Learn how to keep your audio collection organized and easier to enjoy.

Harness the power of playlists to organize your music.

The more music you collect in iTunes, the more you’ll need a good way of organizing it all. Otherwise, you’ll be constantly skipping through songs to get to the tracks you want. The way to keep things in order is with playlists, of which there are two kinds: normal and smart.

Normal ones are simple lists of tracks that you manage manually, adding and removing things as you please. Smart playlists, on the other hand, are automatically filled with tracks that match with a criteria you set up. Using smart playlists has a great advantage: if you download new music by a certain artist or in a certain genre, you can automatically have it added to the relevant playlists -- there’s no need to drag the files across manually. But, 
before we show you how to set up and manage your playlists, here’s a very quick lesson on how playlists work in iTunes…

All your audio is stored in the library: these are your master copies. When you add tracks to playlists, you’re essentially adding aliases (a reference to the master copy), not the master itself. This is important to know: for example, when you delete a song from a playlist, or even an entire playlist, the songs will remain in your iTunes library. But delete a song from your library, and it will also disappear from any playlists.

The playlists you create needn’t remain in iTunes, either. You can sync them to your iPhone, iPod or iPad to take your carefully crafted selections on the go with you, or export them for safe keeping. To do this, click the playlist in the left bar, then choose File > Library > Export Playlist…, pick XML from the Format drop-down, then click Save. To import playlists, choose File > Library > Import Playlist.

Let’s now look at how to create and manage both types of playlist.

What You’ll Need:

>> iTunes, some music

1. Create playlist

The simplest way to create a normal playlist is to click Music at the top of iTunes’ left column, then click the + in the bottom-left corner of the window. A new ‘untitled playlist’ will appear under the Playlists section of the left column. Give it a name and press.

2. Add some tracks

Click Library again, and click a song you’d like to add to your new playlist. Hold down ç to select multiple tracks. You can then either drag-and-drop them onto the playlist in the left column, or right-click and pick your playlist from the Add to Playlist sub-menu.

3. Playlist from selection

You can also select a number of tracks from your library or any other playlist and directly create a new playlist with those tracks in it. Hold Command and click the tracks you want, then choose File > New Playlist from Selection. Type a name and press.

4. Your first smart playlist

Now to create an auto-updating playlist for tracks by a given artist. Click Library in the left column, go to File and choose New Smart Playlist…. Leave Match the following rule and Live updating ticked. Set the first drop-down to Artist and the second to Contains.

5. Try it out

Click the text field next to Contains and start to type your artist’s name. iTunes will auto-complete: continue typing if it doesn’t guess right first time. Click OK and your new list will appear at the top of the Playlists section in iTunes’ left column, with a cog icon.

6. More options

Now that you’ve created a simple smart playlist, let’s look at more sophisticated options. Go to File > New Smart Playlist… again. Notice how there’s a little + button at the right-hand end: this enables you to create multiple rules. Click it now for a new drop-down next to Match.

7. One or all?

This drop-down enables you to choose whether all or just one of the rules needs to apply, which gives you a lot of flexibility. Click the leftmost drop-down to see your options. We’ll create a list of all four- or five-star rated songs we haven’t listened to for over a month.

8. Your first rule

Set your first rule to: ‘Rating’ ‘is greater than’ then click the fourth star. Add another rule and set it to read "Last played" "not in the last" "1" "months". Click OK. This example shows the kinds of clever things you can do with Smart Playlists; try out some of your own!