I just found out that your iPod and iTunes will only mark a track as "skipped" if you press the "next" button between 2 and 30 seconds into it. Before or after this time frame and the skip is ignored.

That solved a mystery for me! I was skipping tracks too soon, and they weren't being removed from my random playlist. I now exercise a little restraint before bashing that skip button when it plays Steps Erasure ABBA... oh, hell, they're all too embarrassing to list.

I have an iPod Video, which has a capacity of 30GB (about 27GB usable space). That's potentially 7500 songs. My music library is already bigger than that and so I use several playlists to make sure I have what I want available when I want it. If you have an iPod classic, it's unlikely (but not impossible) that you'd have this problem, but if you have a Nano, a low capacity Touch or an iPhone, chances are you will be in the same situation as me. Even if you have lots of space and not many songs, playlists can help you listen to the music you want to more easily if you organise them properly.

Talking to some people I know with iPods, I was surprised at how little they knew about playlists in iTunes, so I thought I'd share the way I use them, and give some tips that might help you enjoy your music more.

I know this post looks long and complicated, but that's because I've tried to explain things fully. If anything is unclear, let me know in the comments.

It's important to understand that playlists are separate to your library. They do not contain the actual songs, just references to songs. That means that if you have the same song in several playlists (I do!) only one copy of the song exists on your computer, and only one copy will be on your iPod. A playlist with 20 entries for the same song would only copy that song to your iPod once, it just tells your iPod to play it 20 times.

There are two types of playlists, regular ones and smart ones.

Regular ones are blue, and you manage them yourself. Smart ones are purple, and they can have parameters applied which mean their contents can change depending on a huge variety of conditions. I'll explain more as we go along.

To create a new playlist, you just go to the file menu at the top, and you'll see options for new playlist or new smart playlist. The new playlist will appear towards the bottom left of your screen - you may have some default ones there already if you haven't created your own.

The regular playlists I have are very basic. I have one for my favourites, I literally just drag songs I like into it as I come across them in my library. They don't actually go anywhere, they stay in your main library, but they are added to the playlist. You can also add songs to playlists by right-clicking on them and selecting "Add to playlist".

Similarly, I have playlists for the gym, easy listening, and I even have a Christmas one. You could have as many playlists as you like, just drag the songs you want into them.

The last regular playlist is one I would never actually listen to. It contains all the albums I know I might want to listen to at some point. With that playlist on my iPod, I know I've got the the albums I love with me. I go to the albums section of the iPod, and there they are.

To add a whole album to a playlist, you don't have to select each track manually. You can drag the album cover to it, you'll see a little red star with the number of tracks being added to confirm the whole album is being added. I've outlined it in green here:

On to smart playlists now.

As I said before, smart playlists have rules which tell them which songs to include in themselves. There are rules that cover all the information stored about your MP3s such as title, artist, genre and the year it was released. Then there are rules about the number of times you've played a track, the rating you have given it and even the last time you played it.

So, if you have rated the songs in your library, you could set up a smart playlist that contains all your five star songs, and every time you give a new song a five star rating, it would be added to the playlist. You can take it further, and set up a playlist that contains all songs with a rating greater than two stars and that you have not listened to in the past two months. In fact, I have done this - it's a great way to rediscover music you love.

There are other options when you set up a smart playlist. These include limiting the playlist to a certain size (by number of songs, or by file size). Also, make sure "Live updating" is checked, as this is what makes it update itself as your library changes.

I have smart playlists for 100 Top Rated songs (top rated songs, selected at random, limited to 100 tracks), 100 Least Played (as outlined above), 100 Most Played (songs with the highest play count, selected at random, limited to 100 tracks), and also one called New Stuff, which contains all songs added to my library within the last three months. If space is an issue, you could say this playlist should only contain the 100 newest tracks - as you added new tracks, the oldest would disappear from the playlist.

Have a play, but if you add more than one rule, notice the option at the top of the window - you need to tell the playlist to apply either all the rules or any of the rules.

Say for example your playlist had a rule that said "Artist is No Doubt" and another that said "Artist is Gwen Stefani". If you selected all, the playlist would be empty, because no tracks have the artist as both No Doubt AND Gwen Stefani. If you selected any, the playlist would contain all tracks by No Doubt and all tracks by Gwen Stefani. Which option you choose depends on what you are trying to achieve and how selective you want to be.

This next section only applies for non iPhone/iPod Touch users.

iTunes and your iPod allow you to randomise the play order of your music. I like to shuffle my favourites playlist (which has a fair few songs in it!) so that I hear different songs each time I play it, but then I like to listen to albums in the correct order. It's a bit of a pain to go all the way through the menu to change the settings all the time, so I came up with this solution:

I already have playlists set up for my favourite tracks, my top rated etc. What I did was set up a new smart playlist which selected tracks at random from each of the other playlists! I limited it to 500 songs taken at random.

Then, I made a second smart playlist, told it to look at the first one and take 250 songs that I haven't listened to in the last day.

This means the playlist contains a random selection of my favourite music, it has a smattering of new stuff, some stuff I love but haven't listened to for a while and best of all it's always fresh stuff because it changes every time I listen to it. There has to be two playlists involved because the first one has an "any" rule (take songs from any of these playlists) and the second one has an "and" rule (take songs from that playlist and make sure they haven't been listened to today). It's a bit fiddly to set up, but once it's done you have a completely random playlist, which changes on the fly.

So, there you go. I hope you have a better understanding of playlists now, and some good ideas for smart playlists to help you make the most of your favourite music. If you need any help, just leave a comment and I'll do my best to sort you out!