iTunes and You

This chapter is from the book

iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide, The, 5th Edition

Learn More Buy

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book 

iPod and iTunes Pocket Guide, The, 5th Edition

Learn More Buy

Creating and Configuring a Playlist

Before you put any media files (music or video) on your iPod, organize them in iTunes. Doing so will make it far easier to find the media you want, both on your computer and on your iPod. The best way to organize that material is through playlists.

A playlist is simply a set of tracks and/or videos that you believe should be grouped in a list. The organizing principle is completely up to you. You can organize songs by artist, by mood, by style, by song length ... heck, if you like, you can have iTunes automatically gather all your 1950s polka tunes with the letter z in their titles. Similarly, you can organize your videos by criteria including director, actor, and TV-series title. You can mix videos and music tracks within playlists as well, combining, say, music videos and music tracks by the same artist. As far as playlists are concerned, you're the boss.

The following sections look at ways to create playlists.

Standard playlists

Standard playlists are those that you make by hand, selecting each of the media files you want grouped. To create a standard playlist in iTunes, follow these steps:

1. Click the large plus (+) icon in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window, or choose File > New Playlist (Command-N on the Mac, Ctrl+N in Windows).
2. In the highlighted field that appears next to that new playlist in the Source list, type a name for your new playlist.
3. Click an appropriate entry in the Source list—Music, Movies, TV Shows, or Podcasts—and select the tracks or videos you want to place in the playlist you created.
4. Drag the selected tracks or videos to the new playlist's icon.

5. Arrange the order of the tracks or videos in your new playlist.

   To do this, click the Number column in the main window, and drag tracks up and down in the list. When the iPod is synchronized with iTunes, this order is how the songs will appear in the playlist on your iPod.

   If the songs in your playlist come from the same album, and you want the songs in the playlist to appear in the same order as they do on the original album, click the Album heading.

Playlist from selection

You can also create a new playlist from selected items by following these steps:

1. Command-click (Mac) or Ctrl+click (Windows) songs or videos to select the files you'd like to appear in the new playlist.

2. Choose File > New Playlist from Selection (Command-Shift-N on a Mac, Ctrl+Shift+N on a Windows PC).

   A new playlist containing the selected items will appear under the Playlists heading in the iTunes Source list. If all selected tracks are from the same album, the list will bear the name of the artist and album. If the tracks are from different albums by the same artist, the playlist will be named after the artist. If you've mixed tracks from different artists or combined music with videos, the new playlist will display the name untitled playlist.

3. To name (or rename) the playlist, type in the highlighted field.

Smart Playlists

Smart Playlists are slightly different beasts. They include tracks that meet certain conditions you've defined—for example, Fountains of Wayne tracks encoded in AAC format that are shorter than 4 minutes. Here's how to work the magic of a basic Smart Playlist:

1. In iTunes, choose File > New Smart Playlist (Command-Option-N on the Mac, Ctrl+Alt+N in Windows).

   You can also hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Shift key on a Windows PC and then click the gear icon that replaces the plus icon at the bottom of the iTunes window.

2. Choose your criteria.

   You'll spy a pop-up menu that allows you to select items by various criteria—including artist, composer, genre, podcast, bit rate, comment, date added, and last played—followed by a Contains field. To choose all songs by Elvis Presley and Elvis Costello, for example, you'd choose Artist from the pop-up menu and then enter Elvis in the Contains field (Figure 4.5).

   

   Figure 4.5 The inner workings of a simple Smart Playlist.

   You can limit the selections that appear in the playlist by minutes, hours, megabytes, gigabytes, or number of songs. You may want the playlist to contain no more than 2 GB worth of songs and videos, for example.

   You'll also see a Live Updating option. When it's switched on, this option ensures that if you add to iTunes any songs or videos that meet the criteria you've set, those files will be added to the playlist. If you add a new Elvis Costello album to iTunes, for example, iTunes updates your Elvis Smart Playlist automatically.

3. Click OK.

   A new playlist that contains your smart selections appears in iTunes' Source list.

You don't have to settle for a single criterion. By clicking the plus icon next to a criterion field, you can add other conditions. You could create a playlist containing, say, only songs you've never listened to by punk artists whose names contain the letter J.

