Hi this is Chris from Vitamincm.com and today we are going to be talking about using smart playlist in iTunes and how do you use this smart playlist to manage your iTunes library? Itunes allows you to create two different types of playlist.
There are regular playlists and there are smart playlists. Regular playlist are static and there manually built. By static I mean you build them and they do not update themselves automatically, they are just whatever you put in them and manually built I mean you have to physically add all the songs to them that you want to be included. Now smart playlist on the other hand are dynamic meaning once you define what you want to happen with your smart playlist any new songs that meet your criteria will automatically be added on to the list and these are built using query logic. So if ever you have made queries in any web application or maybe any other pieces offer that you use to do queries against the database that is what you are using to build this smart playlist.
So, when you build smart playlist from queries you are selecting songs that meet a certain criteria. For instance what is the rating on this song, is it three, four, or five stars. What genre? Is it jazz, is it rock, is it classical, is it new music, is it a song that I just added in the last couple of days, or is it a song that has been in my computer for a long time.
You can also use these smart playlist to place limits or restrictions on the songs that get included on to the playlists. For instance you could say song count, I only want one hundred songs or you can exclude genres. You could say I do not want any R&B songs or you can remove artists. You might say I want all my classic rock songs but I do not want Led Zeppelin on there.
There is also the thing that you can do is once you build these queries, any new CDs or music that you add to your library will automatically get added on to the playlist if it meets the criteria so if you built a playlist that pulled in all your classic rock songs and you added a new album by the Rolling Stones that would automatically get pulled in to your new smart playlist.
Now, what you can do with complex smart playlist is you can build several playlist, smart playlist that do specific things. For instance you could build one that says show me all my new songs. You could build another that says show me all my favorite songs and then maybe you could build a third one that says show me songs that I have not heard in a really long time. So they are on these three different playlists. Now, you could build the fourth smart playlist and say I want them randomly take songs from playlist one, two, and three; and it would randomly grab songs from those three playlist and include them into this fourth complex smart playlist and we are going to talk about how to do that whole process today.
So, what we are going to do is just what I kind of laid out. We are going to set it up, see you can always get a fresh selection to music because you might want to take some of your favorite songs but you do not want to hear all your favorite songs all the time or else you are going to get bored at them. You also want to pull in any new songs because if you are talking about a fresh selection of music, obviously your newest songs you would want to be included. And, another thing you might want to do is say throw me in a couple of songs that I have not heard in a really long time. And, we are going to create a master playlist that grabs a selection of songs from each of this other three playlist and we will constantly be updated. So, if you added a new CD that would get sucked into this list if you marked a bunch of songs as new songs that were your favorites they would kind of like automatically get sucked into this list.
So we will talk about how to set all that up in iTunes.
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