Subtitles of the Movie

Creating your own playlist from scratch is quite fun, but you can also have iTunes lend a hand by building what's known as a smart playlist. The smart playlist will live up here in this category and will have this kind of icon. So let's go ahead and make a smart playlist and before I do that, let me tell you what it really would do for you. A smart playlist will update automatically based on certain criteria. For example, the artist I currently have selected, her name is Jill Scott and she really is very, very talented. But let's say that I buy a new Jill Scott album and I start to rate some of the songs as favorites and I don't want to have to go all the way up to my top rated all the time because this contains my top rated for my entire library. What if I just want those top-rated songs to go into a Jill Scott playlist? That's the beauty of a smart playlist. It will add those songs based on what you dictate. So I'm going to go to the file menu and I'm going to choose new smart playlist. As you see here, a dialog box appears and this is going to allow you to enter what are known as rules or criteria that will base the smart playlist behavior. So what I'm going to do is choose from this list here a category such as genre, a description or an artist. So I'm going to leave it at artist and I can also change this parameter to contains, does not contain is and other. So I want to make sure that it says contains. Since I know her name is Jill Scott, I could also put is, but I'll call a head and put contains anyway. And I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this part here. What happens is when you're typing with your playlist, let me go ahead and click OK for now, let me go to the bottom here, make sure I have her name spelled right. When you're clicking a playlist or anything that you're entering criteria for, iTunes is going to help you out and start to add the text for you based on what it sees in your playlist. So as you can see, when I started entering J-i-l, iTunes looked for Jill Scott because this was the closest match. But I'm going here to see whether or not her name has one or two T's. So I'm going to go back to my playlist and I'm going to show you that even after you create it, you can right click or control click and choose edit smart playlist. The same dialog box appears and this time I can go ahead and put two T's. Now what I can do is I can click the plus button here to add more criteria. So I can now choose ratings. And then I can determine how many stars I'd like to have. So I can have is, is not, greater than and so on. So I'll go ahead and leave that off for now. Now I can choose to limit the amount of songs in the playlist. Because if you want to make a CD, you want to make sure that you have enough data that's going to fill the CD, but not go too far and most CDs don't have 25 songs. So I'm going to leave that off and I can also make sure that only checked items is matched. Now, this part right here is very important. Live updating. This is where the magic of the smart playlist comes in handy because as I change my ratings or as I buy a new album and it has the criteria Jill Scott in it, it will automatically find its way into this playlist. So for now, I'll click OK and we notice that we have no songs in here. Now what I'm going to do is right click again, edit smart playlist and let's go ahead and see what we have here that's making this playlist not work. It, it could be once again because of the ratings. So I'm going to delete that, click OK and now we have Jill Scott. Now, the reason I always do that, and if you watched any of my earlier iLife tutorials, you'll notice that I always delete the rating because I want to show you that one of your rules could be throwing your list off. So you have to just get familiar with what to add and what to delete and make sure that one of the rules isn't going to cancel out what you selected. So here is the Jill Scott smart playlist and as I rate songs and as I change ratings, the smart playlist will update for me. So let's go ahead to the Jill Scott category again and I'm going to rate a couple of songs. So I'm going to go ahead and choose Golden and I'll right click or control click on it. I'll make this one five stars and I'll make this one five stars and let's go ahead and do Family Reunion, five stars and now let's return to our smart playlist and first of all, let me spell here name correctly here. I'm going to edit the smart playlist and I will add a new rule for rating. And is five stars. Check it out. The playlist updates automatically based on my criteria. These are the three songs that I have with the five stars and they show up in my smart playlist. Likewise, if I go back to the Jill Scott category and I decide to change some of that, for example I'll make this rating two stars, my playlist should update to have two songs. And there we have it. So smart playlists are a playlist pretty much that will require you to do a little bit of coding using rules and criteria to make a playlist that will update automatically.