Itunes Smart Playlist boolean-OR

Have you ever wanted to create an iTunes Smart Playlist that included the boolean OR operator ?

Well it’s easy right? You just have the rule “Match any of the following rules...”.

But this isn’t what I want at all. This simplistic approach only works for simple unions.

What if you want do do something a wee bit more complex - like a playlist that contains music that is rated between 1 and 5 stars from both the Rock and Alternative genres ?

Unfortunately, the only way I know to achieve this requires two playlists.

Playlist one creates the union, call this playlist “Rock & Alternative”:
  • Match any of the following rules ...

  • Genre contains Rock

  • Genre contains Alternative


Playlist two operates on playlist 1:
  • Match all of the following rules ...

  • Playlist is “Rock & Alternative”

  • Rating is in the range 1 to 5


Easy eh?

Comments

Brent said…
I'm amazed that iTunes doesn't have the ability to do booleans per condition. Winamp has had this capability for a long time, this is the main reason why I use Winamp. I very easily built up a "(last played < 3 months ago AND rating = 5) OR (last played < 6 months ago AND rating = 4) ... and so on awesome playlist. With Winamp you can use their GUI builder or just type out the conditions yourself.
December 9, 2010 at 4:29 PM
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