Folders in iTunes?

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
Am I really dense or is there no way to make folders to put your playlists in? I'd like to group them say by language etc. I know when you're on a network, it puts all the shared playlists in a folder, is there a way to group my local playlists?



Sorry if this has been discussed earlier, but didn't find this topic in a search.... thanks



NeilyB

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 11
    Nope, there's no way to do that.



    Except to get old school and use the trick of putting the same bit of text at the start of each name to make them sort together alphabetically e.g. put "en" and "fr" at the beginning for english and french respectively.
  • Reply 2 of 11
    I really want folders in iTunes. I have a playlist for each of my full albums and they all start with "Album - " and they take up a fair amount of space.



    Alexander the Great
  • Reply 3 of 11
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    You mean hierarchical playlists? Nope. FWIW, iTunes does have a folder structure that you can see/manage in the Finder if you want to organize your library manually. Tell iTunes that you want to manage your own library in the preferences. Probably not much help for what you're talking about.



    Try using Smart playlists and tags to do something like what you want.
  • Reply 4 of 11
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Alexander the Great

    I really want folders in iTunes.



    What's sad is that SoundJam had this feature YEARS ago.



    What's SoundJam, you may ask?



    It was the excellent MP3 player/encoder app that Apple bought and then proceeded to strip off all the good features and uglify the interface.



    *sigh* Ah, memories.
  • Reply 5 of 11
    well you could try making the genres have those extensions as mentioned above (en and fr), then use smart playlists to sort by that. example: fr/rock, then make a smart playlist named "french rock" that looks for "genre containg fr", and "genre containing rock". you get the idea, and there are countless ways to customize it beyond that, but thats what i would do.
  • Reply 6 of 11
    Smart Playlists arent the second coming. If I have 200 Playlists, it can get unruly to pick them. Itd be nice to have a hierarchical structure.



    Obviously this is version 1 technology and I dont know why they dont incorporate them.
  • Reply 7 of 11
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    I suspect that apple considered hierarchical playlists but purposely chose not to incorporate them into the iTunes interface.



    This is an interesting and oft neglected philosophy in interface design; to purposefully not implement functionality that a non-insignificant number of people would find useful. The obvious question is 'what would motivate such a decision' as it is obvious that microsoft and other major software houses don't endorse such tactics. My answer is that there is always a near infinite number of potential features, all of which are useful to at least some subset of users.



    At some point, it is necessary to make a cut-off unless all imagined functionality is to be crammed into the final product. The microsoftian approach is to include as many features as possible until users are swimming in options. They typically include so many options that the most useful ones are obscured by rarely used ones.



    Quality interface design is a delicate balancing act between providing enough customizability without making the interface non-optimal for the majority of users. In the case of hierarchical-playlists, I agree with apple's decision to keep the interface clean, making most user's experience better. Interestingly, this is actually more difficult to do well than simply implementing every imagined feature.



    Nearly everyone heralds iTunes as a milestone in interface design. It's shear simplicity does not seem to constrict what most users are able to accomplish with the tool. At the same time, nearly everyone has 'just one last feature' that they would add to iTunes if they were in charge of development. Yet this one last feature is not the same for all users.



    We are fortunate that the people in charge of iTunes development have resisted feature creep. These 'one more feature's can easily keep piling up until an interface looks flexible on paper but is no longer optimal for anyone.
  • Reply 8 of 11
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Alexander the Great

    I really want folders in iTunes. I have a playlist for each of my full albums and they all start with "Album - " and they take up a fair amount of space.





    I can't see any reason do this. Have you looked into the browse feature? It will list all your albums (limited by genre/artist if you want) and you can start them just by double-clicking.



    On the iPod you can just do browse -> artist -> album.



    ---



    And dfiler: nice post!



    Quote:

    Perfection is achieved , not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away -- Antoine de Saint-Expury



  • Reply 9 of 11
    badtzbadtz Posts: 949member
    does anyone happen to have a screenshot of SoundJam ?



    curious to see what it looked like
  • Reply 10 of 11
    chrisgchrisg Posts: 239member
  • Reply 11 of 11
    mmmpiemmmpie Posts: 628member
    Rather than having heirachle playlists Id like to see the ability to define your own attributes. You cant, but you can force the comments field into this purpose.



    For the language example, just put the language in the comments field, eg: fr, en, or french, english if you want.



    Then create a smart playlist, which searched on the comments field ( containing whatever language ). Then you can browse the results of your smart playlist, giving you albums, artists etc, constrained by language.



    I use this to constrain by country.



    As a bonus, because you use the 'contains' criteria to search the comments you can have many different free text criteris pushed into the comments field of a single track.
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