How to Create an iTunes Playlist
If you're like us, you have thousands of songs in your iTunes Music Library. It's nice to have all of that music available at the click of a button, but different times and situations call for playing different types of songs. For example, you might listen to Metallica during your lunch break and Bach in the evening before going to sleep. You can access music that way by searching your library or sorting songs by artist, album, or song name, but in the end your iTunes Music Library is still one big, dumb list.
A better idea is to create a playlist, which is a customized collection of songs that you've mixed and matched. You can listen to a playlist on your computer, transfer it to your iOS devices, or burn it to a CD (for instructions, see How to Burn a Music CD in iTunes). You can make as many playlists as you like!
Here's how to create a playlist in iTunes:
- Open iTunes. (It's in your Applications folder.)
- From the File menu, select New Playlist. Or just press
Command-Nin iTunes. - A new playlist is added to the iTunes sidebar. All new playlists are named "untitled playlist" by default, but you can change this by clicking twice, slowly, on the new playlist and typing in a new name, as shown below.
- In the sidebar, click Music to load your iTunes Music Library.
- Drag the songs you'd like in the playlist from your music library onto your new playlist, as shown below.
- Keep adding songs to your playlist. You can add as many as you want. To tell how much music is in your playlist, click on the playlist and check the bottom of the iTunes screen, as shown below.
- Feel free to rearrange the songs in your playlist. Drag and drop songs to reposition them in your list. iTunes will play tracks in the order they appear in your playlist.
Your new playlist will always be available from the iTunes sidebar. To start playing it, just select the playlist and double-click the first track - iTunes plays all of the songs in the playlist from beginning to end.
Final Thoughts
Once you get the hang of creating playlists, use your imagination to organize your music. You could create customized playlists for working out, studying, or working in the office. Playlists can completely change the way you listen to your music!
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Matthew Cone, the author of Master Your Mac and a freelance writer specializing in Apple hardware and software, has been a Mac user for over 20 years. A former ghost writer for some of Apple's most notable instructors, Cone founded Macinstruct in 1999, a site with OS X tutorials that boasts hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month. You can email him at: matt@macinstruct.com.