Back in the day when Apple first introduced smart playlists into iTunes I thought they were a good idea, but not terribly useful in practice. I have a music collection approaching 10,000 songs and it’s a breeze for me to find anything I want. But as time goes by i’m finding it difficult to find songs that I want to listen to, my collection has just grown too big. I have playlists that were built slowly by searching for a song, dragging it to the playlist and repeating the process. This is painful, time consuming and has ultimately left me with a jumbled mess of playlists. Most of these now have been relegated to the place in the sky where deleted playlists go. Surely there is a better way.

Create a smart playlist in iTunes. Choose these settings:

You should now have a playlist that will give you good songs to listen to. The rating rule will give you good songs, and the last played not in the last 2 weeks will ensure you don’t listen to the same thing over and over. You need to have at least a few songs rated for this to work properly and hopefully they aren’t all rated at five stars. The above playlist is a generic example but you may also want to add rules that exclude certain artists. For example in mine I don’t include The Eagles or Linkin Park. Those are bands I like but don’t want to listen to all the time so rather than re-rating the songs, just exclude the artist from the playlist.

My custom playlist has been great for me, while letting it loop on random I’ve found some old bands I haven’t listened to in a while like Daft Punk, Jack Johnson and some old Blink-182 songs. The cool thing is as soon as you listen to a song it disappears from the playlist, so you can be sure you won’t get bored and new songs will appear every day.

Another useful smart playlist is “recently played”. If you want to know what songs you have just listened to (because it disappeared after you played it) then do this:

Now you can just check your ‘Recently Played’ playlist to find what that catchy tune was!

Hopefully you learned something from this article. If you have anything to add, please feel free to leave it in the comments below.