September 15, 2004
@ 02:52 PM
Comments [8]
iTunes Smart Playlists Rock My World

Yesterday in my post Killing the "WinFS is About Making Search Better" Myth I wrote

Now this isn't to say that there aren't some searches made better by coming up with a consistent way to interact with certain file types and providing structured metadata about these files. For example a search like

Get me all the songs [regardless of file type] either featuring or created by G-Unit or any of its members (Young Buck, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo or Lloyd Banks) between 2002 and 2004 on my hard drive

is made possible with this system. However it is more likely that I want to navigate this in a UI like the iTunes media library than I want to type the equivalent of SQL queries over my file system.

I just found out that I can already do stuff like this today in iTunes. I can create a playlist by querying based on artist, song name, genre, year, rating, album and a lot more. I've been wishing for this functionality ever since I bought an iPod. Apple fucking rocks. I'll never use WinAmp again.


 

Categories: Ramblings

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Wednesday, 15 September 2004 15:14:48 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

If they put that much thought and effort into a music player, imagine how much effort and though they put into their Operating System ...
Ross
Wednesday, 15 September 2004 15:43:51 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
presumably this is made possible by extra metadata that itunes keeps in its xml database and (again presumably) winamp does not.

BTW I liked your brief description of winfs - it actually made sense to me! - I don't think I've heard it described as "strongly typed objects" before, now it makes a bit more sense. Thanks
bg
Wednesday, 15 September 2004 16:47:40 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, WMP can do that, too with its "smart playlists".
Mike Kozlowski
Wednesday, 15 September 2004 17:52:38 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
One more killer iTunes feature that doesn't get mentioned as much -- the shared libraries on local subnets. If you've ever worked in an office where all the geeks share out their libraries, you know how cool this is.
d.w.
Wednesday, 15 September 2004 21:56:00 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
apparently Dare doesn't read his comments...
as i commented the first time he posted about itunes vs winamp, winamp5 is perfectly capable of doing this. It has a built in media library with all the same metadata querying and custom playlists that itunes has. But whatever, if he wants to ignore it, that's his prerogative.
Andy Smith
Thursday, 16 September 2004 08:07:15 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
My favorite Smart Playlists in iTunes is that you can use it to do set operations, like having a list that is the union of two playlists, or say "everything from playlist A except stuff in playlist B". Its such a powerful feature but its just tucked away alongside the other criteria... Very Apple.
Steve Saxon
Thursday, 16 September 2004 11:38:16 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Andy,
I finally got around to trying the media library feature in WinAmp. Even though the functionality mimics that of iTunes the user interface seems completely bolted on [which it is]. I'll stick with iTunes.
Dare Obasanjo
Thursday, 16 September 2004 23:40:11 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare, you really should check out J. River's Media Center
http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/ they have a 30 day demo available
Clint
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