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 I do it.

Continue read­ing “The Ultimate Smart iTunes Playlist”…