Deleting Items from iTunes Smart Playlists

I download a LOT of podcasts daily (I currnently have 10 solid days of audio waiting for me to listen to and growing) and keep only a small percentage of them. I have so many, that the only way I can manage them and keeping sane is using the EXTREMELY useful iTunes smart playlist feature.

The only problem with this system was that I could not delete the smart playlist items I had already listened to directly from the smart playlist menu, I would still have to sift through iTunes‘ Podcast section and individually delete all the old podcasts…

I’ve FINALLY found a solution, all you need to do to fix this is to select all the smart playlist items that you want to delete and while holding the SHIFT button, hit DELETE. This brings up the regular iTunes deltetion dialog box and presto! Problem solved. This also works from any iTunes playlist, smart or otherwise by the way.

Now, I use Windows, so I don’t know if this fix works for Mac users, but if you run a Mac and have this problems, try this fix and let me know in the comments below.

Thanks to PhilMug.com for the above pic.

Dany

**UPDATE** AlisterComputeron commented that on a Mac, all you need to do is Option+Delete to get the same result.

**9/12/2008** It looks like with iTunes 8.0, Apple changed the shortcut, now Shift+Delete will just remove a playlist item from iTunes, but to delete an item from the computer, the new shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+Delete. This is an annoying change, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about it.