iTunes Playlist Trick - Upgrade

After a year and a half using iTunes on my “home computer” on an almost daily basis, I just saw the simplest, quickest way by far to come up with a custom playlist. (This one allows more programming control than the earlier iTunes Trick, 5/30/06).

Since my computing slab has also become the central piece of the home stereo system, and I’m a natural-born dj (in the original sense of the term), personally this is very big news. I’ll bet you anything some Mac whiz, power-user type columnist or author has already published these findings, but just in case:

All’s you gots to do is* --

• within a playlist, command-click to highlight the songs you want to hear (that must be control-click in Windows),
• click on the up/down Arrow at the top of the number column at left, so you can freely order tracks,
  
• then grab on any one song, slide them as a unit to the top of the list song, and presto change-o, they now appear together in sequence, the lonely space that was once between them having been magically removed.

Once they’re all together, you can shuffle the order, and of course this is also the convenient time to Check all the boxes, too, for those songs to play.

Note: the earlier approach took place in the Library, which gave you multi-genre selecting on the fly, but didn't allow ordering the tracks other than using the column headers (name/artist/etc., selected in EDIT/View Options).

(* -- this is a real Saturday-style post. Please be assured that during the work week we strictly observe correct grammatical usage : - )