Can iTunes just play music I've never heard before?

That's a fun and interesting question, actually. Turns out that iTunes has a ton of different ways you can slice and dice your music collection, including playing just those songs you really like (if you're using the song rating system it supports) or, alternatively, a playlist for people you don't like: just the low rated songs.

In fact, playlists are one of the unsung heroes of iTunes, a program that I use every single day, and it's well worth learning how to fine tune your playlists to be able to automatically pull out just the music you want at that moment.

Well, anyway, to have iTunes just play those songs that you haven't played before, you need to create a Smart Playlist.

Here's how that's done...

Launch Apple iTunes, then on the "File" menu and look for "New Smart Playlist...":

Once you do that, you'll see this:

There are a ton of different options for the primary selector, including: Album, Artist, Comment, Date Added, Genre, Last Played, Play Count, Rating, Show, Size, Time and Track Number.

Think about that. Want to have a playlist that's just the first track of all your albums? You can do that. Or perhaps the twenty songs you most recently added to your library? You can do that too!

But what you want is "Play Count", and you want to test that the value is zero. This is how it'll look:

Click on "OK" and you've a new playlist on the lower left of the main iTunes window:

Now just type a logical or memorable name for this playlist, like "Songs I've Never Heard", and you're good.

Enjoy!