Smart Playlist and you. iTunes can deliver songs in many ways.

Greetings. Making a simple Smart Playlist is simple and making a complex one is complex. Some real intense music lovers love to love their special, weird smart playlists. But we're just gonna do the simple stuff, then you can start playing around with them yourself.  The cool thing is that there no harm in making tons of different ones, then deleting the ones you don't like.

Background: A Smart Playlist is a playlist that is automatically generated based on the criteria you choose. iTunes comes with a handful of pre-made Smart Playlists. For example, "Top 25 Most Played" is nice simple playlist.  Right click over it and select "Edit Smart Playlist".  You'll see this:



See, not much to it. It looks for the songs with the highest playcount, and limits it to 25 songs.

Creating Smart Playlists:  From the File menu in iTunes, choose New Smart Playlist. You'll see this dialog box:

 
Here's where your creativity comes in, setting up rules.  Think of a rule like a sentence that starts with "I want the songs ..." and fill in the dialog boxes. So if you want to listen to all your Neil Young and Neil Diamond songs, you'd say "I want the songs where the Artist name field contains the word Neil."  iTunes pulls all the songs that match that criteria into that smart playlist (which you'd name "Neil Before Me").

When you click the dropdown menu, you'll see all the possible subjects you can use to create a smart playlist.

You can pick any of the information that iTunes stores about a song (called metadata). If you right click over any song in iTunes, select Get Info and you'll see the metadata:

So get crackin' on those smart playlist.  Make one for all you songs from 1986. Oh wait, don't do that! But be goofy. Select all songs that are "Track 5" then burn a CD for your friend. Or make a smart playlist of all the songs you've rated 5 stars.  You get the idea.

Final notes:

• If you're using the rules, make sure to check the "Match ... of the following rules:" check box.
• To keep the size of the playlist manageable, select the "Limit to" check box and set your criteria.
• By selecting "Live updating", your playlist will change as songs are added and deleted in your iTunes library.
  

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