iTunes 4 lets you personalize your listening experience with powerful features like My Rating, Last Played and Smart Playlists that are attuned to your musical preferences.
Smart Playlists
The power to create playlists by mixing music tracks from different albums and genres has always been one of the cool features of iTunes. And with iTunes 4, you simply indicate your desired criteria — like all the rock songs you’ve added to your library in the past month. iTunes goes to work, automatically finding the type of songs you’ve specified and creating a playlist. iTunes 4 also offers you a wide range of new song selection criteria with which you can create smart playlists.
More choice, greater personalization
Chances are your answer to the question “what’s your favorite music?” would depend on your mood, where you are, who you’re with and what you’re doing. iTunes 4 lets you create playlists that match your musical whims and fancies.
My Rating. This feature lets you put your personal stamp on your music collection by assigning stars (on a scale of one to five) to each song. So now you can see your favorite music at a glance. Just click on a song you want to rate to highlight it, and select how many rating points you want to award it. Now iPods can also help you rate your music, simply assigning your rating to the track your listening to and it will sync up with iTunes next time you plug it in.
Composer. This field lets you keep track of the composer or songwriter of a particular song (often someone completely different from the recording artist). This is a particularly nifty feature if you’re fond of classical music or dance tracks remixed by DJs. To activate this, simply select View Options from your Edit menu, check the Composer box, click OK and that’s it. You’re now able to sort your favorite tracks based on the people who composed them.
Play Count. This musical odometer keeps track of how many times you listen to each song, Play Count allows you to see at a glance which songs you listen to most frequently (as well as those songs that you haven’t listened to all that often). To view all your Play Counts, select View Options from your Edit menu, check the Play Count box and click OK. A Play Count column appears in your iTunes library. Every time you finish listening to a song, the play count automatically advances by one.
Last Played. Whenever you play a song, iTunes automatically records the date and time, so you know when you last listened to it. This lets you see the songs you’ve listened to most recently, as well as songs you haven’t listened to in a while — and that you may even have forgotten about. To see your play dates, select View Options from the edit menu, check the Last Played box and click OK. A Last Played column will now appear in your iTunes library.
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See iTunes Rock |
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View QuickTime movies of iTunes in action.
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Smart Playlists ideas |
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Massive Beats
Genre is Electronic and
BPM is greater than 120
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Never Been Listened
Play Count is 0
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Absolute Favorites
My Rating is five stars
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Flavors of Mozart
Composer contains Mozart and
Genre contains Classical
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New Releases
Year is 2003
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Love Songs
Song Name contains Love or
Album contains Love
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100 Newest
Limit to 100 songs selected by Date Added
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Fill my iPod
Limit to 29 gigabytes selected by random
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