Find unplayed songs in iTunes Video

Find unplayed songs in iTunes Video Transcript

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>> Donald Bell: Hey I'm Donald Bell for CNET.com and in this video I'm going to show you how to group together all the songs in iTunes that you've been ignoring. Even if you have 100s of gigabytes worth of music in your collection, old habits die hard and you probably find yourself listening to the same tried and true albums over and over. To see what you've been missing here's a quick way to create a dynamic playlist of the most ignored songs in your collection. First let's create a smart playlist. You can do this by holding down the shift key on a PC, or the option key on Mac, and hitting the create playlist button in the bottom left corner. You can also just dive into the file menu and select new smart playlist. Alright so now you're looking at a box where you can set up all the rules for your playlist. You can get really techy here but all you really need is 3 rules. The first rule is to find all the files in your library with a play count of 0, stuff that's never been played all the way through. Next we make a rule to select the files that have only been skipped less than 2 times. This will filter out the songs that never get played all the way through because you always skip them, in other words it'll filter out the songs that suck. Finally we make sure the media kind is set specially to music because we don't want audio books, podcasts or videos creeping in here. Make sure the live updating box is checked, since we want to make sure that songs get taken off the playlist once you've heard them. Also check the box for match only checked items. If you've made the effort to uncheck a song there's probably a good reason. After hitting the Ok button you should see a playlist of all of the ignored songs. If there's not a lot here you can right click the playlist to edit it and set the first rule to find songs that have been played less than 2 or 3 times to help fill out the list. Also I'd look over this list for any misfits. Sometimes a voice memo will pop up or some 3 hour concert recording you have no intention of sitting through. Just uncheck the song and it'll get booted from the list. Finally to synch this with your iPod or your iPhone you're gonna want to make sure the device is not set to manually manage music and video. If it is the play count information from the device won't be transmitted back to iTunes and your playlist won't update. If you don't have your iPod set to synch all of your music then go into the music tab and make sure your new playlist is selected to synch over. So there you go, now you can find all your orphan songs and give them some attention. Probably won't all be winners, but there's bound to be a diamond in the rough. For CNET.com I'm Donald Bell.