May 16, 2011

Smart Playlists Maintain Themselves

Creating playlists in your iTunes library is simple and straightforward: click the Plus sign on the lower left of the window, select the new empty untitled playlist that will appear in the Playlists section above and enter a name for it, then drag in items from your library as you wish. Smart Playlists start from a different place --the File menu--and add another dimension to what's possible. They populate themselves based on rules you pick: everything by this artist, all my reggae, these playlists, and so on, so they update automatically as you add to your library. You can include multiple rules in a Smart Playlist and automatically limit its size to fit the space you want to give it on a device, for instance. And you can choose how content gets picked when you sync. "Least recently played" to put fresh songs in the mix, "most recently added" to capture what's newly yours, and so on. One tip: if you're using multiple rules in a single playlist, pick "any" in the popup choice for Match at the top of the list of rules unless you only want songs that match every rule in your list.