smart playlist, the beauty of

When I was initiated on MP3 players it was given to me an installer for Sonique, a kind of cool Media Player. It had several configuration/personalization options, like skins, visualizers, and plug-ins. Though I don't quite remember which skin I had installed, I do remember I had WhiteCap with lots of cool visualizers, and I even created my own by editing one of the visuals. Highly recommended, and I keep using this with my current default media player.

Years after, I was introduced to WinAmp. At the beginning it felt kind of awkward, the transition was not so smooth, but CPU usage presumably was reduced, and I think it did; now I consider my self a WinAmp user. And I even created a skin for early versions of it, "Ode to Aphex Twin", edited using MS Paint. I know "MS Paint?", my excuse for it being "I'm not a graphic designer". Through many versions, Global Hotkeys, cool GUI, and stuff, I've been loyal to WinAmp, but since I have an iPod, I've had iTunes as well (but not as my default media player, it's still WinAmp).

Eventhough WinAmp uses a third-party component to sync my iPod, I've seen that iTunes was made for it, so why bother. WinAmp still remains as my "Media Library" manager, because of some mental block that does not want me to use iTunes for this purpose. I also do not synchronize my iTunes playlist with my iPod, I prefer to do it manually, and it has worked well up until now.

I have recently consolidated my CD collection "under the same roof", hence I ripped lots of them and transferred the MP3 files to my iPod. (see previous post).

And talking about ripping preferences, between Exact Audio Copy (EAC), iTunes, and WinAmp, I preferr WinAmp for this purpose. EAC is quite useful when a song is divided into multiple tracks, those segments can be ripped as one track, like in Café Tacvba's CD "YOSOY" where two songs ("Árboles Frutales", "Bicicleta") are divided in small ~30 seconds tracks, among several other features that I do not mind about, but that does not mean they are useless. iTunes, sorry to say this, but I've found that it does not rip quite well. If the first and second tracks are continuous, like in Mix CDs, iTunes leaves a gap between the first two tracks. I can think that there might be some kind of tuning/tweaking/update? to solve this, but I would rather not to. WinAmp, on the other hand, lets me rip without problems, gapless, neat. VBR(2), 32-320 kbps, that's the way I like it. Oh, VBR, that's a whole different story.

But comming back to my main story, please...

Somehow some of my iPod's playlists got lost on the way (80's, 90's, Recently Added, and Never Played), due to n00b actions I guess. But recently I rediscovered this great feature of creating smart playlists on iTunes, though I think it could be given a lot more power, but maybe that's because I haven't played around with it.

Currently I'm "cycled" listening to my "Recently Added" playlist, which includes files added within 1 week. Excellent albums.

[Currently listening: Underworld - A Hundred Days Off]

I am not pretending to create a guide or a how-to, I just wanted to talk about it, among different subjects, as you might have noticed. There are lots of discussions that can be found just by typing the following keywords on your default/favourite search engine: iTunes smart playlist.

At the bottom you will find some useful links related to this post.

Happy ripping/listening!

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Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users
Top 10 iTunes Smart Playlists
Conquer the iTunes Smart Playlist
Brilliant Playlists: Tips for making smarter Smart Playlists