I’ve spent a few days playing with my new toy, the iPod portable MP3 player from Apple. I’m really impressed with how powerful it really is — and that surprises me. Apple has spent so much time promoting the product as being cool, and no time explaining why you should spend twice as much on an iPod over it’s competitors that have the same capacity.

I’m quickly learning that physical characteristics have nothing to do with how powerful iPod really is. It’s all in the playlists:

Once you’ve got your 4,000 song library loaded onto the unit, it’s not that easy to explore, and that’s where iTunes comes in. iTunes is Apple’s remarkably well designed MP3 music player and management software. iTunes allows you to create “smart” playlists that dynamically update themselves based upon several elements: song rating, the number of times you’ve listened to the whole song, and the genre (among others).

Rating your songs as you hear them is the easiest way to grind through your library

As you’re playing songs on your iPod (or iTunes for that matter), you can rate them. Rating the songs is critical to the ultimate success of your “smart” playlists. The more iTunes and your iPod know about what you like, the more likely it is to generate playlists of songs you’ll want to hear.

Establishing a consistent means of rating songs is critical. I’m pretty happy with the “radio station” method I’m using:

I don’t like this song. I don’t ever want to hear it again. I don’t want to delete it, though, because it is part of an album and my wife might like the song, so I’m not going to remove it from the collection.

I like the song, but must be “in the mood” to hear it. If it were on the radio, I might change stations.

If I heard this song on the radio, I wouldn’t change the channel, but I wouldn’t turn it up, either.

This song I’d definitely turn up if it came on the radio. I like it a lot, and while I may get bored of it later, it’s currently among my favourite songs.

This is a special song that moves me or has a special meaning for me. I may not necessarily want to hear it all the time, but it’s one of my all time favourite songs.

One of the other contributing factors to how iTunes ensures you’re hearing the music you want, is the play count. Whenever you listen to a song through to the end (listening to the first few moments then skipping doesn’t count as “played”), the play count goes up a notch. This will help you later tell iTunes “just play the music I really, really like.” You can see by the photo to the right, the time and date of the last playback of the song is recorded, too. This allows you to tell iTunes, “play only the songs I haven’t heard this year” etcetera.

Within iTunes, you can create regular playlists (for example, a party mix) or you can create “smart” playlists that dynamically change based upon what you want. The above photo shows a smart playlist that tells iTunes “play me songs that I really like that I have played at least once.”

You might also want to set up a playlist on your iPod that plays music you haven’t rated, yet. After all, a 4,000 song music library is going to take some time to rate. The above playlist tells iTunes, “play songs that I haven’t heard and rated yet.”

I’ve even got a playlist titled “All Hit Radio” that plays only the top 40 songs that I like, based upon rating and the number of times I’ve played the song.

I’m amazed that Apple isn’t promoting the “intelligence” of the iPod over its competitors.