Stupid iTunes Tricks: Fun with Smart Playlists

Recently I was exploring features in iTunes I hadn't looked at before, and I discovered Smart Playlists, a kind of filter you can use to create customized content lists from your iTunes library.

If you haven't discovered Smart Playlists yet, they can be a very powerful organizing tool. They work in a similar fashion to email filters. You define the type of filter, then you can add or subtract different filtering criteria to filter the list as granularly as you desire. For instance, you can filter by artist or genre or even as finely as something called BPM (beats per minute) or last played, last skipped or My Rating.

As you become more comfortable with the different filtering criteria, you can build lists that meet your own unique needs.

To build a Generic Smart Playlist:

Select Filtering Critera

Start by selecting your filtering criteria. You can add as many filtering criterion as you wish. The more you add, the more refined the lists.

1. Click File > New Smart Playlist. And the Smart Playlist dialog box opens.
2. Start by selecting your filter criteria on the left. For example, to create a Rock Smart Playlist , select Genre from the drop-down list on the left.
3. In the middle column define your filtering argument (contains, does not contain, etc.)
4. In the right column select the filtering criteria. For instance, if you chose genre, enter Rock, Jazz, Classical or whatever you want to use as your filtering criteria.
5. Build on this by adding additional criteria by clicking the plus sign, then follow steps 2-4 again to build your next filtering criteria. For instance, you could create a Jazz list which includes John Coltrane, but doesn't' include Charlie Parker (or any artist you can think of).

List Building Criteria

After you define the filtering criteria, you need to let iTunes know how you want to build the list, how big it is, what you want to base the selections on (e.g., random selections or the most recently played).

1. When you are finished adding your filtering criteria, click the Limit to check box and select the number of songs you want to limit. For instance, you can limit it to 20 songs to build a mix CD or you could limit to 4GB to fill your 4GB iPod mini (or any size you desire)
2. Select how you want to define the number such as items or GB in the middle column.
3. Select how you want iTunes to create the list in the far right. For instance, I like to select Randomly and see what happens, but you can control how you want to build a list by making a selection from the list.
4. Click OK to build the list.

Experiment with this feature and see how you can use Smart Playlists to bring order to your library or to build lists of music and other content according to your own unique selection criteria. And also check out the Filter, another tool for creating lists on the fly.

Comments

[Pav]

Or you could just use a bit of software like The Filter to create your playlist without any work!
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Well, that's a tease. I hope you come back and let us know more about this.

Regards,
RM

[DougScripts]

"Recently I was exploring features in iTunes I hadn't looked at before, and I discovered Smart Playlists...". You're kidding, right? Smart Playlists were introduced in iTunes 3 back in 2002.

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I never suggested it was new, just new to me.

In any complex piece of software there are going to be a number features you never use. I figured if I hadn't discovered it, there were many others who hadn't as well and judging by the number of hits I got on this I was right.

RM

[Pav]

You haven't heard of The Filter?

The Filter is a little app for iTunes Win/Mac that can build a playlist instantly.

All you need to do is select a song in iTunes and then ask The Filter to build a playlist based around this song. It then checks it's "community server" for a list of similar songs and comes back with a playlist. Takes about five seconds.

It's a free download from TheFilter.com so download it and give it a whirl.

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Sounds like Pandora for iTunes. I will definitely take a look and see how it works. Thanks for the tip.

RM

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I downloaded it and it is a very cool little program for helping you discover the music hidden in the corners of your collection. It does require registration, which seems odd to me, but you download it, then choose three songs and the filter builds a playlist instantly based on your selections.

RM

[Robert Delgado]

How can I keep my Ipod(60GB) from playing songs from the same artists when I shuffle
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I've never been able to figure out the Shuffle alogrithm, but you could create a Smart Playlist that excludes the artist in question. I've also found that when my library includes a lot of material from a single artist, there is a tendency to repeat that artist during the Shuffle process. Wish I could be more help here, but the way the iPod shuffles music is really a mystery to me.

Regards,
RM

[Jake]

The trick is to pick out the best songs from the artists in question and tag the tracks by using the comments field. Start tagging all your tracks that you want to hear in your playlists and create smart playlist based on these tags. I tag all tracks "indie" that I want to play in a SPL that plays indie music.