Mr. D. is a gadget nerd, so I’ve found myself learning something every week about technologies that I already have and how I can better utilize some of the software I own. Last week he gave me a lesson on smart playlists in iTunes.  And then Lifehacker posted this post regarding smart playlists last week…so I threw together my own post on the topic.

If your iTunes library is well-organized (and you have really no excuse for it not to be), here are a couple of fun smart playlists you could create to make your music listening experience more enjoyable:

Include or exclude holiday music:

This would just be a shuffle of all of my music with the exclusion of the Christmas albums.

Stuff you like but haven’t listened to in a while:

This playlist will help you keep your randomized listening fresh.

Your greatest hits:

Create a greatest hits playlist for a specific year (or month, week, whatever) with these restrictions. You can open or narrow the range of the play count or the date added.

The bastard children:

We’ve all got songs on our iTunes that we have never listened to, right? Probably the result of some impulsive downloading iTunes purchasing. This playlist will help you listen to the songs that have a play count of 0…and as soon as you listen to them, they will be removed from the list.

Now that you’ve got so many playlists, you can organize them into folders:

Organize all of your playlists into folders. Then you can tell your Party Shuffle to pick music from one of these folders.

Album art screensaver:

If you’re working on a MAC, you’re probably already familiar with this pretty fun screen saver…but for PC users, you can download an album art screen saver at CrayonRoom.com. This saver tiles the screen with your album artwork and flips over CD covers at one second intervals. After you’ve put all of this work into organizing and completing your iTunes library, this is a good payoff. Here’s a screen shot of mine:

Trackback URI | Comments RSS