Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Daypart, a desktop app that lets you schedule playtimes for your iTunes playlists, is the Ron Popeil of the Mac music universe—just “set it, and forget it.”

This app operates in multiple windows. In the main window, you schedule when you want certain playlists to play. This includes regular playlists, smart playlists, and Genius playlists—the variety means you can also schedule when you want online radio stations to begin playing during the day. You choose the days and times you want the playlists to start; you have the option of choosing when iTunes should stop playing, as well. Either let the last song play to completion, or fade it out as its scheduled playing time ends. Playlists can also be set to “shuffle” mode.

Once you’ve created a schedule for your desired playlists (and you can create multiple schedules) you then open the second window—the “Daypart Player”—load the schedule, and press the “engage” button. (And you can look at your schedules in the third window, a calendar view of your music schedule.) After that, you can walk away; your Mac will start the music at the proper times.

Daypart has some shortcomings. Its navigation isn’t entirely intuitive—I had to watch an instructional video to understand that I needed to load the schedule into the Daypart Player. And if you to shut down the app for any reason, you have to reload Daypart Player upon re-launch.

Mostly, however, Daypart is an easy and effective way of playing the music you want when you want, all without too much hassle.

[Joel Mathis is a writer in Philadelphia.]

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