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.

A Very Key Term Before we Begin

Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ is a free application from Blacktree software that is available here. At it’s very basic level, it’s a launcher that allows you to open applications with intuitive keystrokes (and by intuitive…i mean “typing P-H-O-T-O…etc until Photoshop is selected and then hitting Enter to activate it”).

QS has become such an essential part of my computer use that I, frankly, struggle when I’m forced to use a Mac that doesn’t have it installed, so I strongly recommend it to any mac users who haven’t tried it out.

I am in no way connected to Blacktree, I don’t create or support any development plug-ins for Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ. The following tutorial merely explains how this Designer figured out how to use available plug-ins to extend QS’s functionality to my iTunes library.

We begin.

This post (attempts) to explain how I use Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (QS) to control what songs I want to play in iTunes on the fly, without switching applications and without interrupting my workflow.

Why I do this

I use QS to do this because I feel like I’m more productive with music playing and I know that I’m more productive when I don’t switch between applications. Cmd+Tab from Photoshop to iTunes to select a song usually results in a stop at Gmail, maybe a glance at Twitterrific, RSS feeds, iChat, and before I know it…20 minutes have passed (or more). QS makes song selection an intuitive part of my work flow so I can listen to what I want without breaking stride. Best of all, downloading, installing and setting this up is extremely easy. Even a designer can do it. (Insert obnoxious developer laughter here).

Party Shuffle is your Boyfriend, Girlfriend, Best Friend…Party Shuffle is Where I Want You to Touch.

I feel like Party Shuffle is poorly named. “Music Stream” would be more appropriate, if it didn’t imply an internet broadcast. Perhaps “Bottomless Playlist?”

At any rate, It allows you to set a continuous run of music that’s drawn either from your library, or from specific playlists. I have Party Shuffle set up to draw tunes from a Smart Playlist that I edit to filter out everything i don’t want to randomly listen too “Artist is not Dane Cook” for example. (I have nothing but love for Dane Cook, just not when I’m designing a website).

I listen to music in Party Shuffle. All of my playlists, or any of my tracks, or group of tracks can be easily moved into party shuffle by selecting all the tracks, Ctrl+clicking on one of them and selecting “Add to Party Shuffle” or “Play Next in Part Shuffle.” You can see the beauty of this: Playlist functionality…Never-ending flow of music. When we add Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ into the mix we’ll be able to use both of these commands on the fly while working in other applications.

The Process: 4 Easy Steps to Seamless Tunes

• Install Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (ignore if already installed)
• Install the iTunes Module
• Create a Trigger
• Make it part of your Workflow

Step 1: Install Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ (ignore if already installed)

• Go here.
• Click on the Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ tab and click “download.”
• Once it downloads, open the Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ drive in Finder and drag the QS application to your applications folder. Double click to activate it and run through the setup process.
• If you wish…under QS preferences click the “Start at Login” check box and the “show icon in menu bar” checkbox. (QS defaults as a dock icon. I hate dock icons.) You can access the QS preference by either clicking the menu bar icon and selecting “preferences” or by summoning QS with Ctrl+space and clicking on the arrow in the upper right corner of the application window.

Step 2: Install the iTunes Module

• Open Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ preferences by clicking on the menu bar icon or by summoning QS and clicking on the down arrow
• Click on plug-ins in the upper right of the preferences window
• Click on “Recommended Plug-ins” It should look like this:

• Scroll down to “iTunes Module” and click the check box. The plug-in should automatically install and QS will relaunch. To make sure all is well open the preferences page again, go to “installed plug-ins” and make sure the iTunes is there. All good? Cool. Almost done…just have to set up one more thing.

Step 3: Creating a Trigger

If we just use QS as normal (Ctrl+Space and then typing what we’re looking for), we’ll search the whole hard drive including all applications and files. To jump right to iTunes, we need to create a specific trigger that will bypass everything but the iTunes library. Here’s how to set this up:

• Once again, go to the QS preferences
• Click on “Triggers.” iTunes should be one of the choices in the left-hand menu. Click on it.
• On the right is a list of all of the potential commands that QS can be set up to activate with a keystroke of your choice. (”Keyboard Shortcuts” to us Adobephiles, QS calls them “Triggers.”).
• Scroll down to “Search iTunes” in the list of commands and click the check box next to it.
• You’re going to need a key combination to call up this command, so click on the word “none” in the right hand column. A drawer should slide out to the left of the QS window. Everything should look like this:

• Click in the Hot Keys field and select a key command combination that will be quick and easy to remember. I use Creative Suite all the live long day, so I set my key combination up as “Cmd+Shift+X.” If this has over-written any mission critical key commands, it hasn’t affected me yet, but feel free to use whatever you wish here.
• Close out QS
• That’s it. Really.

Step 4: Make it part of your workflow

Now, whenever you hit your Trigger, no matter what you’re doing anywhere on your Mac, not only will you summon Quıcĸsıɩⅴεʀ, you’ll be searching ONLY your iTunes library. Here’s how it works: 

• You’re listening to music in Party Shuffle while working in another application and you get the sudden urge to listen to Mysterious Ways
• Hit your Trigger (Cmd+Shift+X if you’re like me)
• Start typing “Mysterious Ways”
• When the song comes up in the window hit Tab to move into the Actions field
• Select “Play Next in Party Shuffle”
• Hit Enter
• Go back to work. Mysterious Ways will automatically be queued up next in Party Shuffle and will start playing as soon as the current song is finished.

Trust me, that process took way longer to read then it will take to execute. Especially when it becomes second nature.

Notes

• You’ll probably want to make “Play Next in Party Shuffle” the default action once a song or album is selected. To do this, hit your Trigger, type a song title, tab over to the actions field and press the down arrow key to show the list of possible actions to perform. Ctrl+click on “Play Next in Party Shuffle” and select “Make Default.” (Naturally, you can make any of the commands listed your default).
• When QS is activated it’s constantly running in the background scanning and rescanning and cataloging your hard drive looking for changes to files and applications. As such, it has to “learn” where tracks are as they are added to your iTunes library, so it probably won’t catch the new Mylie Cyrus single you just bought from Amazon that you’re hoping no one will know you own. It usually takes 15-20 minutes for the newest tracks to be noted and selectable. Patience, in this regard, is a virtue.
• You can add whole albums to Party Shuffle with this process also. It’s done in exactly the same way: by typing the name of the album in the selection field once QS has been summoned with your Trigger keys. Additionally, you can use the right arrow key to drill down into the selected album in the selector window and tell QS to play specific tracks from it. This comes in really handy if you know you want to listen to a particular track on Ten by Pearl Jam, but you’re blanking on the title for whatever reason.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. If you decide to try this out, find it helpful, have questions, want to scream at me for totally confusing the crap out of you…please leave a comment and let me know.

-oAk-