How to Create a Smart Playlist

Apple’s iTunes music software offered three kinds of playlist, standard, smart and genius. You can make a standard playlist just by dragging, dropping songs from yournlibrary. Genius playlist are made just with a single click. Really the only kinds of iTunes playlist where brain cells come in handy are smart playlist. So what exactly is a smart playlist? Basically it's a playlist that obeys a set of instructions to create a constantly evo0lving rotation or music. iTunes comes preloaded with a few examples you can find in the playlist menu such as recently added, my top rated and recently played. You can tell them apart from other playlists because of the purplish color and the little cogwheel icon in the center. To get a better understanding of how these work, just look under the hood of the iTunes recently added playlist by selecting it, going to the file menu and choosing edit smart playlist. You can also give this option by right clicking on the playlist. Here we can see the rules of this playlist. A smart playlist can include as many rules as you like but this one uses two rules. It looks up the date added information of your music collection and pulls any media added in the last two weeks. And 9it goes through and excludes anything that might be a podcast. This playlist also has a live updating box jet which means that the playlist is updated immediately any kind of content is added or deleted from iTunes. So that’s a pretty basic playlist. To make something more complicated, let’s make our own playlist by going to the iTunes file naming and selecting new smart playlist. Here, iTunes shows us a window where we could enter the playlist instructions. Now, let’s say we want to make a playlist that will automatically collect all of your highest rated rock songs. There are a couple ways to go about this, so don’t feel like you have to be exact. There’s no harm in trial and error. For me, I will use the first instruction to tell my smart playlist to look songs with the word rock in their genre description. I'll set this from Is Rock to Contains Rock so that will also pick up genres like alternative rock, folk rock, rap rock, whatever. Next, I'll hot the plus button to add another rule where I'll say the rating needs to be higher than three stars. To make things interesting, I'll add one more line where I'll say the skip count, the record of how many times I skip the song before it finishes is less than 10 skips. This trick comes in handy for weeding out songs that have a high rating but in reality, tend to be skipped a lot. If I find out later that this make the playlist a little too short, ic an always go back and erase the skip count or delete the rule by suing the minus button. Now if I have a massive rock library, I can keep adding rules such as the date range and the recordings where I can set it up to exclude certain artist. But form my music collection, there should be plenty. Under the instructions, I'm going to check the little box and set the playlist to cut off at 50 songs. You could also leave it by length of time or say 700 megabytes if you want to fit the playlist on to a CDR. Now by default, iTunes would choose the songs at random but since this is a playlist of highly rated songs, I'll have it select songs according to rating. I also want to check the box for match only checked items since I don’t want the playlist ton include songs I've unchecked for my library. The live updating box will also get checked so that newly rated songs will get automatically added or deleted form the playlist. After hitting OK, iTunes will create the smart playlist and give you a chance to name it whatever you want. You can check out the playlist and see if the results match up to your expectations. If they don’t, remember that you can always go back later and tweak the settings by selecting the playlist and clicking on the edit smart playlist option in the file menu. That’s it. That’s how to create a smart playlist in iTunes. You can use them to quickly generate playlist based around genre or decade or even sort out all the loser songs in your collection that always get skipped. For cnet.com, I'm Donald Bell.