffle' feature would decrease the randomness and force iTunes to pick other artists/albums in a random setting.

But it looks like that as of iTunes 8, Apple removed it.

You could try the 'iTunes DJ' feature. You can select a playlist with that, and then one of the settings there is to play higher rated songs more often. That might help you.

Good luck!

Nick,
Well....this one got hijacked immediately following the first post....back to the original topic. The only way that I know to do it is to create duplicate playlist, then delete the songs you don't want coming up from the new playlist. Then you can random play just the new list. I hope that I am not talking down here - I had to ask my teenager for instrux.....the way to random play a single playlist is...start the playlist. After it starts, press the center button several times (3 times,I think) until a submenu comes up. It will have 3 selections "Off", "Songs" and "Album". Use the right arrow button to select "songs" and then hit the center button again. Now the playlist will be random instead of your entire music list. Beware that this will cause all playlists to operate in Random. To turn it off, press the center button the requisite number of times to bring up the menu and then use the left arrow button to select "off". After she taught me this little trick, I use it all the time.

I usually try to keep my iTunes playlists managed by putting in a filter about "not played in the last 2 weeks" or somesuch. That tends to cut down on that sort of problem, at least.

Peter,

Both comments were quite helpful. I was lucky enough not to update itunes since I started at 7.7.11, so I have both features that you are talking about. The "Party Shuffle" does exactly what I want. However, I just wish that this were an option to do with every playlist automatically so that I don't have to update these new playlists every couple of weeks this way.

argon,

I know that I can do this by just manually deleting some of the Led Zepplin songs, but it is too much work to do that all the time. I have a "Metal" playlist with a lot of Metallica where I have the same problem. I just don't want to spend all that time doing this and I would like it to be random removal of some of the Led Zepplin. The Party Shuffle is the closest option for me.

kcarlile,

I'm not sure what filtering you are talking about. Did you write a script for itunes or something?

- Nick

Peter is talking about using "smart playlists." You can either add a condition to the smart playlist like the one he mentioned and/or you can add a condition at the end of the list that chooses the songs in the list based off of either "least recently played" or "least often played" both of which would drop down the amount of LZ in your lists.

Try a google on smart playlists if you're not using them already and you should find a lot of options for using smart playlists to solve the problem.

Jason

Jason,

I didn't even realize that there was an option for smart playlists. Also, it didn't seem like the party shuffle was that useful until Peter mentioned it and I looked into it. Its too bad that you can't create a smart playlist by selecting part of it from the party shuffle so that the smart playlist is dynamic. Anyways, these two options have helped a lot.

- Nick