I had a bunch of music before categorized my auto playlists:
1. Best music (4-5 star rating)
2. New Music (music added in the last month)
3. Most played (song which had the highest playcount)
4. Pre 2000 Rock Music
5. Post 2000 Rock Music (had to make these two playlists for rock music because of a limitation in the previous firmware that would only allow 2000 songs in a playlist)
The autoplaylists worked great for me and I REALLY miss the feature. Most of my listening is done in my car and it is not safe for me to be looking at my player to look for my favorite songs. I used to be able to just select "Best Music" and I was on my way. About the only things I found wrong with the old system was the 2000 song limit for a playlist, and they wouldn't update on the player (had to sync before autoplaylists were updated). I'd be willing to beta test for you guys just to get the feature back!
-Leo
Thanks for the chance to give some input. I understand the work that went into the new software. It is miles above and beyond the first version & iTunes in looks and overall user experience. However, you need to bring back auto playlists and a five star rating system. These are essential tools for power users with large music collections. Look at the funcionality and filtering available in iTunes playlist features and you cannot go wrong. I especially like the way iTunes compiles the individual track ratings to give the album they are from an overall average rating. This is a very useful feature to create a playlist of all 4 & 5 star rated albums as an example.
I set up playlists based on other criteria like:
I think you see a trend from the other comments in this thread.
Bring it on as soon as you can and keep up the excellent work.
Wanted Updates- Moar apps and games, Edit playlists on device, Wireless 360 sync, Netflix thyself.deviantart.com
I had several auto playlists that had different combinations of genre, play count, date added, file types, ratings, file location, artist, content protection, mood, parental rating, play count, playcount by time period, release year.
And for those of you that say that it's really like 3 ratings with the "heart" system" then the old system had 6 ratings. Unrated, 1-5. I used these ratings for very specific auto playlisting. 1- My wife's music 2-My son's music 3-Good Music 4-Great Music 5-Favorites.
I used my zune to play music for all sorts of events and it was nice to be able to create auto playlists for different types of events and I always knew that appropriate music would be available. Now I gotta go get a WMP compatible device just to get back to work. Thanks a lot Zune Dudes.
i actually posted something about how i used it in another post, but i'll retype it.
The autoplaylist is directly tied to the rating system for 80% of things, so the rating system does need to come back with more than a black/white options (like/don't like). Now, I do like the concept of the heart/broken heart idea, and will make it very very easy for people to use, but we need a little more power. For example, the 5 star system, as one person said before, 1 star is ones they like, but hear to often... This concept is different for every person, 1 star for me is songs i hate. Here's an idea on the rating. Keep the broken heart.... but give more options. give us a nutral rating (not unrated though), an 3 hearts. This would be good for me. if i hate the song, broken heart. if i don't hate it, but won't listen to it, nutral. if i like it, and if i heard it on the radio i wouldn't change the station, 1 heart. next up would be 2 hearts for songs that i like, and create custom lists for this as "party" favorits. 3 hearts would be for songs that I will listen to everyday, and most of these would eventually become 2 hearts.
ok, onto how i would use auto playlists.
#4. this option is last, but it's the most important issue with me, and to other media center owners. it is nice that zune has the option to add tv shows, but seriously, the conversion time isn't really that good. in my test it takes about the same amount of time to convert the show as the show is long, and i still haven't been able to get it to convert untill i sync it.... usually i don't have several hours to wait for the show to convert. I wrote ZuneTvWatcher just for this issue, and the conversion time is about 20 to 30 mins for an hour show. and it does this in the background. This is also not to mention that Zune doesn't do this on XP nor does it do HD shows, as my program does. So i set my program to convert new shows when they show up in the recorded tv folder, and I set a folder to be watched by Zune. When a new show is recorded, it's converted, and put into the watched folder. Now, what's even better is when i delete a show from media center, ZuneTvWatcher also deletes the converted file, so that the next time i sync the zune, an autoplaylist searches for all the "TV Shows", makes that list, removes the shows off the zune if they are not on the list (which means deleted from media center), and adds the new shows. now my sync time is 30 mins if there is ALOT of tv shows to sync over, but if it's only 2 or 3, i'm looking at like 5 mins.
As I started using the "unrated" autoplaylist, i started finding songs i didn't even know i had. there were several songs that I listed as 4 stars, because i wanted to hear them again, but i didn't remember the artist or song (with a library of around 20k songs, you can't). Now under the Zune, they are lost... thankfully they are still rememberd in WMP, but that kinda defeats the purpose.
On the note about playlists. I made the move to using Zune as my music player (and kinda media player) because of using the Zune, I previously used Media Player because i also use Media Center with 3 extenders in the house. The problem that I found i ran into doing this was that playlists (auto or manual) created in Media Center would not show up in Zune, and the reverse is also true. I did realize that it was because of the .zpl for zune and .wpl for media player. Please make this work nicely together. i don't think that it is really an issue, as both .zpl and .wpl are the exact same thing inside the file, just the extention is different. That way if i create a playlist on media center, i can then sync that playlist on the zune, and the reverse will also be true.
just read the post above about compliling the album rating by the track rating, very very very very good idea.
Methos99 wrote: create a picture autoplaylist so that when i go on vacation, all the new pictures i have with me to show, without thinking about adding them
I completely forgot about my picture autoplaylists Same needs as his. Is it really only "advanced" users that made autoplaylists? I can't imagine that most DAP owners don't use that feature.
Just Copy Past iTunes But 4 Zune! And Listen To U Customers!