Q: I’ve got a rather large music collection on iTunes and I can’t seem to figure out a way of finding the songs that I don’t have on a playlist. I’m hoping there is a simpler way that right clicking on every song and seeing if it’s on a playlist. Please help!
– Derrick
A: There’s no “one-button” method to do this, but you can pretty easily figure it out with a bit of Smart Playlist trickery.
The key is to build a Smart Playlist using the “Playlist is not…” criteria. Although you may initially think this is cumbersome as you have to list every playlist, you can simplify the process greatly by using Playlist Folders. You can create a new Playlist Folder from the File menu in iTunes, and move your existing playlists into the folder simply by dragging and dropping them onto the folder.
If you put all of the playlists you want to compare against into a single folder you can then list the folder in the Smart Playlist criteria to exclude every item that is contained in any playlist in that specific folder. Best of all, the Smart Playlist will always contain a dynamic list of all of your content that is not in any of those playlists.
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