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Limiting to 2 or 3 genres

I use a set of Smart Playlists that spans a decade of pop/rock/r&b music, so I can "jukebox" a decade of music if I wish. The problem in iTunes (at least up through v4.2) is that it does not allow for certain boolean combinations. What I would LIKE to do is:


year is in the range 1970 to 1979
genre contains Rock
genre contains R&B
genre contains Pop

iTunes SHOULD allow me to specify "AND" and "OR' operators between entries in the Smart Playlists, but does not. As a result, the above returns an empty playlist, since I have no songs that are Rock AND R&B AND Pop. (I would like it to match if "genre contains Rock" OR "genre contains R&B" OR "genre contains Pop").

So how do I get this to work? My 1970's list reads this way:


Year is in the range 1970 to 1970
Album does not contain RM-
Album does not contain JM-
Genre is not Chrisitan
Genre does not contain Jazz
Genre is not Aircheck
Genre is not Christmas
Genre is not Comedy

The list has to specificly EXCLUDE any genre from the specified timespan that I don't want to show up in the list. (The "Album does not contain" is for a series of cassettes dated from this same era which I have recorded into MP3's, and which I are labelled as as Albums called "RM-01", "JM-26", etc).

If I were to add music to my library that was, for example, classical music dated 1976, I would have to add a line to this Smart Playlist that says


Genre is not Classical

This makes for a long Smart Playlist definition, but it works until Apple gives us better boolean logic between entries for these lists.

by Steven Weyhrich on Dec 22 | 7:33 pm

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"This makes for a long Smart Playlist definition"

Indeed, especially with about 40-50 genres and only wanting 2 on my playlist...

by muell0r on Jan 12 | 3:33 am

The way to do AND & OR combinations is to create multiple smart playlists, and then reference them from each other.

So, in the above example, I would create a playlist with the genres that you require (OR combination - match ANY of the following conditions):

genre contains Rock
genre contains R&B
genre contains Pop

then create a second playlist for the 70's period (AND combination - check the match ALL of the following conditions):

playlist is rock_genres
year is in the range 1970 to 1979

It is a lot easier to create multiple *simple* playlists, rather than one large complicated one.

by yellowduck on Feb 03 | 4:10 pm

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