How To Create iTunes Smart Playlists + My iTunes Top 25

July 28th, 2008 | Category: Smart Playlists, iTunes

iTunes is a great computer program. Not only is it cool having 7,000 songs at my fingertips, but it tracks every song I play down to the minute and stores how many times I have played each song. The top 25 songs I’ve played are put into a list. Maybe I am alone in this, but this list is a big deal to me. It is an unbiased, 100% correct analysis of your listening habits. Yes, you’ve played that Mandy Moore song 64 times in a week.

I’ve decided to reset my Top 25 Most Played once every month for the sake of this blog and your entertainment. For this post, I will show you my current most played list. It goes back about 6 or 7 months.

So here’s my iTunes Top 25 Most Played (as of July 2008) [click for larger]:

SMART PLAYLISTS AND WHY THEY KICK ASS

OK so there’s a hot blonde in your Physics class and you arrive 15 minutes early every day, but can’t think of what to talk to her about. So, like the pansy you are, you sit just close enough to smell her perfume, but not too close to incite an incidental conversation. Well, have I got the conversation piece for you: iTunes Smart Playlists. And hey, if she isn’t interested in this, then you know she’s boring and her favorite movie is most likely a two-way-tie between Varsity Blues and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.

We all know how to make a normal playlist in iTunes. You simply click the plus sign in the bottom left corner of the application, make your playlist, and there you have it. It stays like that until you manually add more songs.

Well, a smart playlist is an automatically updated playlist that functions via your manually entered commands. Want to do this with me? OK do this:

Open iTunes
Hold down Alt (or Option on Macs)
The plus sign to create a playlist has now turned into a circle similar to a socket, click that.

You now have opened the commands for a smart playlist.

For example, I have a smart playlist called “Most Played New Songs” … it’s an updated daily list of songs I’ve played the most over the last 6 months. Check it out: