Make Playlists

In the good ol' days, when you wanted to listen to music, you listened to a whole album. A CD was a nice, functional unit of music. Still, if you had the time, it was generally preferable to make a party tape or disca compilation of your favorites. New technologies produce new opportunitiesintroducing the playlist. It creates an experience akin to an instant, malleable, best-of CD.

A playlist is a set of songs that you build and sequence yourself. By making a playlist, you are not affecting your iTunes Library at all. The library is where all the songs live; the playlist is just a convenient way to access some of them. It's also an essential building block if you want to burn a CD of some tracks (as Christopher wants to do for the birthday party), add a bunch of tunes to a slideshow in iPhoto, or organize your music collection for your iPod.

1.	Click the plus (+) button at the bottom of the Source column. This adds an untitled playlist to your Source list.
2.	Type a name for the playlist. Christopher calls his "Jessica's Birthday," which you may also want to do to make it easier to follow the lesson steps. Click the new playlist in the Source list, and notice that there is nothing on the right side of the window; it's empty, since you haven't added any songs.
3.	Click Library. The main window shows the songs you've imported so far.
4.	Drag a song from the list of tracks on the right and drop it on Jessica's Birthday. It may not look like anything happened at first, but if you select Jessica's Birthday you'll see your song in that playlist. You can add more than one song at a time. Common to many Macintosh applications is Command-clickwhich lets you select a series of disconnected items at the same time.
5.	Go back to your library and click one song; then hold down the Command key and click a second song from that list. Both songs will be selected.
6.	Drag the pair of songs to your playlist. Note Shift-clicking works for selecting groups of contiguous songs.
7.	Drag an album from the Album column to Jessica's Birthday. All of the songs from that album are added at once.

You can add individual tracks or whole albums in many ways. This represents just the basics. No matter what method you use, before you know it the Jessica's Birthday playlist will have a number of songs that you can play back-to-back.

Tip

You can include a song in multiple playlists. You can even add songs to one playlist from another by simply dragging songs across the playlists.

Tip

Deleting a song from a playlist will not delete it from your library. Deleting it from the library, however, will remove it from your computer. You'll get a warning dialog, but be careful when you delete.