I love my iPod. I listen to it on the bus or on my bike as I commute to work. I listen to it in bed to help me fall asleep. Sometimes, I hook it up to our stereo and listen to it while the family eats dinner. I also love iTunes. As first, I didn’t understand why I needed another specific jukebox-style piece of software to manage music. However, I really like the interface. You can add any column you want, you can easily change MP3 tags, even on a mass scale, and the ability to keep the music on your computer in synchronization with your iPod is an asset.I’m a big fan of the podcasts as well. I’ve tried a few of the “song of the day” podcasts out there and enjoyed them. However, I found the music they played to often be obsure and by unsigned acts that I had a hard time finding elsewhere, so I abandoned those podcasts. I currently listen to:

What I really love are the little details that separate the iPod and iTunes from other music players that I have tried. Being a numbers junkie, I love to sort the list by the number of times I’ve played various songs, just to see what my listening habits are. I like that it tracks that. I can also sort by the number of times I’ve skipped a song to see if the song is no longer worthy of my collection. I also really dig the ratings as I can create smart playlists based on those ratings.

Speaking of smart playlists, that’s possibly my most favorite feature of the iPod and iTunes. Beyond just plain playlists of songs, smart playlists allow you to create a playlist with rules that filter which songs you hear. There’s even a site, SmartPlaylists.com, where people share ideas about smart playlists they’ve created.

Currently, I have the following smart playlists created in my iTunes and iPod:

  • “Lost Friends” – this randomly plays anything with a play count of less than 1. This helps me find stuff in my 4,000-song collection that I haven’t been listening to
  • “Unrated” – this plays anything without a rating. This allows me to listen to songs and rate them as I listen to them. I made this one such that the songs with the lowest playcount are played first, so it’s like a less-random version of “Lost Friends”.
  • “4-Star Random” and “5-Star Random” – These play anything I’ve rated 4 and 5 stars, respectively, at random. This is when I want to really listen to the best stuff in my collection.
  • “Children’s Random” – Since I’ve labeled all my kids’ music with an artist of “Childrens”, I created this playlist to play those songs at random.
  • “Sleepy – Random” – This is one I listen to when I’m trying to fall asleep. I created a regular playlist called “Sleepy” where I’ve put some of the more mellow songs in my collection. Since I haven’t found a way to may a regular playlist always set to play songs at random, I created the smart playlist to pick songs from the first playlist and play them randomly.