iTunes

Looking for shuffle play with a little more control? Want radio stations by decades?

Create smart playlists like 90s, 80s, 70s, etc., using similar criteria to “Year is in the range 1990 to 1999”. Then head to Party Shuffle and check out the popup menus at the bottom of that window. Choose your desired playlist from the “Source” popup — like my “00s” this morning. If you want, and you’re an obsessive song rater like I used to be, click on “Play higher rated songs more often”. Then hit play, and you’re good to go: instant radio station playing all the best of 2000-2005. ;)

If you don’t like the upcoming mix that is randomly created, head to the top-right corner and click on the Refresh button to get a new one, or delete individual tracks in the list. While you’re browsing around in the main Library, you can also right-click on songs to add them to the Shuffle. Bliss!

Control-Command-Z

Holy crap, how long has Ctrl-Command-Z been a keyboard shortcut to “Zoom” the iTunes window? I noticed it after installing iTunes 5, so I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been there before. More importantly, I’ve been wishing for that exact behavior since the first version of iTunes. Thank. You.

Podcasts

I had been using iTunes’s podcasts feature since version 4.9, but some difficulties with it, as well as forgetting to listen to a lot of stuff due to no notification, prompted me to give up on it as a podcast tracker. Instead, I switched over to NetNewsWire, subscribing to podcasts there instead. The advantages are that I get notified when a new one is available and get to pick and choose what I want downloaded — the opposite in both cases of how iTunes works. I’ll still use iTunes to listen to them, by using NNW’s import into iTunes feature. Best of both worlds.