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At the top of the Source list in iTunes, indicated by a gear icon, you can find what Apple (and everyone else) calls a smart playlist. iTunes comes with a few sample smart playlists, such as the My Top Rated playlist, and you can create your own. Smart playlists add songs to themselves based on prearranged criteria. For example, as you rate your songs, My Top Rated changes to reflect your new ratings. You don't have to set anything up — My Top Rated is already defined for you.
 | The smart playlists are actually ignorant of your taste in music. You can create one that grabs all the songs from 1966, only to find that the list includes "Eleanor Rigby," "Strangers in the Night," "Over Under Sideways Down," and "River Deep, Mountain High" (in no particular order) — which you may not want to hear at the same time. You may want to fine-tune your criteria. |
Creating a smart playlist
To create a new smart playlist, choose File --> New Smart Playlist. The Smart Playlist window appears (shown in Figure 1), giving you the following choices for setting criteria:
- Match the Following Condition: You can select any of the categories used for song information from the first pop-up menu, and select an operator, such as the greater than or less than operators from the second pop-up menu — combine them to express a condition: Year is greater than 1966 or something like that. You can also add multiple conditions by clicking the + button, and then decide whether to match all or any of these conditions.
- Limit To: You can make the smart playlist a specific duration, measured by the number of songs, time, or size in megabytes or gigabytes. The songs can be selected by various methods such as random, most recently played, and so on.
| Limiting a smart playlist to what can fit on a CD, or for the duration of a drive or jogging exercise with an iPod is useful. |
- Match Only Checked Songs: This option selects only songs that have a black check mark beside them, along with the rest of the criteria. Checking and unchecking songs is an easy way to fine-tune your selection for a smart playlist.
- Live Updating: This allows iTunes to automatically update the playlist continually, as you add or remove songs from the library.
After setting up the criteria, click OK to create the smart playlist. iTunes creates the playlist with a gear icon and the name "untitled playlist." You can click in the playlist and type a new name for it.
Figure 1: Set criteria for your own smart playlist.
A smart playlist for recent additions
Setting up multiple criteria gives you the opportunity to create playlists that are way smarter than the ones supplied with iTunes. For example, you can create a smart playlist with criteria shown in Figure 1 that does the following:
- Adds any song added to the library in the past week that also has a rating greater than three stars.
- Limits the playlist to 72 minutes of music to fit on an audio CD, and refines the selection to the most recently added if the entire selection becomes greater than 72 minutes.
- Matches only checked songs and performs live updating.
Editing a smart playlist
To edit a smart playlist supplied by Apple, select the playlist and choose File --> Edit Smart Playlist. The Smart Playlist window appears, with the criteria for the smart playlist.
You may want to modify the smart playlist so songs with a higher rating are picked — simply add another star or two to the My Rating criteria.
| You can also choose to limit the playlist to a certain number of songs, selected by various methods such as random, most recently played, and so on. |
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