itunes
I have 30 or so smart playlists defined in iTunes on the PC. What I'd like to do is export all of these definitions. To clarify, I don't want to export the songs in each of these playlists, I want to export the definition (e.g. "Artist contains Foo").
I have a lot of conditions defined for each playlist, and would prefer a solution that doesn't involve manually performing the same steps 30 times. For example, if I could export registry settings, this would be the best solution.
Before creating a playlist, you have to separate the items into very small pieces, otherwise, you risk contradicting yourself.
Playlist A contains songs that are "singles" (meaning I don't have the full album) and are not in playlist B
Why are you using “not in playlist B”? I assume you want to have a list of ’singles’ that are 1-4 stars rated. Why not add that to the conditions?
Now your “A" list should be the same as before, but doesn’t mention B at all.
Now you happen to have a list “B” that has 5 rated songs (the good ones!).
And now you want your less than 5 rated singles (A) of “XX Genre”, and your 5 star ones…
As easy as it sounds, in practice it’s more difficult… because what sounds like “this and that” is not really like that.
Let me try to replicate.
My “A” playlist is (I’ve used Track = 1 but I’m sure your condition to determine singles is different and I’m taking 0,1,2 and 3 stars)
My B playlist is easier:
Now I have a C one… that contains tracks from A that have a “Rock” genre:
We’re getting close!
Now we need to group B and C into a single D playlist to enjoy the Joy of single Rocks and 5 start songs!
Here’s our D list:
And that’s it. Now two things are important:
Ahhh the joy of playlists. :)
EDIT: You specified two pseudo-contradictory things, but here’s the idea:
Playlist B contains songs in my Library that are rated 5-stars
cannot be intersected with:
all songs for a specific genre in playlist A and B.
In order to achieve that, you’ll have to modify (or create a B2) list that is:
You can’t modify a previous list from a new. This is not a relational database. Smart lists only work as far as simple pascal logic goes. True/False/Intersection/Union…
If you don’t want to change your B playlist (because you use it for something else), go ahead and create B2 and make it include “all from B” and “Genre is rock” and use that B2 in your final “D” creation, much like we created the “C” list, which is pretty much “A” with Rock Genre.
Create a new playlist on your local machine with the same name as the one you would like to import.
Click on the library that you wish to import a playlist from over Home Sharing.
Expand the library by clicking on the arrow to the left of the name.
Expand the folder called Playlists from within the library.
Drag the playlist from the home sharing library onto the one you have created.
Your music will be copied over into the new playlist. This method does have one flaw, however. If you already have some of these songs in your library, they will be duplicated. But, File > Display Duplicates may help you with that.
Unfortunately, this is the only way to do this over Home Sharing. Hopefully, iTunes 11 will improve on this, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Best Answer
If you select a smart playlist, then choose File > Library > Export Playlist... and choose the XML file format, you can then use the corresponding Import Playlist... command from another iTunes library to import the smart playlist definition.
Unfortunately, iTunes only lets you select one playlist at a time, so there's no way to select multiple playlists and export them at the same time. You can do the "Export Library..." which does everything, but then you have all sorts of extra stuff you don't want.
If you're comfortable hacking around a bit though, you could export the whole library, then use PlistEdit Pro to edit the file and remove all the playlist and track dictionaries that you don't want, leaving just your smart playlists. Then you'd have all the playlist definitions in a single file that you can import into another iTunes library.