Section 84. Create a Playlist or Smart Playlist

84. Create a Playlist or Smart Playlist

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

82 Purchase Music From the iTunes Music Store

83 Import (or Rip) an Audio CD

SEE ALSO

85 Create (or Burn) a Custom Audio CD

Although iTunes makes it easy to locate and play any individual song or album, sometimes you'll want to mix and match your music. It's one thing to be able to select a single artist and simply play through all the songs that artist ever produced; it's quite another to pull together a selection of your personal favorite 30 songs, a choice collection for working out at the gym, a soothing set of songs to fall asleep to, or your most highly rated rock songs from the '70s. These kinds of specialized, personalized groupings are what are known as playlists .

KEY TERMS

Playlist A grouping of songs that you create by dragging songs into it in whatever order you please .

Smart Playlist A playlist that is automatically created according to criteria you specify, updating itself as you add new music that matches those criteria.

iTunes can create two kinds of playlists: standard ones, in which you simply make a new list and then manually add songs to it, and Smart Playlists , which are in fact sophisticated saved database queries that automatically select songs that match criteria you specify. (The principle is the same as with a Spotlight search in the Finder, as discussed in 14 Create a Smart Folder That Contains Certain Types of Items .) Smart Playlists have near-infinite versatility; how they can be configured is limited only by your imagination .

84. Create a Playlist or Smart Playlist

Whether a playlist is standard or smart, you can play its contents by selecting the playlist from the Source pane on the left side of the iTunes window and then clicking Play . A playlist can be sorted by its manual sort order or by any of the visible columns , or you can use the Shuffle button to stir the playlist into a random order.

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The Party Shuffle feature selects a random handful of songs from a specified playlist and shows you your playback history and upcoming songs; you can delete queued songs from the list or add new ones manually as the playlist plays. As the name suggests, this can be great fun when you're arranging the background music for a party.

1.	Add a New Playlist To create a new playlist, click the + button below the Source pane, at the bottom left of the iTunes window. A new playlist appears in the Source list, with the name untitled playlist .
2.	Name the Playlist The name of the new playlist is selected so that you can immediately type a new name, such as Driving Tunes or Hair Band Classics . Press Return after typing the perfect title for your collection.
3.	Add Songs to the Playlist Click the Library option in the Source pane to view all the songs available in iTunes; navigate to each song you want to add to the playlist and drag it to the playlist in the Source pane. Each new song is added to the end of the list. You might find it helpful to double-click the playlist's icon to open the playlist in a separate window as you add songs to it. NOTE When you drag songs from your Library into a playlist, you're not removing them from the Library ; you're merely creating a list of references to selected songs, and you can always access each song in its original location in the Library . You can add the same song to multiple playlists, for example, or add the same song multiple times to the same playlist. If you delete a song from a playlist, the song isn't removed from iTunes altogether.
4.	Sort the Playlist Click the playlist in the Source pane to view its contents in the song list area. Click and drag individual songs to different places in the list to manually sort the list to your taste. You can also click any of the column headers to sort the playlist on that column; click the column header again to reverse the sort order. Click the first column, showing the entry numbers , to return the list to your manual sort order.
5.	Create a Smart Playlist To create a Smart Playlist, hold down the Option key and click the + button; its icon changes from a + sign to a sprocket, indicating the automated mechanism underlying Smart Playlists. Alternatively, select New Smart Playlist from the File menu. A Smart Playlist dialog box appears in order to give you access to the specifications of the Smart Playlist query. Various check box options are available, such as limiting the list to a certain number of songs. You can add as many organizational criteria as you want by clicking the + button after any shown criterion. You can filter songs using any of the available info tags, as well as comparison operators such as contains or starts with for textual entries, is or greater than for numeric entries, or is after or is in the range for date entries. You can, for instance, create a list composed of all songs in the Rock genre that were made in the years 19661974 , whose track number was 1. You can even specify that songs in the playlist must also belong to another playlist, such as a Smart Playlist that contains all music by any of several selected artists . The details are all up to you. Smart Playlists are especially useful in conjunction with the My Rating and Play Count columns. For instance, you can create a Smart Playlist that consists only of songs you've rated three stars or higher, or to which you've listened at least five times, or both conditions at once. As you listen to your music, rate each song by giving it anything between one and five stars. Do this by Control +clicking the song and then picking a rating from the My Rating submenu or by selecting a rating from the contextual menu on iTunes' Dock icon. You can also configure iTunes to show the My Rating column and then simply click in that column to set the appropriate number of stars. As you rate your songs and listen to the ones you like best, a Smart Playlist that you might have set up to include only highly rated or frequently played songs automatically becomes populated with music.

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iTunes becomes more and more useful the more you use it; it hones itself to match your listening habits.