There are plenty of ways to listen to Taylor Swift’s newest single or listen to all of the Beatle’s classic hits. You can add them to your Spotify, iTunes or other MP3 players. Downloading songs has never been easier. Here are some ways to create the perfect playlist.
1. Create a Smart Playlist With iTunes or Pandora
The nice thing about iTunes is that it has a lot of great filters. You can use them to create a Smart Playlist. What types of Smart Playlists can you create? Here are some examples:
Album tracks instead of single hits Holiday or seasonal songs Songs that nobody has listened to in a while (filter by “last played”) Most popular songs of the year
There are millions of songs on iTunes. You should have no trouble using their filters to create multiple Smart playlists. Pandora recently announced that they will be allowing their users to create smart playlists as well. “If you think about the solutions that have been offered to date, they’ve essentially been on demand,” CEO, Tim Westergren said during the announcement. “We really don’t believe that’s the right answer — you see all the symptoms of a product that’s not meeting peoples’ needs yet.”[1]
2. Borrow Other Playlists on Instant FM or Blip FM
Instant FM and Blip FM are both popular tools for sharing playlists. If you spent a day putting together a spectacular playlist, then you can share it with people that have similar music tastes. On the flipside, you can also look at playlists other people have created. If someone seems to like the same type of music, then you should see what they put together. You can easily copy it, so you don’t need to spend time building your own playlist from scratch. Of course, you can also remove any songs that you don’t want to listen to. If someone’s musical tastes are almost identical to yours, except for a strange addiction to Katy Perry singles, then you can filter by artist and remove them with the click of a mouse.
3. Get Songs from YouTube
Almost every song ever made is on YouTube. Many people go to YouTube to listen to music when they don’t have access to an iPod or MP3 Player. They also like to listen to amateur songs people upload. They may follow several YouTube stars and download their own songs (or impersonations of other artists). If you come across a great song on YouTube, you can also add it to your own playlist. There are some great tools that let you convert a YouTube video to MP3 files.
4. Use Spotify Search Operators
Spotify doesn’t have the same filtering system that Pandora and iTunes offers, but it allows people to use custom search operators to customize their searches in unique ways. Here are a couple of custom searches you can conduct:
“year:2000-2010″ If you don’t want to listen to anything from the last century, this search operator will give you what you want. It will spit out songs that were made in 2000 or later. “genre:hip hop year 2016” If you want to look at all of last year’s best hip hop songs, this search operator does the trick. “artist:Taylor Swift” This will obviously show you all tracks from Taylor Swift. “track:love” This will give you all tracks with the word “love” in them. “album:Loveless” This will list the album “Loveless.” It is perfect if you know exactly what you are looking for and don’t want a bunch of unrelated albums showing up in your search.
These search operators aren’t case sensitive.
Conclusion
Do you love listening to music from Spotify, iTunes or Pandora? There are lots of great ways to create the perfect playlist. Make sure you understand the filtering options so you can find the songs you want. Featured photo credit: Pexels via pexels.com
