Two ways to make iTunes better: Smart Playlists

Part two of my iTunes improvement post. Right now I'll tell you what smart playlists are and how they can make your life easier.

For someone like me (that has thousands of songs and loves playlists), I find iTunes's smart playlist feature to be really useful. So what is it exactly?

Smart playlists takes the work out of organizing your music library and makes making playlists so much easier. For me, one of my smart playlists is titled J-pop. Inside that playlist is, yep, J-pop songs. Now normally I'd have to add the thousand or so J-pop songs that exists in my music collection manually. Smart playlists makes this so much easier. All you have to do is set a couple of settings, and iTunes will automatically fill your new playlist for you.



Here is how to get started.

1. Go to File > New Smart Playlist and this will appear.

You need to set what iTunes calls "rules" so that iTunes will know what you want in your smart playlist. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will make a smart playlist of all of my instrumental songs that came out in 2010.

2. Set as many rules as you need.

For my instrumental playlist, I need to change "artist" to "genre" (because "instrumental" is a type of music). Then in the box I need to type instrumental.

If you need more rules (you probably do), then just click the plus sign and another rule box will appear.

Now remember part two of my smart playlist is to restrict it to only instrumental songs from 2010. So I once again change "artist", but this time I select "Year".

Here is the finished product.

Of course, click OK and the new smart playlist will appear, waiting for you to name it.

The playlists with a picture of a gear next to them are smart playlists. The ones with a musical note next to them are regular playlists.

And there you have it. The most difficult part of this is thinking of what rules you need to define so that iTunes will properly make your playlist. But when you figure it out, it's really rewarding. Since my J-pop playlist is a smart playlist, whenever I add new J-pop songs to iTunes, they also will automatically be added to the J-pop smart playlist.

You can do some really cool stuff with this, besides just organizing music. For example, my "Old but not forgotten" smart playlist contains songs that I haven't played in 2 months, hence the name. Take a look at the rules I used:

The only one I have yet to figure out is how to make a H!P smart playlist. Normally just adding the names of all of the H!P groups would be fine, but I have songs from soloists as well as duet songs and live songs.. and the list goes on and on. I'd have to make 50+ rules for everything to fit. At that point, I just would rather manually add any new H!P songs I get.

If anyone has an idea for a smart playlist but can't think of which rules to use to make it happen, comment and I'll see if I can figure it out.

Or if anyone wants a tutorial about anything PC-related task, feel free to comment also.