Six months ago I got an iPod, installed iTunes, added my music library. Several hours in, I thought iTunes sucked, and I looked everywhere for how to manage it through Media Player. 6 months later, iTunes is pretty decent, as long as you know a few things. Coming from IT, I tend to be very critical of programs, and am always looking for a little feature or setting that will make it just how I like it. In iTunes, this feature is Smart Playlists, and how to make them reference eachother. I will explain how to do this, but first we need to talk about a couple other areas.

There are a few other flaws with iTunes:

1. The ability to create smart playlists with nested crieterias. Say I want (Vocal Jazz OR Contemporary Jazz OR Jazz) AND Rating >=3 AND (Genre NOT Instrumental and Genre NOT Mom & Baby) and only Music Files, there isnt an easy way to do this, but I will show you how.

2. There is now way to queue up songs to play next. OK, for some people (Chingo) this could be a problem, I dont see it as one.

3. There is no way to monitor directories for files. If you just dump some files into your music folder, iTunes wont pick it up. The fix for this is a program called iTunes Library Updater and it can be found at http://n.ethz.ch/~altery/. Thanks Andre http://www.aboutandre.com

4. Bad management of ID3 tags, dosent write rating back to ID3 tag.

ID3 Tags:


iTunes does a lot of things great, but working with id3 tags can be complicated. If you make changes to the tags in iTunes, it will export them, with the exception of the rating. For myself, the rating field is crucial to my playlists. I don’t care if I lost my iTunes library, I will only lose my playlists. I care if I lose my ratings! Every song I listen to I attempt to rate on the 1-5 scale. 1 & 2 suck, 3 are ok, and 4 and 5 are great. I don’t ever want to hear 1&2’s again. My way of exporting the rating is to go to the Music Library and sort by rating. Using the Shift key, select from the top of all of the 1’s, to the bottom, right click, get info. Then check the comments checkbox, and type 1. Click OK, this will replace the comments in every mp3 file with 1. You have to repeat for 2,3,4 and 5, but it’s a great way to backup those ratings in the MP3 files.




Mass updating id3 tags in iTunes is problematic, so I use an external program to edit the ID3 tags (Tag & Rename). The problem comes when I change the tags on files that are already imported into iTunes. I tunes wont access the file to update the ip3 tags until you play it next, or do something with it. The trick is to go into the Music Library, select every song, right click, get info, and click OK. iTunes will then refresh the id3 tags on every file.


If you do use iTunes to change some id3 tags, most will export back to the file, so changing song name, artist, genre all work great, but are sometimes time consuming. The crucial factor to maintaining clean smart playlists is to make sure my list of music is clean. By clean, I mean accurate artist, album and genre. Genre is the most important. Looking at everyone elses list, there are 100+ genre’s. I am able to classify all of my music into less than 20. I don’t care what everyone else thinks, I look at a song/artist, and say “when I listen to this song, who do I want to hear before it, and after it”, then I assign the song the genre of the other artist. Originally I cheated, and assigned 3000 songs a ‘Top 40’ genre, which was useless. Since the range of songs spanned 30 years, the top 40 genre was a random assignment of oldies and newer stuff, a lot of good, a lot of crap. I am working on cleaning it up, but am only cleaning up the songs that I like. If it’s a 1 or a 2, then I don’t bother giving it a genre, its not worth it. But I do assign genre’s to the 3+ songs. We will cover an easy way to do this with smart playlists.

Smart Playlists: The Basics: Filtering by Genre and File Type:

The first time I created a smart playlist, I put in a rating of 3 to 5, and was satisfied. Then I relized that there were videos and audiobooks on my list. I only wanted music! I looked and looked for a filetype option, but there was none. What I finally found was a crieteria in the smart playlist titled Playlist. What??? A playlist can refer to another playlist? We can now use the power of this to create very structured lists of music.


In the playlist crieteria, the first options at the top refers to the libraries at the top of iTunes. So for every music playlist, I use the crieteria ‘Playlist is Music’. This keeps out all of the videos, audiobooks, etc.

Smart Playlists: The Key: Playlists referencing other playlists:

This is the key that I just recently figured out. Say I want to create a playlist for just jazz, well, there is no point in that because you can just select the Jazz genre on the ipod or in itunes. But I want a list of all Comtemporary Jazz, Vocal Jazz, and Jazz that is rated 4 or 5. Previously I created a playlist called ‘Playable Music’. I am going to create another playlist called ‘Good 4+’. This playlist will list all music that is in the Playable Music list, and is rated 4 or higher. I do this by creating the new smart playlist with 2 crieteria’s. The first is ‘Rating is greater than 3’ and ‘Playlist is Playable Music’. So now I have a list of good music, and can now filter it by Genre. I create another smart playlist called Jazz Genre, and add 3 crieteria ‘Genre contains Vocal Jazz’ or ‘Genre contains Jazz’ or ‘Genre contains Contemporary Jazz’. Now I have my list of good Jazz.