28 Nov
A Guide and Ideas for iTunes Smart Playlists
I love music, and I love having things properly organized in my computer, which may be one of my peeves. iTunes does facilitate this with its Smart Playlist feature. You may have seen it, you may have used the default ones, but you may have not used them to their full potential. This will guide you to take full advantage of them, and have your music beautifully and automatically organized based on the parameters that you set.
Date Sensitive Playlists
Examples:
Added In The Weeks Of The Month
Date Added is in Range - I usually start my week on a Monday and end it on a Sunday.
Podcasts to False - This filters out Podcasts.
Added in the last 3 days
Top Songs
This one seems like a simple but clever playlist. This will be purely arranged by your rating and how frequent you listen to it.
It will only add tracks with 5 stars.
It will limit it to 10 tracks.
And they will be arranged by most played.
Podcasts from a Date Range
Tag Based/ID3 Based Playlists
Long Tracks
If you download bootlegs or live shows, usually, they don’t cut the tracks and is single long track. This is a good day to filter them into this playlist. Tip: Once this playlist is created, I recommend selecting them all, Command/Ctrl + I, Go to the Options Tab, and Check Remember Playback Position.
By Genre of a Certain Year
Let’s say, that 2007 was the best year of House Music, and you keep adding songs to your collection. This playlist will manage to keep all of your collected House tracks for 2007. You can apply this to any combination of genre/year. If you want just all the albums from a certain year, just keep the Year field.
For Fun Smart Playlist
Playlist with Curse Words
In this playlist, I filter songs containing ‘fuck’, ’shit’, ‘bitch’ or any curse word. 96% of results are rap songs.
Playlists based on Tours
Your favorite artist is having a tour, including some amazing bands or artist with them, this playlist, will get you ready once they hit a town near you. The playlist above is based on Kanye West’s Glow In The Dark Tour. When your playlist have multiple artists, or multiple genres, make sure that the Match is any.
By Mood
For this Smart Playlist you will need Moody. Based on the mood and pace of the song, you select one of the grids from Moody. It will insert a tag into the Comments field of the song, something like MoodyC4. I recommend getting familiar with this app, if you really want to go crazy and arranging songs by mood.
By BPM
This will be perfect if you DJ. You will need to gather the BPM from your audio files first.
This is just a few, but get creative, play with all the options that provides, combine them, have fun with them.
