iPOD & ITUNES for Dummies Portable Edition

Chapter 6

Organizing iTunes Content with Playlists

In This Chapter

• Creating a playlist of songs and albums
• Creating and editing smart playlists
• Creating a Genius playlist

The ability to play any set of songs in a specific order is one of the joys of using iTunes and iPods. A playlist is a list of the items that you want, organized in the sequence that you want to play them. For example, you can make a playlist of love songs from different albums for a romantic mood, or surf songs for a trip to the beach.

You can also organize playlists for different operations, such as copying to your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV or burning a CD. I create playlists that combine songs from different albums based on themes or similarities. For example, I have a jazz playlist for cruising around with my iPhone in the city at night, a classic rock playlist for jogging with my iPod shuffle in the morning and hanging out in coffee shops with my iPod nano, a playlist of short films mixed with TV shows for a long airplane ride with my iPod touch, and a playlist of rain songs to celebrate rainy days.

You can create as many playlists of songs, audio books, podcast episodes, and videos as you want, in any order that you like. The items and their files don't change, nor are they copied. iTunes simply creates a list of the item names with links to the actual items and their files.

You can even create a smart playlist, which automatically includes items in the playlist based on the criteria you set up and also ...