How to Create Smart Playlists in iTunes

Video Transcript

"DREW NOAH: So, I showed you how to create regular playlists and folders and that's pretty straight forward, not that complicated. Now, I'm going to show you how to make a smart playlist which is maybe even if you already use iTunes, it's something maybe you haven't thought about making yourself because it's a little bit complicated but not really. And basically, what it is, is you set some parameters for a playlist and throughout, it will automatically add any songs that fit those parameters and whenever you add new music that fits the parameters, either by importing, buying from the iTunes store, it will be added to that playlist. So, let me just show you how it works. You go to 'File', 'New Smart Playlist' and you get an old pop-up box. So, you just get to set up some rules and then the playlist will be populated by songs that fit those rules. So, you see that the rules that we can set, these are all the things that you see in iTunes. You see name, time, artists; these are all the possible things that you can see. Just for an example, I'll pick the 'Name' which is the song name and then you pick the parameter which is contains, does not contain, is, is not, starts with, ends with. So, it contains all type of words, in any song name that has that word, anywhere in the name will be there and the opposite for does not contain is--means, it is exactly that. So, if I type two words, it will be exactly those two words. Is not, just the opposite and then starts and ends with, pretty self-explanatory. But contains is probably the easiest one to demonstrate. Let's just see--make a smart playlist of every song that contains the word "love". And then your other options are to limit it to a certain amount items and when you do limit it, you select by random or you select by these parameters, Match only checked items and Live updating; this is when if I import a new CD that match these parameters, it would be added automatically. So, probably, you want to keep that checked because that's the coolest thing about smart playlist, it's the way they will automatically be updated. So, that's kinda cool. You see all these songs I have songs that have the word "love" on the title. But more practical smart playlists, this, the recently added is one that automatically comes with--when you start iTunes. And that's pretty handy especially when you have a big library to just see what you've put in recently. And what I've done, I have these folders for genres and what I've done is I've created playlists--that's how you edit a smart playlist right there if you just want to right click, 'Edit Smart Playlist'. So, I got these regular playlists that are genre so every time I import a new CD, I'll just drag them into that, into this genre. And then I created this recent Indie playlist that's going to take anything in that playlist. The playlist is iPod Indie and then I created another rule by clicking on the + button and the 'Date Added' is in the last two weeks. So, that way I can see anything that I've added to my genre playlist that is new in the last two weeks or in my smart playlist. So, that just gives you an idea of what you can do with a smart playlist. And I'm just going to go back in and show you a couple more things. Remember to create a new rule or multiple rules, you just click this + button, you can subtract or take one off. And the more rules you create, the more narrow scope your playlist can be if that makes sense. 'Cause you have two parameters that a song has to meet just to be in your playlist. So, that is you smart playlist."