I wrote a short article about a smarter way to listen to your music on the iPod:
If you're interested, you can read the full article here.
Quote
When I am using my iPod choosing a song or an album is quite a task - I have a moderate collection of 220+ albums (1600+ songs). Browsing through all of them to decide which song/album I want to hear now can be rather time consuming. I’d much prefer if I could just turn it on and let it play.
In theory I could just add all my songs and set the iPod on shuffle. However, there are a few issues there:
1) I don’t want to hear songs that I heard recently, which means a song that was played yesterday shouldn’t be played again.
2) I’d like the number of stars that I give to a song to effect how often the iPod plays it (e.g play a 5 starred song every 14 days but a 3 starred song every 30 days).
3) When I listen to a new album I want to listen to it more than anything else to get acquainted to it.
4) I also hear very different kind of music (Metal and Progressive rock) and I wouldn’t like them to mix.
5) I need an easy way to manage this system; adding new albums should be quick and easy.
If you're interested, you can read the full article here.