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OrangeCuse44

macrumors 65832
Original poster
Oct 25, 2006
1,504
2
On the new iTunes web page, Apple states "your smart playlists got even smarter." I'm at work so I cannot check, but can anyone verify what was been added to customizing smart playlists?
 

Aeryn

macrumors member
Jul 24, 2009
83
77
It looks likes you can drill down more in the customization statements...but I'll have to wait for the tutorial because it's not intuitive to me. :eek:

The ellipses indent the statements...and I can't figure out what the indentation means.

EDIT: Okay, it made more sense on a new playlist rather than editing a previous one. Basically, you can include "and/or" statements in your customizations. For example, I had a set of smart playlists to capture my podcasts but couldn't filter out the already played tracks because you couldn't mix "any" and "all" so I used one set of smart playlists as the "scratch" set and created another set of smart playlists to look for unplayed tracks in the first set. Now I can do all that "any" and "all" mixing in one playlist.

And if you followed that explanation you get a gold star. :D
 

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pooryou

macrumors 65816
Sep 28, 2007
1,329
63
NorCal
Wow, they finally updated Smart Playlists?!

This is cool, should hopefully be a LOT more efficient than needing to build playlists off other playlists.
 

ckd

macrumors member
Mar 12, 2009
65
0
The ellipses indent the statements...and I can't figure out what the indentation means.
Looks like you can now nest "any" (Boolean OR) and "all" (Boolean AND) conditions without having to use multiple smart playlists.

For example you could have the top level be "match any", with conditions as follows:
genre is Rock
match all of: genre is Pop, length is more than 4:00
artist is Bob Dylan

That would give you all your rock, all your Dylan, and all your pop songs that are more than 4 minutes long.
 

OrangeCuse44

macrumors 65832
Original poster
Oct 25, 2006
1,504
2
This is fantastic. I know I'm in the minority here, but this has been my top request for a few versions as I frequent smart playlists. Good news, indeed.

Oh, and thanks for the wondefully confusing explanation! :p
 

Aeryn

macrumors member
Jul 24, 2009
83
77
Well, using "Boolean" and "nested statements" in the explanation just seemed way too easy. ;)

I'm in the minority with you. I never really thought of it as a request though, I just figured my demands were so far out that I'd have to live with the hack.

I haven't figured out how to easily upgrade my existing playlists though, it doesn't look like you can demote current statements to nested with a simple click.
 

OrangeCuse44

macrumors 65832
Original poster
Oct 25, 2006
1,504
2
I'm in the minority with you. I never really thought of it as a request though, I just figured my demands were so far out that I'd have to live with the hack.

I gave up all hope after the last major iTunes release. This is great, can't wait to mess around with it.
 

reubs

macrumors 68000
Jun 22, 2006
1,866
175
I'm interested to see how some folks use this. It's kind of overwhelming to me to see all of the options, so I'd like to see how others utilize. I don't have a huge collection, and I don't use Smart Playlists often, but this seems to be a powerful tool. As far as automated playlists and iTunes, I've used Genius more than I've ever used Smart Playlists.
 

jaw04005

macrumors 601
Aug 19, 2003
4,513
401
AR
Maybe I’m missing something, but can we still not access the “blue dot” or “played/some played/not played” within our smart playlists?

I would like to create a “Not played podcasts” playlist. However, there are podcasts I never listen to all the way through. So, their play count is still 0 and I don’t want them in my “Not played podcasts” smart playlist.

How do I achieve this? I can’t use play count as a differentiator.
 

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