optimum number of tracks for an iTunes playlist?

October 16, 2013 8:04 AM

I want to leave iTunes randomly shuffling through a given playlist for as long as possible so I don't have to futz with it, but I also want to actually hear *all* the tracks in the list, not just those that the random shuffle always seems to favor. How many/few tracks should I put in a playlist?

I have iTunes on my MacBook Pro, an iPhone with iOS 7.0.2, and an iPad. When I use iTunes on any of these devices, I generally want background noise, so I would prefer a few big playlists of songs that I can start then forget about all day. But as widely known, iTunes doesn't seem to do the whole random shuffle thing very well: If started on a given playlist, it seems to favor the same approximate sequence of songs such that I'll hear some repeatedly and other hardly ever before I end up doing a restart for some reason, and I'm back to square one.

Admittedly, I haven't been very thoughtful about this matter thus far: I currently have one main play list I go to on all my devices, but it's approximately 17 hours long, which given the limitations above doesn't work so well. Plus, since updating the phone to iOS 7, the playlist just crashes out every few times I stop and start it on my phone.

There's probably an obvious answer on google, but I haven't been able to find it yet, so what would you folks recommend as the optimum number of tracks to have in a particular iTunes playlist to both let me put it on and leave it for as long as possible but short enough that so I might actually end up hearing all the songs on the list? (Fwiw, most of my tracks are electronica/dance which run about 7-10 minutes each.)

posted by 5Q7 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If you want to hear all the songs, the playlist should be exactly as long as the total amount of time you intend to listen to it.
posted by ook at 8:07 AM on October 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

It seems like you should add some additional criteria to your playlist, like "Last Played NOT IN THE LAST 14 days" or something. That would eliminate the songs that feel to you like they're coming up in the random shuffle too frequently.
posted by bcwinters at 8:24 AM on October 16, 2013 [4 favorites]

It seems like what you really want to do is solve the issue with your non-random shuffle. I haven't encountered this problem (iTunes's shuffle always seems plenty random to me), but there are a number of tips on the internet for those who do:

For example,

http://lifehacker.com/5929611/why-itunes-shuffle-isnt-random-and-how-to-fix-it
http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/a/itunes-random.htm
posted by willbaude at 8:27 AM on October 16, 2013

That said, maybe you'd like the Lifehacker "playlist of record." I use this, and while it took a little while to set it up and tweak it, it's really pretty awesome.
posted by willbaude at 8:34 AM on October 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

I use a smart playlist with a "fewer than X plays" selector. I set X to 1 and let it go for a few days, weeks or months until everything reaches 1 play. Then I set it to 2 and start again. I rarely hear things playing over and over, unless I'm down to the last 2-3 songs in the list that are several play-counts lower than everything else.
posted by spacewrench at 10:40 AM on October 16, 2013

IIRC (it's been a while since we've used iTunes for our household music), what I did before was create a massive "source" playlist containing all the songs I wanted considered for inclusion in the shuffle, then set up a smart playlist that drew from the source playlist and had an additional "not played within the past [x] days" criterion.
posted by Lexica at 6:21 PM on October 16, 2013