Advanced iTunes: Smart Playlists and multiple libraries

What's the best way to use Smart Playlists?

There is no 'best' way to eat a Cadbury's Creme Egg, and there's no 'best' way to use Smart Playlists. For anyone not familiar with them, Smart Playlists automatically build playlists based on criteria you pre-define, such as the date a song was last played, what star rating you've given it, or what genre it belongs to.

Let's make an advanced Smart Playlist, which will give us a ten-song playlist of metal songs we clearly used to like, but haven't heard for ages.

First click File, then 'New Smart Playlist...'. Tell the box that pops up to match all of the following rules, and choose Genre > Contains > and then type 'metal'. Then click the plus sign to the right to bring up another rule creator.

Then choose Last Played > Is before > and then choose a date suitably far back in the past. In our example we chose a date over a year ago. This so far tells iTunes to build a playlist of metal songs you haven't heard for a year, but if you have a large library you may have loads of songs that match this rule, so we're going to be more specific. Click the plus icon to add a third rule.

Choose Play Count > Is greater than > and then a number large enough to indicate that you've listened to a song a few times. We chose five in our example, which at least to us suggests we liked the song a reasonable amount.

Now tell iTunes to limit to however many items you want in your playlist and tell it to select them at random, then click okay. We chose 10. Lo and behold, we have a ten-song playlist of metal songs we listened to regularly back in the day.

The key here is experimentation. Play with adding rules and see what results you get.

Next: Finding the perfect album art... 

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