Finding songs not in any playlist

Q: I arrange my music by artist-specific smart playlists. There are, however, songs that fall through the gaps as I only have playlists for artists with many songs. Is there a way I can construct a playlist of all those songs that do not have a playlist? I have tried with a smart list using “Playlist is not ….” but I can’t seem to add enough options to include all of my playlists.

Any ideas?

Finding songs not in any playlist

– Alex

A: You’re right – manually excluding each playlist you have isn’t the best solution to your problem, even if you could set it up; you’d have to keep tweaking it each time you add another playlist. Luckily, there’s at least two better ways:

The first, if you’re on a Mac, is to use the “Not in Any Playlist to Playlist” script available from Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes. As its title suggests, this script compiles all songs not in any current playlist into a new playlist.

We haven’t seen any similar VBScripts or Javascripts for iTunes on the PC yet – if you have, let us know in the comments!

A second method is a slight twist on the idea you started with. We’re going to use the fact that playlist folders inherit all songs contained in the playlists beneath them. First, create a Playlist Folder in iTunes by selecting “New Folder” from the “File” menu.

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