Anyone have a pointer toward the logic that would allow a Smart Playlist to approximate the AOR-style radio programing calendar-frequency?

You know, the phenomenon where you realize that you haven’t heard a song or you somehow expect to hear it soon, and then it within what seems to be few days, you hear it being played somewhere.

If you know of any reference materials on this subject, any info would be appreciated.

Any song I reasonably like gets a rating of 3 or over, this playlist selects the least recently played 150 of these tracks, that aren’t DJ sets, and plays them in a random order.

I also really like ‘under a minute’ that plays every song (you guessed it) shorter than a minute. This plays them in track order so you get some kind of progression – lots of album openers through to those squiddly little closers. Might listen to it now…

If you have a large collection and you are serious (to not say ‘anal’) about tagging, then using it becomes a no-brainer. What’s the use of meticulously adding information if you’re only going to browse it by one field? I use tags for everything from tempo to moods to seasons to daytimes to instruments, and I think the couple of additional seconds it takes to tag a track is worth it thanks to auto playlists (even though most of the time I listen to albums back to back).

There’s also an extension for MediaMonkey that pretty much kicks any Smart Playlist feature’s butt. It’s called Magic Nodes and lets you add arbitrary new nodes to the tree view on the left, based on criteria defined through a Smart-Playlist-like interface, or even full SQL queries that directly access the music database underneath. There’s literally no idea crazy enough that you can’t make it into a playlist with that tool. Except if you don’t know SQL ;D

@Emme: Have a look at Amarok. They mention a dynamic playlist feature using Echo Nest. As for iTunes for Linux: try Songbird or aTunes.

Do you know if anyone has realized anything similar (to the smart playlists or to genius) using the echonest api? Is it available anywhere?

The majority of these playlists are Smart Playlists which use other Smart Playlists as their base point. It works out pretty well for me.

Of course, Smart Playlists in iTunes are still pretty flawed. I want the ability to create Smart Playlists of songs I’ve only ever listened to on thursday nights on the way to the pub, or that just contain albums that I have rated more than three songs from and the average of those is at least four stars. There are other ways to do this, for sure, but nothing build directly into iTunes, which is a crying shame.

Oh, and for completeness’ sake, along with my 73 Smart Playlists, I have five standard playlists which are also used as base includers or excluders for other Smart Playlists.

- “Top 100 – Least Recently Played”
- “New Podcast (Within the last week, excluding 1stars, which lets me eliminate them without deleting them.)
- “Most Played – But not this week”
- “Top 500″ on random makes for a very enjoyable listen.