Comments on: iTunes: Smart Playlists need to support search on playlist name

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:53:43 +0000

Thanks, but now that I know about the folder as playlist trick, I no longer need a workaround :).

As for the upbeat/downbeat combination, it’s definitely something that I just do “manually” myself by listening to the songs and using my pre-existing knowledge of the songs. I have thousands of tracks to choose from, so I am far from having run out of options still.

By: Arden

Arden — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:23:24 +0000

You could also make a “dumb” playlist for the songs you have in your “5-min songs” playlist. One of the criteria for 5-min would be songs that are not in this “dumb” playlist. Then, when you want to mix things up, you simply drag “5-min songs” on top of the “dumb” playlist (adding all its songs) and delete all the songs in “5-min songs,” thereby rolling 6 new songs.

The only thing I can see you potentially having trouble with is getting 5 upbeat and 1 downbeat songs into the playlist. The order is no problem because you can manually reorder them, but how did you manage to get that ratio of songs in?

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:20:45 +0000

The static playlists “5-min Songs #” are already all in a folder, and I can indeed view the combined contents of the folder by selecting the folder itself in the source list, but these combined contents are not accessible via a smart playlist rule, so it’s of limited use. I would still be forced to check the contents of this folder each time I want to select a track, to make sure that I haven’t used it yet.

HOLD ON! Another reader has just sent me an e-mail telling me that folder names are actually listed as playlist names in smart playlist rules. And indeed they are! This solves everything! All I need is to use the rule “Playlist is ‘name of folder’ ” and I am done. Great! Thanks a lot to Grant…

Thanks for the tip about Tangerine. I will give it a look.

By: ssp

ssp — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 21:56:40 +0000

While not 100% what you are looking or, either of these may be helpful for your problem:

• putting all those ’5 minutes #’ playlists into a folder and then matching for being in that superfolder
• trying out that new Tangerine! application which is specifically designed to make workout playlists