Fundamentals of Digital Audio Podcast

On last week's MacBreak Weekly, Alex Lindsey mentioned he wanted a way to make a new playlist in iTunes from a random selection of songs in other playlists. So say you have playlists called "Gold" - your favorite songs, "Indie" - independent artists, "Jazz", and "Blues". You want to make a new playlist with song from each of the 4 playlists mentioned above. Furthermore, you want to weight some playlists heavier than others so there are more song from that source playlist, for example "Indie" in the example above might contribute more songs that the other playlists. The script lets you decide how many items to add from each source playlist so you can weight them to your liking. This gives you a great mix of songs between your favorites and other great tunes you love but seldom listen to.

So I whipped up an applescript to do the trick. 3 caveats:
1. Its a bit slow. Randomizing the playlists takes a bit of time
2. It borrows heavily from the randomize script at Doug's Applescript for iTunes site
3. It will randomize the order of tracks in your playlists

Other than that it works great for me but, YMMV. This script has not been heavily tested.

Here is the link to download (do control-click save as or save link as). Save the file to [your home directory]/Library/iTunes/scripts. Then you can run from the script menu in iTunes.

Enjoy! Feel free to modify or embellish the script. I hope to make this an Applescript Studio application someday.

Bug report #1:
If you try to add say 12 songs to your new perfect playlist, and the source playlist has only 10 items, for example. You will get an error (obviously). The script should detect this though and warn you.