iTunes Smart Playlists - an underutilised time saver that reeks of Apple cleverness

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iTunes Smart Playlists - an underutilised time saver that reeks of Apple cleverness

Date Created: 22 Aug, 2006, 12:43 AM

I've been working with a chap for his fear of flying.

He has now successfully flown with his family to North America with stops in LA, NYC, Toronto and Las Vegas.

It wasn't the most carefree of holidays but he did it, and is ready for more.

But as is so often the case, his visiting me for a very circumscribed and brief number of sessions allowed him to "test out" the case of more psychological input, and so on his return he's consulted me for more personal as well as work-related matters.

In order to get him started on the work stuff (he is one of a number of partners in a practice) I suggested to him that he listen to some of consultant David Maister's podcasts which I have enjoyed listening to myself. He offers very down to earth, straight forward advice, well down the other end of the spectrum from the likes of Anthony Robbins and Co.

Maister has already made several series of podcasts on different themes.

Here's how iTunes has stored them in its Library, from most recent down to most ancient, below (Click all images to enlarge):

Unfortunately, my client doesn't possess as yet an mp3 player, although his early adolescent son has insisted on an iPod Nano as a birthday present, so he's somewhat familiar with the concept.

I was going to burn him a collection of audio CDs of Maister's podcasts, but as you would see from the list, having typed his name into iTunes' search field, the result produces 9.8 hours, requiring some 8 audio CDs. His car's stereo does not play mp3 CDs hence the audio CDs. If the stereo did play mp3 CDs, all the files would fit onto one CD with 300 MB left over for other podcasts of a business orientation.

In the end I decided to put them all onto one CD, and have him have his son help him burn whatever takes his fancy onto a CD-RW via iTunes, with the hope that one day he'll get himself an iPod and be done with it.

What I did for him surprised me, as jaded as I might be, and knowledgeable about iTunes. I'm writing here of iTunes less-utilised-than-it-should be feature of Smart Playlists.

I have created one for my own iPod, filling up fast with podcasts, a smart playlist I call Today, which represents my latest unlistened-to podcasts.

Here, below are the parameters I use:

I don't want my folk dance songs as part of this list, so a field is created for that, and I don't want podcasts I've actually listened to in this list either, hence the Play count is restricted to the range of 0 - 1. Note that a partial playing is recorded as 0 in iTunes.

Now when it comes to burning my client the Maister mp3s, I simply highlighted all of them and using the New Smart Playlist menu item, under File, I created a Maister Smart Play list. This allowed me to burn a CD with all of the files.

Note though that my preferred way of laying out iTunes songs is by Date Added, rather than alphabetical. This way my latest podcasts are always at the top, and it makes searching for a just added CD easier to locate, since it's at the very top of the iTunes' window.

It bothered me a little that my client's CD would have the Maister mp3s all over the place and he'd have to do some smart shuffling to listen to them in series order.

But lo and behold, when I burnt the CD, look at the file structure that resulted:

Notice what the Smart Playlist has done in burning itself to the CD. Moving from left of screen to right, we start with the media connected to my Powerbook, with my Tiger-named internal hard drive at top, two partitions of an external drive underneath, and the Maister-named CD under that.

To the right, is the folder containing all the files, named 01 David Maister. Moving to the right, we see the folders of the four podcast series so far recorded. When I highlight the first of the series, we see all fourteen mp3s I have downloaded, with their names and in chronological sequence.

This will make my client's task very easy when it comes to choosing to burn his own audio CDs as well as transfer the files to his iPod when he gets around to buying one for himself.

Now this might not seem much to you, but this was the first time I had needed to burn a Smart Playlist with a fairly complex mix, and I am very impressed with the ease with which iTunes helps the sorting out process.

Do yourself a favour and explore the Smart lists in all of Apple's apps, including Mail, the Finder and of course Spotlight. You might just save yourself a lot of time and effort, and surprise yourself at the thought that's gone into making these apps. so human-centric. And very Apple-like.