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How to create smart playlists in iTunes

If you’ve got a large and ever-growing music collection, it can be hard to find and ‘dust off’ any songs that you’ve got but haven’t played for a while.  The solution is smart playlists.

For the time being, I just have one static playlist for the gym called ‘Gym’ funnily enough.  It only has the songs I want to be in there.  Nothing more, nothing less.  But this is no good if you want a playlist for your top rated songs (let’s say four or five stars) and you have to keep adding them manually.  You would expect that when you rate a particular song four or five stars, it would get automatically added to the playlist.  This is exactly what smart playlists do.

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Burning Sleep is back for 2010

I apologise for anyone who has come across this site and seen effectively, a dying site.  There have been few updates throughout 2009, and nothing posted since July 2009.  Well, that is all about to change.  Starting from today, I’m giving Burning Sleep as much attention as I give Los Havros: the sister site on video games.

It’s been a fairly turbulent period for the writers here, with Matt leaving the team to pursue other things for the meantime, and myself getting caught up with a hectic life and perhaps devoting too much time to my other projects.  I also felt that we were a bit too ambitious with what we were trying to cover.  So, there’s going to have to be a few changes round here before carrying on.

My hit list:

  • A few visual tweaks to the blog here and there (ongoing)
  • A change of focus to concentrate on music and technology (for now)
  • Me as the sole writer for now, with others coming on board in future
  • Regular posts (yay!)

Speaking of regular posts, I’m going to aim for at least one per week as I feel that’s quite feasible for now.  Anything more frequent is a bonus.

  • Music fans cling to CDs, but discover music online- I’m not surprised with this news, really.  CDs are tangible items whereby if anything goes wrong (hard disk failure, etc), you have hard copies available to ‘resurrect’ your valuable collection.  Via Ars Technica. -- by Adam (0) #
  • Hayley Williams on Twitter- If you’re on Twitter and want to follow Hayley, she can be found under the username of @yelyahwilliams – Many thanks to @elleb87 for the tip. -- by Adam (0) #
  • ‘brand new eyes’ is Paramore’s 3rd studio album- It’ll be available everywhere on September 29th, 2009.  I can’t wait! -- by Adam (0) #
  • UK has the worst copyright laws- Well worth a read.  “UK laws that make it a copyright violation to copy a CD that you own onto a computer or iPod should be changed, says Consumer Focus”.  They sure do, as existing UK copyright law is old, out of date, and unfair. -- by Adam (0) #
  • Last.fm to charge for streaming- Internet radio and social music site Last.fm is to start charging listeners outside the UK, US, and Germany.  Scrobbling and other goodness will remain free.  Via BBC -- by Adam (0) #
  • Stream free, legal music with Spotify- This is certainly not a hoax.  Stream as much music as you want for free whilst listening to the occasional radio-style advert.  Don’t want adverts?  £9.99 a month for an ad-free, all you can eat service.  With most music labels signed up, there’s certainly plenty of choice. -- by Adam (2) #