Smart Playlist for songs played most often within time period??

Madvillain wrote:
You would think it would be something they offered. I will hunt for the feedback link and recommend it.

You can provide feedback here.

I don't know why anybody would want to listen to the most played song over and over and over. 🙂

Yeah, that makes it pretty hard for other songs to catch up. 😉

The feature you are asking about comes up pretty often here, but with current iTunes it cannot be done unless you reset the play counts at the beginning of the new time period.

Madvillain wrote:
I don't know why anybody would want to listen to the most played song over and over and over. 🙂

Actually I can give you one real world example of where this comes in handy. My wife's iPod is a 30GB. My library is closer to 60GB, so clearly not everything fits. So I have made up a few smart live updating playlists to sync her iPod and give her an ever changing iPod.
Since she obviously has stuff she likes to listen to a lot, we want that stuff to stay on the iPod most of the time. So one playlist is (I forget the exact ratios, so just to use round numbers) 10GB of the most recently played items. Another would be 10GB of the least recently played items.
Both of those would be live updating SPLs so that the stuff she tends to play a lot or recently heard and wants to hear again, remain on the iPod. The other playlist rolls in things that haven't been played in a long time. Once she plays them, if she doesn't play them again they will eventually roll off the iPod, but if she keeps playing it, it stays on the iPod.
Then the balance of the iPod is a (dumb) playlist to just load in a bunch of stuff she knows she wants all the time no matter what.
So there ya go! 🙂
Patrick

+"For example:+
+What 50 songs have been played the most on your wife's iPod in the past 6 weeks?+
+If you can tell me how to make a smart playlist for that, you are the man."+

PT is the man; however, that cannot be done with current iTunes capabilities.

The data that the SPL is able to look at is the "Last Played" date/time, and the "Play Count," which is cumulative since the song was added to the library (or last had its playcount reset). You can put those two together but the SPL does not do what you are asking.

If you wish to zero out your playcounts today, you can know in 6 weeks what she has played the most in the 6 week interval. But most people don't like that; they get a wrenching feeling about ever zeroing out their play counts.

You can provide feedback to Apple if you would like to see additional capabilities.

Madvillain wrote:
Your post described SPLs based on recently played items (and songs not recently played).

Right, those SPLs I described only address WHEN something was played, independent of how many times it has been played.

I am looking to make a most played within the last week/month whatever, not just played, most played.

Then you could create two SPLs and combine them but you can only do it for some number of songs or for some amount of storage space (e.g. 1GB). You can not do it going back some specific time period.

For example:
What 50 songs have been played the most on your wife's iPod in the past 6 weeks?
If you can tell me how to make a smart playlist for that, you are the man.

Well as I said, you won't be able to do it by weeks. So instead you have to create a SPL where the rule is "Limit to _ Items/Storage selected by Most Recently Played" and then try and pick a number of items or an amount of storage that gives you roughly 6 weeks back (you can also do minutes or hours instead).
Of course the more you listen to the iPod the less far back it will go since you listen to a LOT of stuff recently and the less you listen to your iPod the further back in time it will since it takes longer to get to that number of songs or amount of storage.
OK so that is the first playlist, let's say it is called "MostRecent". And you made it limited to 500 songs. So your SPL for MostRecent looks like...

Next create a second SPL. In that one you want to Match the following rule where Playlist IS MostRecent. Then "Limit to _ items/storage selected by Most often Played" and should look something like this (where I picked limited to the top 25)...

This last one is kind of what you wanted, except hard to pin point how far it goes back in time. You have to try and estimate to get 6-weeks. Key thing is the second playlist should hold LESS stuff than the first playlist or you just get everything in the first playlist. Make the first one big enough to go back as far in time as you need while the second one should be limited to really only have the most played ones so you aren't seeing most of the first list.

I often like songs for a few months and then move on to something else or go back to something else. My most played list goes back to day one, and therefor a newer song that I have listened to 10 times in the past 2 weeks doesn't rank nearly as high as some song I've listened to 15 times in the past 8 years.

The above should at least get you in the ballpark. The Most Played playlist in iTunes, as you mentioned, if of your entire library. All we are doing is first creating a SPL to grab the last 500 songs played or last 100 hours or last 3GBs of stuff played. Then we create a Most Played list but limit it to that playlist so we are not seeing the entire library.

I hope that helped,
Patrick

How about this - would it work for you ?

SP :
Last played "is in the last" 4 weeks
Limit to {whatever} selected by "most often played"

You're welcome! (Actually I'm still using 7...)

christopher rigby1 wrote:
You're welcome! (Actually I'm still using 7...)

Thus proving my lack of attention to details!
Patrick

I'm looking for the exact same thing madvillain...Looks like it's impossible atm. iTunes would probably have to change the way it stores music statistics.