Divide Smart Playlists into Albums

Can I somehow divide my Smart Playlists into albums? In iTunes on my computer a whole list comes up and yes, I can see the songs and albums, but on my iPod the playlist is just one long list of songs. Also, on the left side of iTunes if I want to play a certain album from say Jack Johnson, I've got to click on Jack Johnson before I can choose and play a specific album. Can I change this for Smart Playlists or do I have to convert everything into regular playlists?

I'm not clear on exactly what it is you're asking. You can set Smart Playlists for just about any criteria you want, so it would be easy to create a Smart Playlist to just select out all tracks by a particular artists.
If you want your iPod to show Artists or Albums so you don't have to search through a playlist, go into the iPod's Settings and set the Main Menu setting to show artists, albums or both.
You might find these sites helpful:
Installing iTunes and Getting Started
The New User's Guide for iTunes
iTunes 101
iPod 101
Regards.
Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer

Similar Messages

How do I create smart playlists for albums?

Hi,
I have a lot of albums and each album has their proper track listings meaning their proper track songs. I would like to create smart playlists for all my individual albums and for every individual album has a smart playlist with the proper track songs in the smart playlist for the album?
1.) Would doing this be possible?
2.) If so, how could I do this?
I forgot to mention a lot of my albums are multiple CDs, and a lot also include bonus CDs.
I don't know many tracks or CDs off the top of my head, but here are some album names as an example.
Road Trips vol. 1 no. 1
Road Trips vol. 1 no. 2
Road Trips vol. 1 no. 3
Road Trips vol. 1 no. 4
And the list goes on.
Thank you,

An album in iTunes is a collection of tracks that have the same Album name and the same Artist or Album Artist. Older iPods only work with Artist. The iPod has menu listtings for Artists & Albums built in, so again no need to duplicate with playlists. Any tracks you put on an iPod will, if correctly tagged, show up in their relevant album, and in the artist listing, the genre listing, any playlists that you include, etc.
For tips on organizing tracks in iTunes and on an iPod see the Grouping tracks into albums article. It needs some updated images, but the information is otherwise still relevant.
tt2

How can I make a smart playlist sort album by artist in order of size?

I'm trying to figure out a way to make a playlist of songs I generally like from a very large library to fit on my iPod. The songs aren't rated, and I don't want to have a totally random selection chosen by a smart playlist.
I thought a good way to pare down the list would be to sort album by artist, and then filter that list in order of the size that each artist takes up. It's more important to get rid of an artist that I don't like that also hogs a lot of space than one that maybe only has one track. I figure if I could scan down the list and exclude the worst offenders, it conceivably would make the task much simpler.

I'm trying to figure out a way to make a playlist of songs I generally like from a very large library to fit on my iPod. The songs aren't rated, and I don't want to have a totally random selection chosen by a smart playlist.
I usually make two playlists.
One playlist with favorites I do want on the iPod and another smart playlist to fill the rest of the iPod. Just limit the size to th esize of the iPod minus wthe size of my iPod selection playlist.

Creating New Smart Playlist by Album name - Missing From Drop Down List

I hope i'm not the only person with this issue but since upgrading to Windows Vista i have noticed a very annoying little bug with iTunes.
When trying to create a Smart Playlist there is no longer the option from the dropdown list to create a smartplaylist using the perameter 'Album'.
Any lists created when my PC was using XP still have the correct parameters in place but you cannot create any ne ones.
I have tried creating a new library without success. If i revert back to XP there is no problem.
Are Apple aware of this issue? If not, how do i contact them to report this bug?

... how do i contact them to report this bug?
Submit the form at the bottom of this page .

Smart Playlist--Last # Albums Added?

