There are several ways that you can browse your music library in iTunes. Its grid and Cover Flow views are really great for picking out an album by its artwork, and you can play an individual track within seconds of it springing to mind, just by typing in the search bar. But sometimes you’ll want to kick back with a tailored selection of songs, or create a playlist for a party.
iTunes caters for this with several kinds of playlist. Each type is differently suited to the effort you want to invest and how finicky you happen to be feeling. The most basic type of playlist is nothing more than a place to gather songs from your whole library and play them in whatever order you choose.
There are several options for playlists.
With Smart Playlists, instead of handpicking every single song, you can specify criteria that inspects information attached to your songs, such as the artist and year of publication. iTunes also records dynamic information, such as the number of times you’ve played a song and how many times you’ve skipped it. iTunes does the hard graft of working out what matches your criteria, which it does in next to no time even if your library contains thousands of songs.
Several Smart Playlists are automatically provided to serve common purposes. One shows your highest-rated songs, while another shows recent additions to your library. You might want to create a list just to show dance music from the 1990s only, or songs by particular artists that you haven’t listened to in the last six months.
For a Genius Playlist, you only need to pick one track from your library to generate a selection of up to 100 songs. This requires the Genius feature to be on (Store > Turn On Genius), so that iTunes can periodically provide Apple with information about your songs and listening habits. Apple analyses information from many people around the world and cross-references with your library to pick out songs that it thinks are complementary to the single song you’ve chosen.
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