In this post, I’m going to show some extra shortcuts in the Windows version of the mixer, which you can use to make creating certain kinds of playlists even easier. Following along will require the Power Tools to be enabled.

For the first one, let’s just start with playing all songs by a single artist. The most obvious way is to go to the search box, and type in the artist name, say beatles. This will show all songs matching anything with the word beatles - in my case, that includes 408 songs, including an album called Bach Meets The Beatles. Since I only want the real Beatles, I can use the search selector to say Search Artists, which will restrict the search to just the artist field - 355 songs. (If I want to do this without using the mouse, I use / to enter the search box, and ctrl-down to change search modes.)

But that’s not how I usually do it myself. I just click in the Artists window, and start typing: beatl - this automatically searches down the list to the first artist matching the phrase I’ve typed so far - you can see what the phrase is right above the search window.

If you are searching for a word which is in multiple artist names, you can use ctrl-n and ctrl-p to go to the next or previous hits. This will also show you artists which might include multiple names (like “Eric Clapton” vs. “B.B. King & Eric Clapton”).

This trick will work with artists, albums, or titles, and it searches just the current list, so you can do quick searches inside selections.

If I’m selecting an artist like the Beatles, where I have lots of songs, I’ll typically use the Spice Playlist power tool - this will pull out a subset of songs, and remove any duplicates, just like a regular mix does, but using only the songs in the current list, and not based on any seed. It’s important to make sure duplicate artist removal isn’t enabled when doing this, or there will only be one track in the list. If you select Ignore Mix Limits, it will make the mix as long as possible, otherwise it will use your current mix limits shown on the toolbar. In my case, this reduces the 355 songs to 223, which would last about 10 hours. Often I’ll just set the mix limit to 2 hours, since I generally want to listen to something else at that point.

Sometimes I want to do this with several artists. In this case, it’s a bit trickier, since you need to get each artist selected (you could also just make a temporary playlist, but where’s the fun in that?) Using ctrl-f brings up the Advanced Search box. There are a few things that make it “advanced” - in my case, I’ll type in beach boys and hit enter - this shows the match. I can select it, press Add, and now I have both the Beatles and the Beach Boys selected, without having to scroll all over the list. (If you don’t have lots of artists, it may be easier to scroll and ctrl-click to get multiple selections). If you are going to be adding multiple artists, hold down the shift button when you press Add, and the dialog box will remain open.

If you don’t know which artists to add, try right-clicking on your intial artist, and select Similar Artists. This will bring up a list of candidates - you can use ctrl-click to choose several, then press Add to extend your selection. Or, select Related Artists - in the case of the Beatles, this will bring up George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (assuming you have tracks by all those artists individually). The related artists feature includes members of bands or collaborations, and is not based on acoustics.

Once I have multiple artists selected, I can reenable duplicate artist filtering before I spice my playlist. For instance, if I have 3 artists selected, I can make sure the playlist alternates equally between the artists by setting the controls to not duplicate an artist within 2 tracks.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 10:33 pm and is filed under MusicIP Mixer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.