My Name is Kate

Discover Some Forgotten Gems in Your iTunes Collection

OK, this first Discover post isn't about something new, it's about REdiscovery.

And it isn't my idea, but the brilliant Rob Cottingham's.

But I have so much unrated and forgotten music on my iTunes that I just had to share his tips.

Rob has two great ideas for finding new and old favourites in your iTunes library: 

• Routine Listening - making sure you cycle through some of your least played, highest rated 
• Discovery - cycling through your unrated music to find great songs you may have forgotten

I'm doing the second one (Discovery .. see the connection?), RIGHT NOW:

Create a Smart Playlist that includes following criteria:

• Rating is < 1 star (i.e. unrated)
• Media is Music (I've never used this criteria - I had just never rated my videos - thanks, Rob!)
• Genre is not Holiday, Holiday - Spoken Word (yeah!), Comedy, Voiceover or Voice Memo (Rob has other genre exclusions - always interesting to see what genres people use)

So smart!

Thanks, Rob! Make sure you swing by his blog and read the full post!! And while you're there, stop by Noise to Signal, Rob's amazing cartoon about social media, business and how we live in the digital world.

Anyone else have any iTunes tips?

 

 

 

Cool Little Mac App - I Love Stars (iTunes ratings)

In the Great iTunes Library Transfer of 2007, I lost all of my song ratings and play counts.  Sigh.  Which means that my smart playlists weren't so smart anymore.  So I've been slowly putting in ratings again.  Which is a pain b/c you have to switch to iTunes to do it.  And they don't have a keyboard shortcut.  Now, I found a number of smart folks who had written Apple scripts to do ratings short-cuts or tweaked keyboard shortcuts in the system settings.  For a Mac newbie, a little scary.

So instead, I have tried and am delighted by a little toolbar app called "I Love Stars"

It appears in your menu bar when iTunes is playing.  And you just click to set your star rating. It also takes scroll wheel input.  It's so tiny and easy to use.  Even more so than a keyboard shortcut, I think.  MacApper says it best:

I think utilities like these are really helpful because it reduces distractions. Having to switch to iTunes just to rate music is annoying and somewhat distracting. Though you originally planned to just tag a song, in no time, you’ll end up browsing album art, looking through the iTunes store, and actually buying some music. It’s simple utilities like these that get the job done, and done fast.

I Love Stars is free (like beer) from Potion Factory.  They also have a pretty neat playlist creation tool called Tangerine.  It creates playlists based on Beats Per Minute.

Via MacApper

Bonus link: I also came across AutoRate which is a mass tunes rater based on a formula. I like to do each song individually, but this might work for initial ratings.

 

Reason #37 I like my new MacBook Pro ..

Built in Flight Tracking in the widgets. Sweet.

That's Roro's plane.  She comes home today.  Yay!