Music that’s easy to find

Have you ever had those times where you can’t find your music? You’re scrounging around for hours looking for those old Led Zeppelin LPs that have been sitting in your attic for years.

Should you experience the same frustration in iTunes?

Not really. You can organize your digital life.
One of the best features in iTunes is its Playlist feature. It lets you organize your music. It also allows easy access later. It even works on your iPod, too.

There are two ways you can create playlists.

Just go to File on your Menu bar and click New Playlist. This creates a section on the left-hand column where you can name your playlist, for example, Led Zeppelin. Now that you have created a name for it, you’ll notice that there is nothing in that playlist. That’s because you haven’t put anything in there yet.

Click on the Music Library and search for songs by Led Zeppelin. After a short search, you find the album Led Zeppelin IV, always a good choice. Now all you have to do is click and drag those songs over to the Led Zeppelin playlist on the left-hand column. You can also right-click those songs to bring up the Properties menu and select Add to Playlist. You will see a list of Playlists you’ve created. Select Led Zeppelin and that’s it.

Now all you have to do is go to your Led Zeppelin playlist and listen to your heart’s content.

You can also create a Smart Playlist. A Smart Playlist uses specifics as Artist or Album name to create a playlist for you and add those songs in your Music Library to that list.

Using the same example as above, you want to create a playlist of the Led Zeppelin IV album. You know you have it in iTunes. So, instead of creating a playlist, then dragging the songs to it, you can go to File, select New Smart Playlist. A little window will show up, asking for specific parameters. Don’t be intimidated by this window. It’s very simple. This window filters your Music Library to specific items and creates a playlist for you, based on those filtered items, that’s all.

To use the previous example, to add a Led Zeppelin IV playlist, click on the drop-down menu where it says Artist. There should be a whole list of filters you can select here, but for this purpose, you are going to select Album.

You can leave the second drop-down menu at “contains”, but you can see there are many other options to choose from.

Now you can enter Led Zeppelin IV in that text box and click OK.

That’s it! If you’ve labeled your music properly, you should see the entire album of Led Zeppelin IV on the right hand side under Playlists.

Granted, there are many other options to organize your music. These are just the two simplest ways to do that. iTunes has really advanced in making use of a Music Library that you control, key word is YOU. So go nuts, experiment, have fun creating your own funky playlists, who knows what you come up with.