Finding songs not in any playlist

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Finding songs not in any playlist

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Q: HI, I have over 100 playlists in iTunes 7. However, I have many singles and one off songs which don’t fit into a generic playlist. I want to create a smart playlist which allows me to select 4-5 star songs in the default ‘Music’ playlist (i.e. my Library) that do not exist in any of the many playlists I have. I obviously don’t want to create rules that specify ‘Playlist - is not -’ and create a rule for every single playlist I have. Is there an easy way to do this?

- Duncan

A: There is one way we can think of to accomplish this fairly elegantly, but it’s not entirely grunt-work free.

If we knew we really wanted a playlist like this, we would get in the habit of putting all of our playlists in one folder. Since folders are treated like playlists in the Smart Playlist condition setup, the smart playlist would then become supremely easy to set up:

Why isn’t this a completely superb solution? Well, to add 100+ playlists into a folder will take a bit of manual labor: iTunes won’t let you select multiple playlists at once when you want to move them all together.

Mac users have a bit of luck, here: AppleScript negates the need for this entire solution. Simply grab the Not in Any Playlist to Playlist AppleScript from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, and it will create the playlist automatically for you.

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