How do you create your playlists?

[zixxer]

I can't be the only one in this situation... I've somehow accumulated over 3000 songs - about half of it is stuff I rarely want to listen to, but want to keep for when I'm in the mood for slow or oddball music.

So how to you trim 3000 songs down to a playlist of 100 or so songs? I care because I ride a motorcycle, and want to be able to keep my ipod in my pocket. I haven't been able to find a remote that works decent so I need a playlist that doesn't have any 6 minute ruin-my-day songs in it.

I used to do it by genre - pick a few from each category, but TuneUp (retagger) changed my tags to 100 different genres.

 

[PeanutButter]

Smart playlists. Tagging is key if you don't wanna go through your whole library and choosing songs one-by-one, you already seem to be good in this aspect. Rating songs is the next thing that also helps pick songs with certain ratings above or below a certain point so you don't get "bad" songs. I've been using iTunes to make playlists such as the one you're looking for for my Shuffle. I think you can limit the smart playlist to a user defined number of songs, too.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Random shuffle. I do this for my jogging MP3 player every couple weeks, so it's basically a surprise whatever comes on next.

Of course, using Media Player to manage your music you can do everything from rate the songs to put them in separate libraries and organize them thusly.