Alfaj0r.com

iTunes smart playlists are a godsend. They’re also underutilized by most people.

I figured I’d share the main use I give them. At work, I enjoy having background music during the day. I also enjoy listening to all sorts of different music (as made evident in my Last.fm). So just put that thing in Shuffle, right?

I have a better way, that I picked up from the ever-useful SA forums.
I have the following smart playlist:

What this does, is play songs that I haven’t heard in the last week. And since I don’t want to listen to Dane Cook or Tchaikovsky at random, I’ve ruled those genres out.
Then, I go into the playlist and hit shuffle, and bam! I get to listen to music that I probably haven’t heard lately, without much thought.

Have you ever reorganized your music files and then found your iTunes to have taken a shit all over your library, marking half of it as invalid, with exclamation marks? If not, please feel free to click here.
If you’ve suffered from this annoyance, and are looking to keep your sanity, pay attention!
After some researching, I came across this magic file (that can be downloaded with the whole SDK here). If you download this little piece of coding heaven, you just do this:

1. Fire up the mighty command prompt. (Start -> Run -> cmd)
2. Navigate to where you saved the file. Let’s pretend it’s on C:\
3. Type the following: cscript removedeadtracks.js and hit enter. *
4. :banjo:

* If this doesn’t do anything, you need the Windows Scripting Host. It should be in your computer though, so if you don’t have it, for the love of god, run Windows Update. :froggonk: