itunessmart-playlist
In the iTunes 12.7.2.60, I'm trying to create a Smart Playlist with the songs that I didn't listen to in a while. This playlist should not include songs that I skipped recently. My current rules look like the following (see the screenshot):
However, the iTunes still adds songs that I skipped. How can I make it to exclude songs that I skipped recently?
I think the best option you have is to recreate your super playlists as a single more complex playlist.
When you are editing a smart playlist you can option click the '+' button (turns into '...' while you are holding option) and this creates a subgroup that can a condition of it's own.
This playlist picks music based on rating and last played choosing higher rated tracks more often:
One technique I used in some playlists was to put NSFW tracks in a playlist and then build other playlists to exclude NSFW tracks. Putting tracks in a playlist is an easy way to add additional information about them without having to edit the ID3 tags. That doesn't work with these more complex smart playlists.
You will have to put additional information like that into the ID3 fields. You can use the comments block for this, but I don't like to do that because I like to be able to add this kind of flag to multiple tracks at once and I can't do that as I may be losing comments already entered. Genre works if you're willing to use that instead. Any field will work; as I don't have tracks that use grouping I used that for my own NSFW tags.
One slightly more complex place to put these kinds of tags is the 'Category' field. iTunes keeps a category field but doesn't show that field in the editing UI so it's normally not used for anything. Doug's Applescripts offers a script that will let you edit this field. (script and instructions)
You can't do this with a smart playlist as Apple doesn't expose the lyric field there.
You can create an Applescript that creates a playlist. You'd then have to rerun the script to update the playlist. A track has a playlist field so you'd just check that.
Here's one example of such a script
tell application "iTunes"
if exists playlist "No Lyrics" then
delete playlist "No Lyrics"
end if
make new playlist with properties {name:"No Lyrics"}
duplicate (every track of playlist 1 whose lyrics is equal to "") to playlist "No Lyrics"
end tell
Best Answer
The rules look correct. The problem may be in what YOU consider a skip versus what iTunes/iOS considers a skip. There's varying reports that a skip in the first 3 seconds doesn't get counted, a skip in the last 10 seconds doesn't get counted, etc.
Maybe the best thing to do is this:
Create another smart playlist RecentlySkipped with one rule: Last Skipped IS IN THE LAST 1 days.
Then alter your existing playlist by replacing the "last skipped" rule with "Playlist IS NOT RecentlySkipped".
You can then play around with playing tracks and skipping them at various times - in the first 2 seconds, in the first 10 seconds, in the first 15 seconds, in the last 15 seconds, etc. Then check the RecentlySkipped playlist to see which ones got added to it and which ones didn't.
Also, the play and skip count logic has been changed from release to release in the past. So it's possible, for example, that what counted as a skip in iTunes 12.6 is not counted as a skip in iTunes 12.7 or vice versa.
Also, in older versions of iTunes you could reset play count independently of resetting skip count. More recent versions reset both counts whether you want them both reset or not.