Okay, maybe "This Sucks" is a little harsh, but I have two uses for the "Play everything but songs I've said I don't want to hear" playlist. One, I have "interesting" audio tracks that I want to keep for some reason or other, so deleting them isn't an option for me. I like having my music players set to grab all MP3s on my machine, so going to the trouble of culling the "I like it but don't delete it" music and putting it in another folder isn't really ideal either.
The second reason is that I share a music library with my wife who likes a lot of music from the 60's and 70's. I happen to really like Jimi Hendrix, but I'm not a big fan of Van Morrison. Keeping our music collection synchronized and backed-up across three computers is difficult enough without trying to exclude some tracks from mine and others from hers -- there's plenty of music I like that she doesn't, too.
So I did about 2 minutes of digging, and there are simple solutions for both Windows Media Player and iTunes users.
Windows Media Player users have the easiest time of it. Since all music gets a rating of 3 stars by default, you just create a smart playlist (below) that says, for example, "Include all music that's at least 2 stars." Every time a song comes on that you don't want to hear again, just give it a rating of 1 star, and you're all set.
It's a little harder for iTunes users. You'll need to do a few more things:
1. Set "Matching" to "Any" instead of "All"
2. Create the first rule to say "is greater than" 1 star
3. Add another rule (click the little "+" sign)
4. Set the second rule to say "is" and erase all the stars in the box
The first rule makes sure you don't get music with the 1-star rating. The second rule (and the one that's least intuitive) makes sure you get music that you haven't rated yet... which is necessary since iTunes doesn't provide a default rating for songs, and unless you're obsessive about rating your music, most of your songs probably fall into this category. And then you had to say "Any" because you'll find a very small set of tracks that are both "unrated" and rated "greater than 1 star." When you're through, you should have a rule that looks like the image below:
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