Conditional Smart Playlists

With iTunes 9, you can create more powerful Smart Playlists than you could before, thanks to a new feature called nested conditional rules. With nested conditional rules, you have sets and subsets of rules that can act on previous rules. Perhaps you want a Smart Playlist that picks out music and music-video files that are less than 4 minutes long, that were recorded before 1990, and that fall within the Pop and Soul genres. It would be difficult to get this level of detail in a traditional Smart Playlist—but not quite so difficult in a Smart Playlist that contains nested conditional rules. Figure 4.6 shows settings for an example conditional Smart Playlist.

Figure 4.6 A conditional Smart Playlist.

A good way to see how to use nested conditional rules is to duplicate the settings in Figure 4.6. (Later, you can follow this same procedure but choose different settings for your own conditional Smart Playlists.) Follow these steps:

1. In iTunes, choose File > New Smart Playlist (Command-Option-N on the Mac, Ctrl-Alt-N in Windows).
2. In the resulting Smart Playlist window, click the ellipsis (...) button to expand the window.

3. Click the minus (-) button to remove the top condition, which reads (above the pop-up menu) Artist Contains.

   For nesting to work properly, you need to start with a conditional, and that first default entry prevents you from doing that.

4. Click the plus (+) button next to Artist Contains to create another condition. Configure the two conditions to read Media Kind is Music and Media Kind is Music Video.

5. In the All of the Following Rules section above these two conditions, choose Any from the pop-up menu so that it reads Any of the Following Rules.

   This setting ensures that the playlist will look for both music and music-video files.

6. Click the ellipsis button at the top of the window to add another condition group.

   If you click the ellipsis button next to one of the Media Kind entries, you'll set a condition that affects only that Media Kind rule. You want something that affects all chosen files.

7. In the new condition group, create a rule that reads Time is Less Than 4:00.

   That takes care of the time limit.

8. Click the top ellipsis button again, and create a rule that reads Year is Less Than 1990.

   So much for the date.

9. Click the top ellipsis button just one more time to create one last group.
10. In this group, add two genre conditions that read Genre is Pop and Genre is Soul.

11. Above these Genre entries, change All of the Following Rules to Any of the Following Rules.

    Changing All to Any instructs the playlist to look for any tracks that meet the previous conditions and that are tagged with any of these two genres.

Folders for playlists

You can also file playlists in folders. By invoking the File > New Playlist Folder command, you can lump a bunch of playlists into a single folder. Folders are a great way to keep your playlists separate from your spouse's or to gather groups of similar playlists (All My Jazz Playlists, for example).

At one time, folders didn't translate to the iPod; however, the 3G–5G iPod nanos and the iPod classics do offer nested playlist hierarchies.

Genius playlists and mixes

If you're the kind of reader who starts at the beginning of a book and plows through to the end, you're already aware (from Chapter 2) of the Genius feature on the iPod. iTunes 9 can also create Genius playlists, as well as Genius Mixes (which I also touch on in Chapter 2). As a reminder, Genius playlists are collections of music that iTunes believes to be related to other music in your library, and Genius Mixes are 250-track playlists chosen by genre from your iTunes Library. In the following sections, I look at the ins and outs of each feature.

Genius playlists

To create Genius playlists with iTunes, follow these steps:

1. Switch on the Genius feature.

   When you install iTunes, you're offered the choice to turn Genius on. Doing so requires an iTunes account. If you don't have one, no worries; when you start the Genius process, you'll find an option for signing up for an account. If you neglected to turn on Genius, you can do so by choosing Store > Turn on Genius. If you're connected to the Internet, iTunes will ask you to sign into your iTunes account.

2. Wait while iTunes configures Genius.

   iTunes gathers information about your music library—specifically, the songs it contains—and sends that information to Apple's servers anonymously. That information is compared with similar data from other users and placed in a database. A database file that contains the relationship data is sent back to your computer.

3. Create a Genius playlist.

   Select a track in your iTunes Library, and click the Genius button in the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window. iTunes will create a new playlist of 25 songs (by default) that should go well with the track you selected. You can ask Genius to create a longer version of this playlist by making a larger choice from the Limit To pop-up menu at the bottom of the window; your choices are 25, 50, 75, and 100 songs. You can also click Refresh to ask Genius to try again.

4. Save the playlist.

   When you click the Save Playlist button at the top of the window, iTunes creates a playlist named after your source track—A Common Disaster, for example. You can return to any Genius playlist you've created and change the Limit To settings as well as refresh the playlist.

5. Expose the Genius sidebar.

   Click the Sidebar icon in the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window to display the Genius sidebar, which is designed to recommend related music from the iTunes Store (Figure 4.7).

   

   Figure 4.7 The Genius sidebar.

   At the top of the sidebar, you'll find entries that include the name of the artist, Also by This Artist (which includes Top Albums and Top Songs entries), and Genius Recommendations. You might also see an iTunes Essentials entry. A small arrow icon next to an entry indicates a trip to the iTunes Store. Click an artist's name, for example, and you'll be taken to the Store page devoted to that artist. Click the arrow icon next to Genius Recommendations, and iTunes creates a list of those recommendations. (Though this list looks like a playlist, you can't save it as such.)

   Next to the song selections, you'll see both a Preview button (denoted by a small Play icon) and a Buy button. To audition 30 seconds of a track, just click the Preview button. If you like what you've heard and would like to own the track, click Buy. In the resulting dialog box, you'll be prompted for your Apple ID and password. Enter that info and click the Buy button, and the track downloads to your computer.

Genius Mixes

Genius Mixes are new in iTunes 9 and, as I write this chapter, supported only by the 5G iPod nano, 2G iPod touch, and iPhone. Genius Mixes are broader tools than Genius playlists in that they're created based on genres—Rock, Jazz, and Classical, for example.

The "genius" of Genius Mixes is that their content is still related, much as is content for a Genius playlist. Unless you have a small music library, it's unlikely that iTunes will produce a Genius Mix including AC/DC, Donovan, Sheryl Crow, and Ry Cooder, even though all four artists may have had a Rock genre tag applied to them. Instead, you may have one Rock Genius mix that includes '60s artists such as Janis Joplin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and The Small Faces. Another Genius Mix could include modern pop artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, The Finn Brothers, The Apples in Stereo, and Feist. So thanks to the enormous database of related music first created when the Genius feature was introduced with iTunes 8, iTunes has the power to create these large mixes that make sense.

Creating them is really easy:

1. Launch iTunes 9 or later.
2. Click the Genius Mixes entry located under the Genius heading in iTunes' Source list.
3. There is no step 3.

iTunes will create up to 12 Genius Mixes. Each Genius Mix is represented by an album cover that, in turn, features four album covers taken from the music in that Genius Mix (Figure 4.8). An example Rock Genius Mix, then, could include album artwork from Coldplay, Radiohead, Oasis, and John Mayer albums.

Figure 4.8 Genius Mixes.

Unlike Genius playlists, Genius Mixes can't be edited. In fact, you can't even see the contents of one of these mixes. What iTunes provides is exactly what you get. To play one, just click its icon, and the first track in the mix plays. To skip to the next track, click the Next button in iTunes' play controls (located in the top-left corner of the iTunes window) or press your keyboard's right-arrow key.

As I said, Genius Mixes can be synced only to the 5G iPod nano, the iPod touch, and the iPhone (iPod touch and iPhone 3.1 software required). To sync Genius Mixes, do this:

1. Select your compatible device in iTunes' Source list.
2. Click the Music tab.
3. Enable the Sync Music option.
4. Enable the Selected Playlists, Artists, and Genres option.
5. In the Playlists column, look for the Genius Mixes entry; then select all of these mixes (by checking the Genius Mixes check box) or specific mixes (Figure 4.9).
   

   Figure 4.9 Selecting Genius Mixes to sync to a 5G iPod nano.

6. Sync the device.

As I point out in Chapter 2, on the 5G iPod nano, you find the Genius Mixes command in the Music screen. Select it, and the first Genius Mix appears on the iPod's screen—again, represented by four album covers. To play the Genius Mix, click the Play/Pause button. To skip to the next song in the mix, click the Next button. To skip back a track, click the Previous button twice (clicking once takes you to the beginning of the currently playing track).