iTunes is the ubiquitous application for those playing music on a Mac and for those that own an iPod, iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately for Apple, iTune's has as many detractors as supporters these days but this wasn't always the case.

In attempting to be an app of all trades iTunes has almost alienated itself from its original remit of being a digital Jukebox and become a behemoth of code which has been cropped, padded and modified to handle other functionality such as the iTunes Music Store, The App Store, video playback and iDevice synchronisation (which includes calendars, photos, bookmarks etc.). Even the recent change to solid state storage in iPods has had a negative affect by reducing the amount of storage space available to you when you're on the go. If you owned an iPod Classic this wasn't an issue as you had anywhere up to 160GB of space to play with and could carry around either your whole music collection or at least a part of it.

As someone with a considerable iTunes library (300GB+ / 34,000+ tracks) I was often annoyed by the limitations of my wonderful yet measly 8GB iPod touch and I quickly realised that I had to think smarter about how I handle my content within iTunes. The answer was iTune's Smart Playlists.

Now you may have used smart playlists before (they've been around since iTunes 3.0) but most likely you've used them for a quick compilation of tunes you wanted to throw together (a playlist of "Rock' music for example) or you haven't used them at all.  Now, on the surface that's what they appear to have been designed for, however, for those with large iTunes libraries and/or limited iPod capacity they can be much more powerful. Let me show you how.

The playlist below is set up to only select tracks which have a 5-star rating and haven't been played in the last week. The number of tracks within the playlist has also been limited to 5GB. For me this is important due to limited space on my iPod touch.



The benefits of this playlist are that any music I have listened to on my iTunes at home (within the last 7 days) is not included on my iPod (meaning I'm not listening to the same tracks all the time) and when I synchronise my iPod the tracks I've listened to will be removed and subsequently replaced within the playlist with fresh tracks which will then synchronise back to my iPod. This keeps my iPod freshly stocked with music I know I'll like but haven't listened to recently.