Mimi is the name of my Mac mini that holds all my music. For a couple of days I’ve been wanting to create a smart playlist that can mimic my own personal radio station.

Yesterday I started off my creating some smart playlists that held music just added to my library, music I’d listened to recently (but not too recently), music I like and music I’ve not listened to for sometime. All the while ensuring that streams, DJ mixes, podcasts and very short tracks are ignored.

Then I came up against two problems.

The first is that shared libraries don’t contribute to the play count / recently played date. I use shared music extensively since Mimi holds all my music, but I have another Mac that I like to listen to music on. Fortunately, there’s the Shared Music Monitor script that runs in the background updating this information.

The second problem is that there are a lot of smart playlists. Each of these needs to be refreshed in order for the ultimate ‘radio’ playlist to be refreshed. After all, I don’t want to be listening to the same stuff every day. So I wrote my own iTunes AppleScript which deletes all of the tracks on each of the specific smart playlists – thereby forcing them to be recreated – and I have a nice ‘radio’ playlist which can be updated each day or when I want to.