Just like Rules and Smart Mailboxes in Mac OS X Mail, you can sort your iTunes media using rule-based criteria. There's a couple of ways to sort your iTunes music so that it's always playing at least five interesting playlists, so follow along as we whil your iTunes library into shape in just a few clicks.
Begin the smart playlist creation by clicking File > New Smart Playlist inside of iTunes. When you’re ready to create some rule-based magic, follow our top 5 list below.
Don’t like hearing “Jingle Bells” and other holiday tunes in the middle of June? This is one of the problems that comes with having your seasonal music mixed in with your regular, year-round tunes. Follow this smart playlist to round up your seasonal music for exclusion from other playlists.
Check the box labeled “Match any of the following rules.” Then, create the following rules:
Album contains “christmas”
Name contains “christmas”
Name contains “holiday”
Genre contains “holiday”
Genre contains “christmas”
Give your unplayed songs some love by creating a playlist just for them! With this smart playlist, you can see all of the songs in your library that haven’t been played in the past week.
Check the box labeled “Match all of the following rules.” Then create the following rules:
Playlist is Music
Plays is 0
Want to create your own, customized “Best of the Year” playlist? Then this is the rule for you!
Check the box labeled, “Match all of the following rules,” then put the following rules into place:
Plays is greater than 10
Date Modified is in the range 1/1/2012 to 12/31/2012
To get only the highest played songs during the year, you can increase the “plays” setting.
If you’ve bought any albums from iTunes, then you’ve no doubt had iTunes stow away album artwork in the form of PDFs. Other PDFs can also be stored in iTunes. With this smart playlist, you can see all of the PDFs stored within iTunes.
Check the box to “Match the following rule”.
Kind is “PDF document”.
Typically, when we skip a song in iTunes, it’s because we don’t like the track, and are too busy to navigate into iTunes and change the song rating.
Check the box to “Match all of the following rules,” and then specify the following rules:
Playlist is Music
Skips is less than 2
Cory Bohon is a freelance technology writer, indie Mac and iOS developer, and amateur photographer. Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.
Carsten Legaard
April 20, 2012 at 2:15pm
You've made it to a Christmas and Holiday playlist, congratulations! But your goal was to exclude those songs from other playlists. Doesn't that remain to be done??
DJR12
April 20, 2012 at 10:12am
I'm not sure #3 will work quite as intended, though I wish it would. Let's say my most played song in the past is "New York, New York." I used to love it. I've played it 300 times. But now I don't want to listen to it so much. So I haven't played it in the past year. If I set up the Smart Playlist as indicated here, the song won't be included. So far, so good.
But supposing I play it once today, its play count will be 301 (thus over 10) and it will have been modified this year. So it will be included in the playlist, even though I've only played it once this year.
What I'd love to be able to do is create a playlist of the songs I have played > x times in the past time period y. I'd be happy to be wrong but I don't think this playlist will achieve that.
