As cool as the Genius is, sometimes you want a little more manual control over what goes into your automatically generated music mixes. That’s where Smart Playlists rise to the occasion.

Once you give it some guidelines, a Smart Playlist goes sniffing through your music library and comes up with custom mixes based on those guidelines. A Smart Playlist even keeps tabs on the music that comes and goes from your library and adjusts itself based on that.

You might tell one Smart Playlist to assemble 45 minutes’ worth of songs that you’ve rated higher than four stars but rarely listen to, and another to play your most-often-played songs from the 1980s. The Smart Playlists you create are limited only by your imagination.