February 2008 Archives
Many people who have iPods never create playlists, they just load their songs, set it to shuffle and press play. On first look this should work pretty well, after all if I don’t like the song I wouldn’t have bought it and put it on my iPod in the first place.
The problem is that while I may like a particular song, it may not fit my mood right now. I may be unwinding on the ride home after a hectic day at work and a great rock song isn’t what I really want to hear, I would much rather hear something more relaxing. Or maybe I’m getting ready to go for a run; smooth jazz isn’t going to fill the bill here either. The best way to have songs that fit your mood or activity is to use playlists.
Creating playlists in iTunes can be a slow, time consuming task. That’s why we created PlayDJ. It takes much of the work and tedium out of creating playlists that fit your mood and activity like a glove. You can quickly select a group of songs that fit a particular activity, like your daily run and create scheduled playlists from that pool.
Let’s say you have 1,000 songs in your iTunes library and about 200 of them are great for your daily run. You simply create a raw playlist with those 200 songs and save it. Then when you are ready to build a scheduled playlist for your run, you just tell PlayDJ how long you plan to be running, say an hour, and in the blink of an eye you have a scheduled playlist to sync with your iPod. Using this 200 song raw playlist you can create a new scheduled playlist for each day’s run and not hear the same songs over and over.
That’s the real beauty of scheduled playlists; they spread the artists and songs automatically, so you will hear all of the 200 songs on your raw list, not just some of them. Scheduled playlists also eliminate the clumping of artists that so often happens when you just use shuffle. It’s not that your iPod likes Steely Dan more than you do, it’s just how random works.
Once you’ve used PlayDJ to build scheduled playlists that exactly match what you are doing while you listen to them, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. I’ve got a long car trip this weekend, so I need to create a couple of scheduled playlists for my trip.
