When it comes to media libraries, iTunes is undoubtedly one of the most popular applications on both Windows and Mac OS X with hundreds of millions of copies in the wild. I tend to be very obsessive compulsive with my iTunes library. Everything must have its place and be organized perfectly. Album art on every album - and if the album art can’t be found on the Internet, I scan it in manually. 

One of the advanced iTunes features that I didn’t begin using until recently are Smart Playlists. While I occasionally played with the default “Top Rated” and “Most Played” playlists, I didn’t really use the feature to the max. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve begun to discover the true power of Smart Playlists in iTunes, and how they can help you get the most out of your music.

All songs:

One of my pet peeves with iTunes is the way it handles music. The so-called “Music” tab is mixed with PDF documents and Music Videos. When you create a smart playlist, it includes songs, podcasts, movies, and anything else in iTunes. The best way to get around this is to create an “All Songs” playlist. This will automatically exclude podcasts, movies, PDF documents, and other non-music files. This playlist will become the foundation for other music-only smart playlists.

Forgotten Lovers:

This is one of my favourite new playlists, and one that I find myself spending a lot of time in. When you have a large music collection it’s easy to lose track of one of your favourite songs and forget about them. “Forgotten Lovers” scans through your iTunes library for songs that are three to five stars that haven’t been listened to for over 2 weeks. As you can see, to avoid this playlist from including podcasts and movies, we only have it gathering songs from our filtered “All songs” playlist.

Rate Me:

Having thousands of songs in my iTunes library makes it hard to go through and rate every single one. However, I try to rate as many as I can. This playlist makes it easy to do so. It gathers all the unrated songs in your library that have been played more than three times, and skipped less than three times. Usually this means that I like the song, but haven’t yet rated it.

Once you have the All Songs playlist set up, iTunes makes it simple to create powerful playlists that you can use on a daily basis. The sheer amount of metadata that iTunes stores is mind-boggling, down to the precise number of times a song has been skipped. Smart playlists in iTunes help people with large music collections rediscover their music all over again.