Gadgetory

if you're looking for some extra room on your hard drive one of the easiest places to trim the fat is your iTunes library so with music that you never listen to not to mention old podcast TV shows movies and audiobooks in today's how-to I'm going to show you how to take out the garbage with just a few quick steps so how do you carve out all the rotten stuff while saving the media that you can't live without here's where a smart playlist comes in handy go up to the file menu and select new smart playlist if you're new to these a smart playlist automatically creates a playlist based on a set of rules you can use them to collect all the songs from a particular artist or all of your albums from the 80s or in this case all of the music that you never listen to we're gonna make a smart playlist with three rules rule number one the media in this playlist will have been played less than two times rule number two any media that has been skipped over more than five times and rule number three songs that you've rated one or two stars because there probably won't be a lot of things here that satisfy all of those requirements go to the top of the window and change match all to match any then hit OK now you have a playlist filled with all the bad ignored or frequently skipped media in your iTunes library if you don't see much you can right-click on the playlist and select edit and adjust the numbers to pull in more media another trick is to right-click the column headers and add a column for size so that you can sort by file size and delete the big stuff first the problem is if you've ever tried to delete a song from iTunes playlist you've probably noticed that it just deletes the song from the playlist and not from your computer in a smart playlist the delete key is basically useless since we have no manual control over the list unless of course you know this trick this keyboard shortcut comes to us from our friends over life hacker it turns out that you can delete iTunes media from your computer directly from a playlist by holding down the option key on a Mac while pressing delete or shift delete on Windows now I wouldn't nuke all the media on this playlist without looking through it first there could be some important or sentimental media in there worth holding on to really the playlist is just there to help you get a handle on the dusty corners of your iTunes library if you've enjoyed this video you can find more over at how to cnet.com or you can send me how to suggestions on twitter or if facebook's more your thing you can subscribe to me there for more tips like these for cnet.com I'm Donald