ITunes' Smart Playlist Feature is Great In-Car DJ

I subscribe to music services (three of them, in fact). but in the car, I listen to music files I've synced to my device. Why? ITunes' Smart Playlist feature is a much better disc jockey than any shared playlist Spotify puts together or any I could build myself.

Related: A Driver's Guide to Podcatcher Apps

To create a smart playlist, you just describe what you want to hear. ITunes nods, builds a playlist for you and[2] automatically updates its contents over time. In iTunes, you create a smart playlist by choosing New and then Smart Playlist from the File menu. You'll see a window like the one above.

Next, just add rules for the playlist to follow by clicking the + button. For example, here's what I've asked my Mad Trax playlist for:

• 1. Select songs from my playlist of hand-picked, fast-tempo numbers.
• 2. Only choose tracks that I've rated four or five stars.
• 3. Make sure I haven't heard this track in the last week. I could hear Foo Fighters' "Something From Nothing" once a week for the rest of my life, but maybe not every day.
• 4. If I've skipped this song more than 10 times during playback, forget about it. Obviously I've gotten sick of it but haven't gotten around to changing the rating.
• 5. Pick 8 gigabytes' worth at random, based on those rules.

Click OK and sync the playlist to your phone. Boom, playlist.

The lovely bit happens when you walk back into the house with your iPhone at day's end and plug it into your charger. If you've enabled WiFi syncing and your Mac is awake, iTunes will remove the 28 tracks you listened to during the day as well as the song that received its 10th "skip," and it'll replace them all with fresh music that meets all the smart playlist's criteria.

Poking through all the smart playlist rules pays off. Every music file is crammed with data about the track and your history with it. I managed to attach ratings to each of the thousands of tracks in my library, simply by building a smart playlist that only includes unrated music and then diligently rating tracks as they play. It took months, but eventually no tracks remained that fit the playlist's rules.

Cars.com contributor Andy Ihnatko is a nationally known tech writer.