Alternate iTunes Music Selection

Responding to my Too Many Tunes entry from last week — one where a reader wished to delete songs in iTunes that don’t appear within playlists — readers Jim Peterson and Chuck Rekow offered alternatives to my suggestion of using comments and a smart playlist to separate one from the other.

Jim suggested that a cool way to tell if a song in the iTunes library is part of a playlist is to select the song and Control-click on its name (or right-click if you have a multi-buttoned mouse). In the resulting contextual menu you see a Playlists entry that lists all the playlists to which that song belongs. If no Playlist entry appears, you can give the song the boot. Regrettably, this isn’t the best way to sort through a long list of tracks.

Chuck offered this solution:

1. Go into the library, hold down Command and click on a checked box next to a song name. All the songs in the library will be unchecked.

2. Open every playlist, hold down the Command key and click a box next to a song. Every song in the list will have a checkmark. Repeat for every playlist.

3. Go back to the library and delete unchecked songs.