Here’s a quick test to see if your iTunes library is anything like mine. Go to the Music tab in iTunes and sort your tracks in reverse order by “Last Played.” Scroll down past all of the tracks that have never been played (which is bad enough) and check the date on the very first track that you come to that has a play count.

Mine is a Garth Brooks track that I last played on March 18, 2005 (!). This clearly illustrates (to me at least) that before I go off spending anymore money on new music, I should probably check out the wealth of cool tracks already sitting in my library that I’ve either neglected, or kept because they preserved an album and never listened to, or have just plain forgotten about. (Yes, Garth Brooks is cool. Shut up.)

This post is about the method that I’ve developed for coaxing out the hidden gems in my iTunes library while still keeping all the advantages of iTunes DJ and Quicksilver which I describe in detail in this earlier post.

I have a smart list that I’ve named “Draw From.” The first rule of this smart playlist is “Playlist is Music.” This tells iTunes to automatically fill this playlist with every track that I own while ignoring things like Music Videos, TV shows and podcasts. I then set iTunes DJ to select only tracks from “Draw From,” and press play.

As tracks start to queue up that I don’t want in the Draw From selection, I weed them out by creating new rules in the Smart Playlist. For example: I have a handful of Classical music tracks which I sometimes use as white noise when I really have to concentrate on meticulous tasks (copy revisions for example). I like Classical, but not all the time, so I filter it out of the Smart Playlist using the rules of widest scope first and narrowing down. I’d start by telling “Draw From” to exclude all tracks with a genre of “Classical.” Next would be to ignore all Classica albums that aren’t tagged with the Classical genre and so on until I’ve pared the smart list of the tracks I want to remove from the mix.

Clearly, setting iTunes DJ to source its tracks from the Music playlist would leave me with no way to specify which tracks to ignore. A Smart Playlist resolves this issue.

Why Not Just Use Genius?

Good question. Genius doesn’t allow me the flexibility of using Quicksilver to queue up the next track on the fly without breaking my momentum in another application. Also, when you get to the end of the Genius list, that’s it. You’re at the end. iTunes DJ allows you to queue up tracks, podcasts, whole albums or even the contents of full playlists and when the music finishes, it just goes right back into the iTunes DJ functionality.