This was originally from my website but I felt the MacNN community might be interested.
http://www.oldirtyhaddad.com/forums/...hp?thread=1714
OK, so this is going to be a post that most people won't care about. If you're not annoyed by the playlist limitations in iTunes don't bother reading the below paragraphs.
My biggest complaint about iTunes so far has been a lack of advanced playlist capabilities. Your options do not consist of AND OR and NOT but you're really just limited to AND or OR when making a playlist. In iTunes they're labeled as "any" (or) and "all" (and). For example:
Hip Hop OR Rap
Unfortunately iTunes does not allow for a combination of AND and OR syntax within 1 playlist; you must choose either any or all of the criteria.
A more complex playlist would maybe look like this:
#1. (Hip Hop OR Rap ) AND 4+ Stars
However, being the inquisitive person that I am, I looked through the iTunes filters for Playlist. See, AND and OR is similar to algebra - you can expand the logical operators to get the same result. So we expand #1 to look like this:
#2. (Hip Hop AND 4+ Stars) OR (Rap AND 4+ Stars)
Unfortunately iTunes won't let us directly work with this either. However, it will let us make each playlist on it's own. We make the following two playlists:
#3. (Hip Hop AND 4+ Stars) called "top hip hop"
#4. (Rap AND 4+ Stars) called "top rap"
We then create a third playlist, using the OR feature of iTunes to create
Top Hip Hop OR Top Rap
Giving us a single playlist that has (Hip Hop OR Rap) AND songs that are 4 star or above.
I hope that someone finds some benefit to this post. Enjoy.