Making really smart playlists in iTunes
ByOne of the things that tech support gets, especially family tech support, are the calls on why doesn’t a program do a function a specific way. The phone call usually comes during dinner time, or when changing a diaper, giving a bath, etc. Your beloved family member, or friend, then goes on for 15 minutes trying to describe what/how they want a given program to respond. You then are on the hot seat to come up with the answer they want.
One program I frequently get calls on is iTunes and ways to make a better playlist. iTunes has two options to make playlists: drag/drop selected songs for a static playlist or use selected parameters to create a smart playlist. Smart playlists can make updates to the actual song list based on new conditions of a person’s music library. What typically is asked is something iTunes cannot do out of the box.
A smart list is a playlist in iTunes that takes parameters to generate what songs show up on the playlist. For example, if I wanted to see all songs by a given band with over 3 stars (all 4 or 5 star songs), the smart playlist would look like this:
This rule set will create a list of all songs of all Meat Loaf songs that are 4 or 5 stars (which of course means all of his songs). But what happens when you want to have multiple bands that span multiple parameters? Say you wanted to create a playlist of the greatest hair band songs. So you create a smart playlist like this:
Now this appears that you would get a really great playlist to play for your kids on the way to the next family reunion 2 hours away. But when you look at the actual song list, this is what you get:
Hmmm… not exactly what we expected. Also not exactly what your Dad, your sister, or your cousin’s brother in-law’s best friend expected either. The problem is in the syntax iTunes used to create the list. iTunes has a parameter clause to have either ANY of the conditions listed generate a playlist or ALL of the conditions listed to create a playlist.
In our example, we wanted all the the listed bands and only songs with 4 or 5 stars. But iTunes looked at the statements and thought a song’s artist had to contain all the names listed and be greater than 3 stars. Well none of our songs where sung by a band called: Poison-Slaughter-Dokken-L.A. Guns. Now if we did we all know it would be great song, right? What we need to do is trick iTunes into doing a compound smart playlist. We want a playlist that contains ANY of the listed bands and ALL songs must have a rating greater than 3 stars. We can’t mix the use of ANY and ALL selection statements in a single smart playlist, so what we’ll do is create two smart playlists.
The first playlist is a smart playlist of all the bands we want included and make sure the rules state we want ANY of the rules to be followed. The list would look like this (note the ‘ANY’ flag for the rules):
And this gives us a song list like this:
Now we’re halfway there. The next thing to do is create another new smart playlist and use the first one we created as a base template. For example:
And this generates a playlist like this:
We now have a playlist that includes all of our bands, but only includes songs with a rating of greater than 3 stars. Now the best thing about this is if you add/remove artists from the base smart playlist, the compound playlist will be updated as well.
Have questions, leave a comment and I’ll get back as soon as I can.
Edit: Now normally this type of request comes from Windows users, so doing this in Apple Script is typically not an option.
