How to create smart playlists in iTunes

If you’ve got a large and ever-growing music collection, it can be hard to find and ‘dust off’ any songs that you’ve got but haven’t played for a while.  The solution is smart playlists.

For the time being, I just have one static playlist for the gym called ‘Gym’ funnily enough.  It only has the songs I want to be in there.  Nothing more, nothing less.  But this is no good if you want a playlist for your top rated songs (let’s say four or five stars) and you have to keep adding them manually.  You would expect that when you rate a particular song four or five stars, it would get automatically added to the playlist.  This is exactly what smart playlists do.

I highly recommend the following article on iLounge: How to create smart playlists in iTunes.  You don’t have to copy the playlists mentioned there exactly but rather, tweak them to your own liking!

As examples, here are my smart playlists and the parameters:

Infrequently Played

• Match all of the following rules
• Last played is not in the last 2 weeks
• Media kind is music
• Rating is greater than two stars
• Limit to 100 items selected by least recently played

Music Videos

• Match the following rule
• Media kind is music video

My Top Rated

• Match all of the following rules
• Rating is greater than three stars
• Media kind is music
• Limit to 100 items by least recently played

Recently Added

• Match all of the following rules
• Date added is in the last 2 weeks
• Media kind is not Podcast
• Media kind is not Movie
• Media kind is not TV Show

Recently Played

• Match all of the following rules
• Last played is in the last 2 weeks
• Media kind is not podcast

Top 25 Most Played

• Match all of the following rules
• Media kind is not podcast
• Play count is greater than 0
• Limit to 25 items selected by most often played

There you have it.  Obviously, customise to your own particular taste and preferences.  Have fun!