Today’s tip is another for the “interesting, and maybe useful someday” drawer. In iTunes 7, it’s possible to create a regular playlist from the contents of a Smart Playlist. Why, you might be thinking, would I ever want to do that? Perhaps you’ve set up a random live updating Smart Playlist of some sort, and really like the selection of songs that it’s come up with. Before they change with the next live update, you could create a standard playlist from the contents of the Smart Playlist.
One way to do this is to open the Smart Playlist, select all the songs, and then drag them to an empty area in the leftmost column in iTunes. Here’s another method—just drag the Smart Playlist from its present location and drop it on the PLAYLISTS header. As long as the Smart Playlist isn’t in a folder, you’ll see a new standard playlist (with the same name as the dropped original) added at the bottom of your list of playlists. Open it up, and you’ll see the songs that were included in the Smart Playlist.
This trick even works with the Party Shuffle playlist, and the Purchased entry in the STORE section. You can even grab the Music entry in the LIBRARY section and drag it onto PLAYLISTS to create a standard playlist of your entire library. The only time this trick does not work is when the Smart Playlist is in a folder. If that’s the case, the first drag and drop will simply move the playlist out of its folder. If you then repeat the drag and drop, you’ll get a standard playlist out of it.
As noted up front, I’m not sure exactly how useful this might be, but it is interesting.