Dylan Verheul

You can see what I listen to on my Last.fm profile. The app that brings my music to Last.fm is ScrobblePod. It has some Snow Leopard issues at the moment, but since it's open source someone just made his own Snow Leopard compatible ScrobblePod builld.

Download link: http://tr.im/scrobblepod

Thanks sotkov!

Update: Official ScrobblePod Snow Leopard compatible build was published a few hours after this post went online.

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To get the most out of my music collection, I am fanatic about rating music. The star ratings of the songs, combined with a few playlists power my iPhone syncing and my "personal radio stations". One of the great tools to make rating your songs a breeze is a free little gem of an app called I Love Stars. This application is so tiny, it lives in a blog post!

What it does is nothing, until you play a song in iTunes. Then it shows itself as an editable star rating in your menu bar, making it easy to rate the currently playing song. I Love Stars can even alert you to unrated songs.

Please note that if you are running Snow Leopard and/or iTunes 9, you need to upgrade to the latest version of I Love Stars. Earlier versions have a small problem with the new "sudden termination" feature of Snow Leopard, causing iTunes to restart instantly after you quit it.

Kudos to Andy Kim (@andypotion) for making this application available to us all!

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Sooner or later iTunes is bound to support tagging. I don't mean the (dead) concept of marking a song you hear on the radio for reviewing in the iTunes Store, but the web style method of tagging, such as seen on blogs and del.icio.us.

Still not clear? Suppose you have a track that is a live version of a song you really like. Let's say its genre is Trip-Hop. You want to know this is a live version, so you can select or ignore it in playlists, but how? Also, what if this song is a bonus track (which I often do not want to sync to my iPhone) or a cover version (which I like to group, because I like to hear other people's renditions of songs I really like). The answer is tagging.

My simple solution i to use iTunes Comments section for tagging. I write every tag in there like this: =tag (where tag is the tagname. The comments section of the example above could be:

=live =cover =bonus

By adding the = sign, you can easily search for tags in smart playlists. Also, you can use the Comments section like you normally would, it won't interfere with ttags. For instance, I could also add some textual comment like this:

Excellent live version of Creep (Radiohead) by Prince. =live =cover

Tag your music like this and your smart playlists will love you!

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