Lifehacker Australia

Building Smart Playlists In iTunes

I agree with Paul, in that the ability to chain a set of smart playlists is what makes them so great.

It is also sadly necessary if you want to have any nested logic. As smart playlists are either x AND y AND z or x OR y OR z. You cannot have X AND (Y OR Z) for example without having 2 smart playlists one which is (Y OR Z) and one which is in Playlist 1 AND X.

I don’t listen to music very much on my iPod, sticking with mostly podcasts and audiobooks. But in order to avoid listening to the same stuff, I have a set up which randomly select 20 songs with a heavy bias towards least played. The chain runs as follows:

Grab everything marked as music or in the manual playlist of music exceptions (i.e. songs downloaded as podcasts)
Grab my 1500 least recently played songs from that list
Grab the 300 random songs from that list
Grab the 100 least played songs in that list
Grab 20 songs randomly from that list.

And then I created a playlist folder and hid all of the playlists except the last one in it.