Maybe I’m late to the party, but I’ve finally figured out a way to build Smart Playlists in iTunes that include only my favorites from a pool of bands. Since iTunes restricts to you all or any of the search terms you can’t say something like “All of the songs that are rated three stars or more and where performed by any of the following bands: The Thrills, The Killers or Franz Ferdinand.” Well, I’ve figured out how to make this work.

1. Create a new Smarty Playlist and have it match any of the Artist names you want (ie. The Thrills, The Killers and Modest Mouse). Name your new playlist and save it (ie. “Thrilling Killer Mice”).
2. Create another new Smarty Playlist and choose all of the criteria should be met. Set Playlist is insert name of first playlist and then click the plus to add another criteria. Set this second criteria to a range of stars that suits your fancy. Save this new playlist.

It was killing me for quite some time that I couldn’t group bands by their specific sounds and also have the playlist reflect my ratings. This way the first playlist stores all of the songs by all of the like sounding bands and the second playlist reflects songs from that pool of artists that I like.

Of course, the first playlist is for reference only. When you add another album by a band in one of your various pools the first playlist will update and, when you rate songs on the new album, your second playlist will update. It’s kind of like inheritance in iTunes playlists.