ITunes “smart” playlists – unable to limit filter to any other existing playlists

The "..." allows to nest criteria for smart playlists.

Say you would like a smart playlist that contains all tracks from Bob Dylan or the Beatles with a score of 3 stars or better.

Without hierarchical rules you only have the options of getting the tracks that match all or any of your rules.

With hiearchical rules you can have the condition all on one level and any on another level.

It seems that nested rules exist since iTunes 9; see also a screenshot.

Here is my example:

Match all rules

• Rating is greater than 3 stars

• any of the following

  • Artist contains Bob Dylan
  • Artist contains Beatles

I think the best option you have is to recreate your super playlists as a single more complex playlist.

When you are editing a smart playlist you can option click the '+' button (turns into '...' while you are holding option) and this creates a subgroup that can a condition of it's own.

This playlist picks music based on rating and last played choosing higher rated tracks more often:

One technique I used in some playlists was to put NSFW tracks in a playlist and then build other playlists to exclude NSFW tracks. Putting tracks in a playlist is an easy way to add additional information about them without having to edit the ID3 tags. That doesn't work with these more complex smart playlists.

You will have to put additional information like that into the ID3 fields. You can use the comments block for this, but I don't like to do that because I like to be able to add this kind of flag to multiple tracks at once and I can't do that as I may be losing comments already entered. Genre works if you're willing to use that instead. Any field will work; as I don't have tracks that use grouping I used that for my own NSFW tags.

One slightly more complex place to put these kinds of tags is the 'Category' field. iTunes keeps a category field but doesn't show that field in the editing UI so it's normally not used for anything. Doug's Applescripts offers a script that will let you edit this field. (script and instructions)