Creating complex smart playlists in iTunes

Creating playlists in iTunes can be as simple as
dragging a few songs, or as complex as
creating smart playlists that refer to other
playlists and use nested conditions to pick
songs that meet specific criteria. In this week’s
column, I answer three questions to show just
how complex smart playlists can be. While
perhaps not the same as the smart playlists
you want to make, they are good examples of
the complexity that is available with smart
playlists in iTunes.
Q: I have a collection of jazz music that is
bigger than a single 160GB iPod classic can
hold. In total, I have over 6800 albums on
four iPods, so I will soon face this problem
for other genres too. How can I easily set
up two 160GB iPods to hold only jazz music,
such as having artists with names from A
to L on one and M to Z on another?
The easiest way to do this is set up each iPod
to sync a single playlist, and to create two
standard (not smart) playlists by dragging all
the music from the first group of artists to one
playlist, and all the music of the second group
to the other.
However, you probably want to be able to sync
future additions to your library as well—and
that’s where things get more complicated. You
can’t create a smart playlist in which the
beginning of artists' names are from A to L,
for example.
I can think of a couple of ways to add new
music to these playlists. The first is to use the
Recently Added playlist, which iTunes creates
by default. If you’ve deleted yours, here’s what
it looks like: