metaViper

One of the many ways I prowl for good content on the web is by listening to podcasts. Often though, good information is dispersed across several brief broadcasts from a variety of authors. Sometimes I’m in the gym running, sliding around the iPod’s clickwheel to select the next podcast; all while dodging other runners. An accident-prone endeavor to say the least.

Then I ran across smart playlists on Apple’s web site and realized that they could easily solved my problem. I set up two playlists named PodShort and PodLong.

In iTunes 7, smart playlists appear under File>>New Smart Playlist … For my PodShort smart playlist I configured it to pull up only podcasts with time less than ten minutes and a play count of zero, ordered randomly. For each additional rule click on the plus sign at the right-hand side. That playlist enabled me to hear commentary from six different podcasts (each around five minutes long) rapid fire without the need to pick and choose during my workout. And you guessed it, I use my PodLong list when I have a larger chunk of time available for research, it pulls up podcasts over ten minutes long.

My only gripe at this point is with volumes. Each podcast has a different loudness which means I had to pull out my iPod, turn off the lock, and adjust volume a couple of times. That should be something iTunes takes care of programmatically or through a set of enforced volume standards.