iTunes Song And Playlist Management

I recently reformatted my computer and had to back up then later restore my music library.  I have had many experiences doing this process, but somehow I still forgot to save my playlist this time around.  Therefore, I found my entire music library but have no playlists.

For those unfamiliar with iTunes, there are traditional sense of playlists that one can drag and drop desired songs into the playlist and those songs will be found in those playlists.  However, Apple included 'smart playlists', a programmable set of criteria that will search your library and pull songs that follow the rules you had set up.  For example, one of the preset smart playlist is one of recently added songs.  The smart playlist will check all songs for their date added and play any song that was added in the past two weeks.

As I was lamenting over the loss of my old playlists, I thought of an ingenious idea.  Seeing how my playlists reflect the song's general mood and the comment field of the song is encoded into the file and will be preserved when the file is moved, I figured I could modify the comments field for the songs, use the smart playlists to generate my playlists, and not have to worry about saving my playlists.

Essentially, I am tagging my songs with keywords that I can generate custom smart playlists around.  For example, I edited the comment field for Journey's 1983 love ballad "Faithfully" with the word "romantic".  If I tell a smart playlist to play only songs with the word "romantic" in the comment field, "Faithfully" be show up there.

Bottom line:

• iTunes's smart playlist is a very useful feature, accessible through File -> New Smart Playlist


• Each song's comment field encoded into the file, so it will stay with the file wherever it goes


• Combination of the smart playlist and comment features allow for powerful playlist manipulation

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