With my albums, I often like to listen to my recently purchased albums. I can't find a way to do that in iTunes. The only choices seem to tie "added" to a date. I want to keep my most recently puchased albums on the playlist without them falling off the list as time passes. Is there some way to do that which I am missing?
Thanks,
Tom

Played around with it a bit. Best I've come up with with is this. Smart list rules are:
Kind is xxx (whatever your import preference is set to
Kind is Protected AAC audio file (for iTunes store purchases)
Limit to XX (50, your choice) items selected by most recently added.
Make sure you're set to match ANY rule...not ALL rules.
Not perfect, perhaps, but as close as I've come thus far.
Diane Wordsmith

No more "Album" smart playlist?

I just got a new laptop with vista on it and i have been uploading some CD's and i just noticed that i cannot create a smart playlist by album. Same thing for when i download CD's from the itunes store
Is this happening on everybody or jsut mine?
whats a way around it, its nice not to have to manually drag and drop all the songs into a regular playlist

Well, I just tried one as an experiment. Selected "Album" is "Bones of All Men". Worked fine. Now, I am using a Mac but that shouldn't make a difference.
Exactly what criteria are you using for your smart playlist?

Album ratings and smart playlists

Hello all,
I was wondering if anyone can help me with the new iTunes functionality. I am trying to create a smart playlist with album ratings between 0 stars and 5 stars (basically all albums) and limit the playlist to 4 gb. I am trying to just create a random list of albums to sync to my iphone. Everytime I create a random list it always truncates the final album to exactly match 4gb so there is always an album that is incomplete.
Can anyone think of a different way to accomplish this so you can get ALL complete albums? There must be a way. Sorry if I sound picky about this but I am an album guy, not a random song guy.

Hi there. Try the following:
iTunes -> Preferences... -> Playback -> Shuffle: Albums
Now take your smart playlist you created, and set the 4GB limiter selected by "random" instead of "album". Because we forced shuffling to be by album only, this "random" will select entire albums, randomly. I just figured this out a few minutes ago and it seems to work great.
If you want all albums, you can probably omit the album rating rule (you might need to set Kind to "MPEG audio file" or something to skip podcasts, etc.)
To refresh your list, select and delete all tracks in the playlist, or use the Reshuffle Smart Playlists script available at dougscripts.com/itunes. Or you could add a criterion saying that Last Played must be greater than a month, or so.

Random Albums Smart Playlist: Is it possible?

In addition to the other smart playlists I have live updated onto my iPod, I wanted to add a 7GB limited smart playlist which selects random albums. I have had a very hard time doing this. Is this even possible?????
My current rules state:
Date Added is after 10/31/05 (first day I had my music library)
Limit to 7 GB selected by album
This unfortunately pulls the albums in alphabetical order, so the 7GB limit essentially caps me at albums starting with "B."
Is there a away to pull a true random smart playlist of albums that I can either recreate or reset each time I would like my ipod to live update?????

no responses. see other question of same nature.

Smart Playlists with Implied Criteria

Discovered a cool feature in iTunes last night. The basic idea is that when you rate a track [1-5 stars], a "ghost" rating appears for the whole album that contains that track. You can then create a smart playlist which queries for that "implied criteria." So you can, for example, create a smart playlist that includes all music you have not yet heard AND that does not include any tracks that belong to any album that has another track that received a low rating.
Wrote a little blog post about this:
http://birdhouse.org/blog/2014/02/03/how-to-create-itunes-smart-playlists-with-i mplied-criteria/

So I went through technical support because I had this exactly some problem. Smart playlist shows up in iTunes on my iMAC, as well as via Apple TV (both via iCloud and Home Sharing options.) It also fully populates those smart playlists.
For my pre-existing Smart Playlists (that only have criteria for the GROUPING field) show up, have songs, but are quite a few songs short. I then created a brand new play list with brand new tracks... and its empty on iPhone 4S and iPAD2. Apple TV and IMAC are fine.
So technical support provided me with this response: For smart playlists to work on iOS devices, the songs must be downloaded to the device.
My feedback was this: So this is chicken and the egg. You create the playlist to easily locate and download those songs to your device, but you cant because they have to be on your device before they will show in the playlist.
I suppose the only work around is to create the smart playlist w/ your filters. THEN create a regular playlist and copy everything in the SMART Playlist into the regular playlist.
I have not used Apple products for very long... approaching 2 years. I moved everything to Apple. Computers, laptops, portable devices, etc... I have been VERY impressed. HOWEVER, this makes the point of Smart Playlists completely manual when it comes to your iOS device.
I will for sure be launching a compliant to www.apple.com/feedback.

