Let’s go over how to create and use playlists in iTunes. What are playlists you ask?
Playlists allow you to put together your favorite songs because it’s totally left up to you and your creativity to come up with your mixes and create the playlists in the order you want. It can be as many songs or as little amount of songs. You can put together a CD’s length and burn the playlist to a CD to put in the car or to give to your friends as Mix CDs. And when you have your iPhone, iPad or iPod connected you are able to sync all the playlists you’ve created in your iTunes and take along the music with you.
What Are Playlists?
Playlists are a collection of songs you select and add to to come up with your own favorite music mixes and you can make them really long like days and days of songs or very short 20 minute or 30 minute mixes. There are also selections within iTunes to create your own mixes automatically. So basically there are 2 types of playlists. Playlists do not actually contain any music in them as the music are basically pointers from your main iTunes library. So for example if you keep adding the songs into Playlists in iTunes that does not mean you are increasing the quantity of songs in your library and increasing the size (bytes) in your library and your computers hard drive. There will always be just one song with the physical mp3 in your iTunes > Computer Hard Drive and the rest are pointers. You can create hundred and hundreds of playlists with thousands of songs in each of them and your iTunes library size will stay the same. This is true if the music has been imported once. Unfortunately though if the music has been imported more than once and you have duplicate songs in iTunes then that’s a different story.
Standard Playlists
The playlists that you create on your own are basically just the standard playlists in iTunes as they are not the Smart Playlists which we will discuss below. You simply go to File > select New Playlist or command N in a Macintosh. See image below. Playlists can include as many songs as you want or as little amount of songs. They can contain the same song as many times as you want and pick and choose songs from different albums to make unique mixes. You can create a Jazz playlists or Indie playlist or create a Halloween themed songs playlist. The options are totally endless for creating your standard playlists. You can organize the songs in any order in the playlist or obviously in shuffle mode you can play them out of order.
Smart Playlists
Smart Playlists are called Smart Playlists because they are smart in which you don’t do the work of putting in the songs or tracks/music or video into the playlists it does it for you. Basically you are telling iTunes some basic information and it creates the playlists for you hence the name Smart because it does it for you. See images below. You can set the qualities such as year or genres or artists name and iTunes can get to work and quickly put together all music from the year you set and you’ll have all music from 2011. Or if you selected the characteristic electronic genre then you’ll have a nice hefty smart playlist of all the electronic songs or music you have in your iTunes. But you can control how much music goes into the Smart Playlist by checking the Limit To button and inputting the quantity. You can limit to a number of items, GB (gigabytes), MB (megabytes), hours or minutes. You can also select Live updating so that when you add new music to your main iTunes library they will automatically go into the Smart Playlist you have created that matches the attributes of it. When you change any of the music in your Smart Playlists in iTunes they will automatically be updated in your Smart Playlist as well.
So this is it, very simple to create basic Playlists and Smart Playlists. Once you get the hang of creating standard Playlists and Smart Playlists you will start playing around and make countless amounts of playlists with specific genres, artists, years, themes and more and sync to your iPhone, iPad or iPod or burn to CDs and give away as gifts. Playlists are fun to make and listen to in iTunes so start putting together some and enjoy your music even more!
All the playlists you create are stored on the left hand pane in alphabetical order for easy finding. Get into the habit of naming your playlists so you can easily find them at a later time as the more playlists you have that are unnamed the more difficult it will be to find them. See image below.
To fix your iTunes music/library click the link below:
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