Recently I decided to see what it would be like to listen to every album by some of my long time favorite bands in chronological order. For no particular reason other then to see what it would be like.

Appletosh announced iTunes movie rentals last week, to some mixed reactions. You can rent them directly from the Apple TV if you have one, sweet. You can rent HD movies for $5, sweet... for $5 though? I guess that is the going rate at blockbuster. But for that much I can rent from netflix. And for $20 I can pretty much get as much as I want from netflix...

If you read one of my previous posts about how great smart playlists with ratings can be, you might find this tip useful.

I love having a top rated and a five star playlist, I can just click the playlist and I know that only great jams are going to play. The only problem with this is that only about 5-10% of my library has been rated. I never have the time to do it, so how do I solve this first world dilemma?

Okay, now that I've had the magical iPhone for a few weeks and the love affair with the device is over, I have two major complaints:

1. Videos do not play in playlists
2. Smart playlists do not sync properlly

One more thing about smart playlists: the more information you give it to work with, the smarter it works. Until just now I've always set out in creating a smart playlist to do something specific such as playing the newest podcasts in the order I receive them. But just now I wanted to put on some good songs and not think about picking anything. So I created a smart playlist that would assemble a list of songs I have rated four stars or above, and have been played more then 5 times.

Quick tip: If you enjoy smart playlists, and use them for things like TV Shows or Podcasts, but have the dilemma where you want your most recently added, but sorted by oldest, check this out:

For this example, we'll do a 'Newest Podcasts' smart playlist listed oldest first.

1. Choose File>Smart Playlist
2. Select Genre and next to Contains, type: Podcast
3. Next, add another set of rules, and select Play Count and set it to 0

I am a big Smashing Pumpkins fan, and when I saw that you could preorder the new album on iTunes, I immediately signed up. I'm listening to it right now for the first time, and wanted to check something about it on the iTunes store, so I clicked the store link next to one of the track names and got an interesting error message (pictured above). Zeitgeist (Bonus Track Version) will be available in the store on July 09, 2038.

So this might be old news to a lot of people, but it's something I've discovered, or rather, actually started using a few months ago.

Smart playlists in iTunes, is one of the coolest and, in my opinion, underused features of iTunes! It allows you to keep an ever changing playlist based on certain criteria you set.