Reader Kirk Aplin is mildly confounded by an iTunes feature he’s recently discovered. He writes:
I just ran across a column title in iTunes that I was unaware of—Last Skipped. How does that work and what it is for?
Last Skipped can be used in a couple of different ways. Within iTunes, Control (right) click on iTunes’ column header, and choose Last Skipped in the contextual menu that appears. Click on that Last Skipped header to take a gander at the tunes you’ve skipped and the date and time you last skipped them. This hints that these tracks may be among those that you don’t really care for and are therefore candidates for culling. Control (right) click on that same column, choose Skips in the menu that appears, and then click on that Skips column and you’ll see how many times you’ve skipped a particular track. This provides even more compelling data on which tracks you can delete without regret.
Last Skipped is also useful in smart playlists, and for the same reason. If you’ve skipped tracks lately, you may not want them loaded on to your iPod, iPhone, or iPad. For example, you might construct a smart playlist that contains the conditions shown in this window.
This provides you with a smart playlist that contains all your jazz recordings (providing they’re all tagged with the Jazz genre), that you haven’t skipped in the last three months, and that haven’t been skipped three or more times. Because it’s a smart playlist with Live Updating enabled any tracks that you skip in the future will be removed from the playlist.