Smart Playlist is not syncing to iPod after upgrade to iTunes 9

Since upgrading to iTunes 9, one of my smart playlists is no longer syncing to my iPod, however, it syncs fine with my iPhone.
The conditions for the playlist are:
Media kind is podcast
PlayCount is 0
Any ideas why it's not syncing?

Quick fix: Make a regular playlist. Drag the contents of the smart playlist into it. Sync the new playlist.
WIthout seeing the rules for your smart list it is hard to guess what the problem is, but you may get better results if you break it down into more sublists gathered together in a playlist folder.
tt2

I have smart playlists combined in a folder that I use to make playlists to fit on devices. Lately the folder isn't updating with the playlists inside it, so the folder shows songs that aren't in any of its playlists. Can anyone help?

I'm using the latest iTunes on Windows 8. Since upgrading to iTunes 12 my old system of smart playlists within folders have not worked properly. I used to have a folder containing three folders with smart playlists in them, but I had to abandon this and copy all the smart playlists into one folder, as the nested structure didn't seem to update anymore. This worked for a couple of months (even though it was less convenient and didn't exactly accomplish what I had been able to do on iTunes 11 and earlier).
More recently, however, I've found that the folder in the simplified structure also doesn't work properly. The smart playlists are set up to remove songs after they were played, but now the folder seems to retain some songs even after they've disappeared from the playlist that included them. It seems to be building up 'ghosts' of songs that were played and were then supposed to disappear as per the smart playlist setup. I tried copying all the playlists out of the folder, but ended up with the folder 'properties' showing that it contained a number of songs, even when it was empty.
I also noticed that I'm unable to reference the folder in the conditions of any new playlists I set up - I get the error message that the folder relies on smart playlists that cannot be updated. In response to this I reviewed all the playlists, but saw no errors.
Anybody else have this problem?

It may be best to recreate the folder and the smart playlists from scratch.
tt2

Smart playlists are not in alphabetical order on iOS 5.1 devices

One of the most frustrating things for me about iTunes Match is the fact that the smart playlists in iTunes (version 10.6) do not sync in alphabetical order on my iPad/iPhone running iOS 5.1.
Even though I click on the Name column and the songs in iTunes appear in alphabetical order, the songs appear in a random order on the iPad. I spent hours trying to fix this by turning iTunes Match off on my iPad, turning it on etc all to no avail. I created new smart playlists thinking that maybe the original smart playlists were corrupted in some way by the upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. This did not work either.
Then, I had an idea. I created a new playlist (not a smart one), called it Test Alpha, copied the songs from the smart playlist into it and waited for my iPad to update.
Voila! The songs in this new, non-smart playlist are in alphabetical order.
I do hope that this problem is fixed. It is a pain to do this for the 15 odd smart playlist I have. Hope this helps someone else.

No. And the problem persists in iOS 6 with the latest version of iTunes.
For three weeks, I had been talking on and off with a techie in Singapore. She got me to run all these test, send screen shots etc..
In the end, I was told that the engineers said 'that is how it's supposed to be'. Well, thank you very much. No help at all. No further discussion about the issue ensued.
Apple's arrogance will soon be the cause of its share price collapsing. My solution? I have not renewed my subscription to iTunes Match.

Smart Playlists and Automatically Increasing a Track's Play Count

Any one know if there is a way to increase the play count of a track once it has been selected and included in a Smart Play List. Why? I have 92 GBs of music or 16, 665 songs on an external hard drive and I have an 8 GB mp3 player that I fill up every couple of weeks with music and I'd rather not hear repeated tracks. What I would like to do is include the rule in a Smart Play List that any track that has a play count of "0" is added to the Smart Play List without the risk that a track had already been added to that Smart Play List in the past. Any suggestions?

