Tangerine! from the Potion Factory is a $24.95 shareware application that quickly analyzes your each song in your iTunes library and automatically calculates the BPM and beat intensity. Within its very well done, very Mac-like interface, it lets you create iTunes playlists following a desired pattern. For example, you can make a workout playlist which becomes faster and more intense, reaches a climax, and then slows for your cool down. You can also control the playlist’s length, BPM range, and/or beat intensity range. Perhaps most importantly, BPM data can be exported to iTunes so that you can make smart playlists such as the two I described earlier.

A competing application which may be worth looking into is beaTunes, which is $31.95 shareware that runs on both Windows and OS X. Personally, I prefer Tangerine for its interface.

Introduction to smart playlists

iTunes has a feature called smart playlists. Unlike manually populated regular playlists, smart playlists are automatically populated by iTunes based on criteria that you specify. Also, they can automatically update as content is added to your library, or as information about an item changes. For example, you can make a smart playlist for a particular decade, or for songs with particular ratings. As you add more music from that decade, or as you change the ratings of your music, those smart playlists will automatically reflect those changes.

You create a smart playlist by choosing “File” -> “New Smart Playlist…” For more information, see the iLounge.com article, “How to create smart playlists.”

How this will work

Smart playlists can work together with each other by requiring their items to be in a particular playlist or not be in a particular playlist. This very powerful feature is critical to this guide: four playlists will be working together to produce a single playlist, which we’ll call “Balanced.” That may sound complicated, but you only have to set it up once, and the results are absolutely worth it.

Playlist 1: “Blocklist”

You might have some content you don’t want coming up on shuffle. Create a smart playlist called “Blocklist” of items which meet “any” of your unwanted criteria. Give it some thought. Some examples: Christmas music, videos, items below a certain rating or above/below a certain length, and spoken word like podcasts or audiobooks.

Once you have a playlist containing everything you don’t want, other smart playlists will be able to exclude anything found in that playlist. By doing it this way, you can block unwanted items in multiple smart playlists without unnecessary duplication of rules.

Playlists 2 & 3: “Been a while” & “Forgotten”

Half of “Balanced” is going to be the least often played of the least recently played music in your library. You will need two playlists to accomplish this. You will also need to decide how much content you ultimately want in your “Balanced” playlist, in terms of either time, file size (MB/GB), or number of items. You might want to base it on, for example, the size of an audio CD (80 minutes) or MP3 CD (X number of MB) for easy burning.

Create a smart playlist called “Been a while” with this rule: “Playlist” “is not” “Blocklist.” Below that, tell it to “limit to” your desired limit (see previous paragraph), selected by “least recently played.”

Next, create a smart playlist called “Forgotten” with this rule: “Playlist” “is” “Been a while.” Give it half the limit you set for “Been a while,” selected by “least often played.”

Playlist 4: “Randomness”

The other half of the Balanced playlist is made up of just one playlist. If “Balanced” was purely made up of the previous playlists, then over time your content would keep playing in a similar order. To mix things up, you still need some true randomness.

Create a smart playlist called “Randomness.” Tell it to match “all” of the following three rules: (1) “Playlist” “is not” “Blocklist,” (2) “Playlist” “is not” “Forgotten,” and (3) “Last played” “is not in the last” [some threshold]. I personally chose two weeks as my threshold. Give “Randomness” the same limit as “Forgotten,” but make it selected by “random.”

Finally, “Balanced”

The  “Balanced” playlist itself is very simple. Tell it to match “any” of the following two rules: (1) “Playlist” “is” “Forgotten” or (2) “Playlist” “is” “Randomness” and press “OK.” Choose “File” -> “New Playlist Folder” and create a folder that you can tuck the other playlists into. You’re done! Now sit back, relax, and enjoy a library that is always fresh!