One of iTunes’ most powerful features is Smart Playlists—here’s how to deploy them to enjoy all of your music, not just your current faves.iTunes, iPods, and iPhones make it easy to carry tons of music around at all times. But that just means it’s even easier to get stuck in a rut listening to your current ear candy of choice. So set up some Smart Playlists to cherry-pick your favorite jams and forgotten gems, and you’ll quickly start enjoying every part of your ever-expanding collection in ways you hadn’t imagined. To get started, launch iTunes and go to File > New Smart Playlist, then set up your playlist as indicated in the screenshots below.
This playlist is great for finding tracks that you love but haven’t heard in a while. Tweak the Last Played and Last Skipped rules depending on how much music you consume on a daily basis -- heavy listeners might want to go back a month or more.
Now that the holidays are over, you don’t want “Christmas with the Brady Bunch” popping up when you’re working out. Banish even poorly categorized holiday tunes with this Grinch of a Smart Playlist. Fans of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” or Madonna’s “Holiday” can add some extra criteria to keep those tracks in play.
Genres are too constricting, and rating stars are too fiddly. So use the Comments field to tag your music however you like, and then create a Smart Playlist to bring up tracks that are perfect for whatever mood you’re in right now. You can add as many tags as you like, giving you unlimited ways to group your tunes.
If you have a particularly favorite era of music, like the totally rad 1980s, use a Smart Playlist to reconnect with your old favorites. Cull tracks based on a range of dates in the Year field. And if you have a particularly large collection, you can further refine your list using Ratings (if you use them) or Play Count to grab just the cream off the top.
gryphster
February 14, 2011 at 7:22pm
Huh?
"So the easiest solution is to purchase an AirPort Extreme and a NAS (short for “network attached storage”) drive, keep your library on the NAS, and use MediaRover to make sure all your computers use that one central library."
Easy as pie.
JohnnyMan
February 10, 2011 at 10:25am
Thank you for these types of articles. I am a relatively new user (2 years) and I can't get enough of these "How to" types of articles.
Thanks again.
Dp aj4
January 26, 2011 at 4:56pm
After doing the 4th tip under "terminal tricks" to create a stack for recent items, my iMac won't respond. HELP!!! can anyone help me to recover. Did anyone actually test these "tricks".
Guess I should know that executing a command with'kill' in it wouldn't be a good thing
jerryfx
January 19, 2011 at 1:28pm
I have had a problem with the data on my Mac not synchronizing with the MobileMe site. Repeated resets did not seem to help. However, I have found that restoring my iCal data from the saved archive before resetting/restoring to MobileMe seems to do the trick. Very strange, but it seems to work.
Blskny
January 19, 2011 at 9:32am
Keep trying to put the spacers in the doc. Love the organization tool but it is not working. Here is the message I keep getting:
2011-01-19 11:24:13.499 defaults[43792:903] Could not parse: {"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}defaults. Try single-quoting it.
I changed the double quotes to single quotes but it is still not working. Would really appreciate clarification.
THANKS!!!
veri
January 15, 2011 at 3:37am
You forgot an easy fix for most software issues:
Delete (or better yet; rename) the applications settings folder from your library. This forces the application to rebuild it, and it usually fixes any issues with corrupted or obsolete settings.
In most cases, the application will start to behave properly again.