Haven't seen this myself, but then again I don't have any rated songs with no Last Played date. A couple of suggestions:
1- Try a Reset or Restore of the iPhone.
2- In your smart playlist criteria, add "Media Kind is Music". Strange, but sometimes this nudges a smart playlist into behaving.
3- Modify your criteria as follows:
Match All:
- Media Kind Is Music
- Rating > 3
(indent) ----> Match Any:
.....................- Last Played Not in the Last 8 weeks
.....................- Playcount is 0
That will "OR" the zero playcounts with songs that have not been played in the last 8 weeks, and "AND" all those with the required criteria of 4 or 5 stars as well as Media Kind being Music. If you don't know how to "indent" the criteria, click on the elipses (...) to the right of the last criteria you entered, and be sure to change the overall criteria to Match Any for the indented portion.

Smart Playlists with Date Criteria

It seems any smart playlist with a date criteria (ie: Date Added) will not show up on any device that access the iTunes Match Service. I have several smart playlists with a date criteria and they show up blank on my iphone and ipad. Yet, if I delete the date criteria, the playlist populates on the device. I tried creating a smart playlist with just the date criteria and then in a new smart playlist referencing the date criteria smart playlist and the new playlist will not upload to icloud because an icloud smart playlist can not reference another smart playlist

So I went through technical support because I had this exactly some problem. Smart playlist shows up in iTunes on my iMAC, as well as via Apple TV (both via iCloud and Home Sharing options.) It also fully populates those smart playlists.
For my pre-existing Smart Playlists (that only have criteria for the GROUPING field) show up, have songs, but are quite a few songs short. I then created a brand new play list with brand new tracks... and its empty on iPhone 4S and iPAD2. Apple TV and IMAC are fine.
So technical support provided me with this response: For smart playlists to work on iOS devices, the songs must be downloaded to the device.
My feedback was this: So this is chicken and the egg. You create the playlist to easily locate and download those songs to your device, but you cant because they have to be on your device before they will show in the playlist.
I suppose the only work around is to create the smart playlist w/ your filters. THEN create a regular playlist and copy everything in the SMART Playlist into the regular playlist.
I have not used Apple products for very long... approaching 2 years. I moved everything to Apple. Computers, laptops, portable devices, etc... I have been VERY impressed. HOWEVER, this makes the point of Smart Playlists completely manual when it comes to your iOS device.
I will for sure be launching a compliant to www.apple.com/feedback.

Smart Playlist does not play new songs. Any clue?

I created a Smart Playlist that referes to another Smart Playlist. This other playlist selects randomly songs that were last played before a certain date. (So if a song from that playlist is played, it is automatically replaced by another one). The newly added songs do not seem to be played at all. I need to restart iTunes to do so. Any clue?

In principal, putting a Smart Playlist into another Smart Playlist will work. However, if the rules of the Playlists are conflicting, that may be why you have an issue. First of all, can we be clear on exactly which Playlists are doing what?
Are you saying that songs recently added to your iTunes Library are:
not in the first Playlist,
not in the second Playlist but are in the first one, or
that they are in the second list, but simply don't play.
or that songs, newly added to the second Playlist are there, but don't get played? In this case, how many songs are in the list?
Can you take screenshots of the two playlists, or list them here. In this screenshot for example;
...this Playtlist refers to five other Smart Playlists. The resulting Playlist is usually over 300 songs. So I don't always know if a song in the list ever gets played, simply because there are so many. I do know however, that the list plays a random selection of my songs and gets updated successfully when I sync the iPod with iTunes.
If you list the Playlists here (rather than screenshot them), can you also mention the top left tick-box section; "match any/all of the following rules". It changes according to the fields below it.

Divide Smart Playlists into Albums

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