It's not that I don't like making mix playlists. The screenshot isn't even half of my handbuilt ones.Lots of variety for various moods. But not so good when I want a mix. And the shuffle is never quite the right mix. I have different mixes of smart playlists that I go to sometimes, but, nothing that I was loving.
And then a Lifehacker genius shared a system of playlists to randomly play music based on a combination of how much you love the song and when it was last played, and, well, I'm liking this.
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I'm going to tell you how I adapted it. So either follow the link above first or stop reading now.
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My biggest tweak was setting my initial playlist to exclude songs that had been played 0 times. I have a bunch of SXSW songs that I haven't heard yet. I like doing listening/rating/trashing marathons with those. Don't want them sneaking into random mixes, so they're banned.
Unlike the original poster, I've ranked songs in iTunes for years. Different threshholds for different artists. I might prefer a 2 star Jars of Clay song to a SXSW song with 4 stars. But Jars songs have to be rated so that my favorite songs show up on top when I'm in Jars mood. And SXSW songs that don't get at least 4 stars get deleted.
Related, I have lots of kiddy music that gets top rankings, so my initial playlist was overtaken by songs that I like, but don't want to hear every week. But there's a playlist called "kids." Woah. Kick that out of the 4 and 5 star unplayed music lists. Still shows up, but it's a trickle, not a flood.
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