wow... mine came up with zero songs in the playlist, not surprisingly. 2007 was a horrible year for music.

seannj30

An alternative way to do this would be to use the Year tag, rather than Date Added, so you actually get music from 2007, rather than music added to your library in '07.

What we really need though, is a way to hook last.fm into iTunes (or Foobar2000, Winamp, etc) and have the player generate playlists based on top track/album/artist of whatever time period of your choice.

davidgiesberg

Wouldn't it be better to use "Year" instead of "Date Added"? For that matter, one could forego the play count requirement and tick that little box that says "Limit to ..." and tell it how many tracks you want, or hours, or whatever, and tell it to select by most often played. That way you can better tailor your results I think.

@seannj30: Simply not so! Here are some 2007 albums that I have (and like):

Amiina - Kurr
Björk - Volta
Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust
Explosions In the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
God Is an Astronaut - Far From Refuge
múm - Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy

You just have to look slightly outside of the mainstream sometimes if you want the real gems. :)

erisdiscord

Yeah, use "Year", not "Date Added". I switched to a higher-capacity player (an 80GB iPod classic), so I've re-ripped a bunch of stuff to 256M AAC in the last six months.

In any case, I've been using Smart Playlists that cover "This Year", "Last Year", "Year Before Last" for quite a while.

Deprong Mori

I have a "never played" playlist set up that runs through my collection (which is quite vast) to find tracks I may have missed.

Sometimes it throws up some gems.

djhworld

This is only effective if you have not redone your library in the past year. I used Picard to retag all of my songs (wow was that a time consuming project), so everything in my library would be from 2007 with this hack. On the flip side, since my abiding love is late 70's era rock, using the year tag would bring me only the latest greatest hits collection. It's goofy when, say you're playing the music trivia game on Ipod and you get an either/or decade question: like this: Chicago "Saturday in the Park" - 70's or 2000's.

PotKettleBlack

There's loads more to be done with playlists and iTunes. For some tips, maybe check out the "Playlist" tag at Everything iTunes.

As well as using mac or windows scripts to manage playlists, you can create an autoplaylist of unchecked songs or use playlists in other ways. Check out the playlist tag for more.

itunes-guru

@all: The reasons why I used Date Added instead of Year:

- The year was notoriously incorrect for most of my files. I'd say only 30%-40% of the files I added in 2007 had the year tag set

- I was interested in all the music/artists I had "discovered" in 2007, not necessarily albums that were released in 2007. By sorting by date added and including the Year in the display I was able to see if it was a new album or an old album that I added

@PotKettleBlack: Yeah, if you delete your DB and reimport then your date added is going to be useless.

I also like having a "just added" playlist to find files that I've added in the past few days so that I can make sure the tags imported correctly

engtech

@davidgiesberg: With MediaMonkey, which is heads and shoulders over iTunes, Winamp, Foobar and Windows Media Player (yes, I have used them all), you have at least three options for hooking last.fm into it.
These are all scripts/extensions that are easy to add to the Monkey, and I use them all:

1. Top Tracks.
Select an artist and hit the Top Tracks button. It will enqueue the x (number set in prefs) most popular songs by that artist on Last.fm (obviously limited to the ones you have in your library).

2. ScrobblerDJ.
An AutoDJ that reads the last song(s) in your Now Playing list and enqueues the most popular song by the most similar artist.

3. Last.fm Node.
This adds a "node" to your left-hand navigation where you can list the top tracks of a given artist, of a given last.fm tag or of a given last.fm user (stalking!). These lists can then be used as regular playlists - play, sync, burn, whatever.
As a bonus, Last.fm Node has an AutoDJ function that seems to work much better for me than ScrobblerDJ. It does not go the detour of "similar artist", but instead goes to "similar song" (however last.fm defines that).

I am using this right now and loving it. For example, it just enqueued this chain of songs:
R.E.M - Electrolite
Weezer - Island in the Sun
Pixies - Where Is My Mind?

TJOHO

all of my music (except for 2008) would be added.... i guess thats because I got my computer in 2007. But this is helpful because i was wondering what smart playlists do. Does anyone know if they show up and work on ipod?

fullyrandomtandem

Another way to do this would be to keep the Date Added between 1/1/07 and 12/31/07, take out the Play Count condition, but change the Selected By field to Most Often Played, thus giving you the best of the best from 2007. Of course you could set it to Random and periodically delete the songs from the Smart Playlist and always have a fresh list of great songs.

bentruyman

I did just this toward the end of last year by setting up a Smart Playlist on my iPod (which is how I listen to most of my music), then ordered by most played.

Ath the time I thought it was a pretty geeky thing to do, but now I know at least I'm not alone.

My top 10 songs of 2007 here:
[christophermiles.com.au]

Slimejam

I love iTunes smart playlists, but this is an idea I hadn't come up with.

I have numerous smart playlists but probably the most useful I have is one for "Full Albums only" which allows me to switch to cover flow and flick through my album collection without having random songs pop up (it excludes tracks with "unknown album" - I make a point of removing the album title from all tracks I download where I don't own the whole album).

I also have separate playlists for songs I haven't rated, haven't played or haven't entered the year of release into ID3 - helps me keep my collection clean so the smart playlists work as they are meant to.

Guess this all makes me a serious music geek. :-P

@fullyrandomtandem: yep - all smart playlists will show up on your iPod playlists.

inbetweener

@TJOHO:

that sounds really awesome. I'll have to try it.

engtech

@engtech: Awesome it is - only glad to evangelize.

Since my last post, I have discovered that, although both scripts say to disable other auto-DJs they actually complement each other well because one is a bit slower in quering Last.fm than the other.

So, if you have both ScrobblerDJ and the AutoDJ function of Last.fm Node active, you will get two new songs whenever you reach the end of your Now Playing list rather than just one. The two scripts sometimes end up with quite different selections, so this makes for really interesting mixes!

Also, sometimes one of the scripts will come up empty-handed, but this ensures that something is always loaded.

You'll find the scripts in the user forums at mediamonkey.com as well as very helpful individuals should you have questions or run into problems. Good luck!

TJOHO