If you’re like me, you never lis­ten to the radio because you’re very par­tic­u­lar about the music you hear. Thankfully, this is the age of the iPod, when some­one can carry their entire music library in their pocket, and you don’t have to worry about hear­ing a song you don’t like.

However, that doesn’t mean you’re always in the mood for cer­tain songs. And if you have lots of sin­gle songs or old clas­sics in your music col­lec­tion, lis­ten­ing to them means you have to search for them. Just turn­ing on the shuf­fle option in iTunes doesn’t cut it, because it’s a lit­tle too ran­dom; a song will be cho­sen regard­less of whether you just heard it an hour ago or a year ago, and regard­less of how much you like it.

The solu­tion is a smart iTunes playlist: a playlist that will not only have a mix of new music and old clas­sics, it’ll adjust accord­ing to your tastes. That means you won’t need to inter­act in select­ing or skip­ping songs, and a song won’t play over and over again, unless you want it to.

Another advan­tage of a smart playlist is that you can put on some music quickly, with­out hav­ing to decide what you feel like. If you tend to get focused on projects for hours at a time, it’s nice to not have to con­stantly be choos­ing the music to play in the back­ground. And whether you’re tak­ing a 5-minute walk to the gro­cery store, or a 5-hour drive out of town, a smart iTunes playlist will fill the time with music perfectly.

Here’s how you can cre­ate your own.

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